Florida State University

SENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ocial
Psychology

SENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ocial
Psychology
Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Kathleen D. Vohs
University of Minnesota
EDITORS
1

Copyright © 2007 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Encyclopedia of social psychology/editors, Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4129-1670-7 (cloth)
1. Social psychology—Encyclopedias. I. Baumeister, Roy F. II. Vohs, Kathleen D.
HM1007.E53 2007
302.03—dc22 2007014603
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
07 08 09 10 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Publisher: Rolf A. Janke
Acquisitions Editor: Michael Carmichael
Developmental Editors: Carole Maurer, Paul Reis
Reference Systems Manager: Leticia Gutierrez
Project Editor: Tracy Alpern
Copy Editors: Colleen B. Brennan, Robin Gold
Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd.
Indexer: Julie Sherman Grayson
Cover Designer: Candice Harman
Marketing Manager: Carmel Withers

Contents
Editorial Board, vi
List of Entries, vii
Reader’s Guide, xv
About the Editors, xxv
Contributors, xxvi
Introduction, xiv
Entries
Volume 1: A–I
1–506
Volume 2: J–Z
507–1018
Index, I-1–I-76

Editorial Board
Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Northwestern University
Ap Dijksterhuis
Radboud University Nijmegen
Wendi L. Gardner
Northwestern University
Michael A. Hogg
Claremont Graduate University
Jay Hull
Dartmouth College
Editors
Managing Editor
Nicole L. Mead
Florida State University
Advisory Board
vi
Kathleen D. Vohs
University of Minnesota
Douglas T. Kenrick
Arizona State University
Antony S. R. Manstead
Cardiff University
Sandra L. Murray
State University of New York at Buffalo
Abraham Tesser
University of Georgia
Penny S. Visser
University of Chicago

List of Entries
Accessibility
Accountability
Achievement Motivation
Action Identification Theory
Actor–Observer Asymmetries
Adaptive Unconscious
Affect
Affect-as-Information
Affect Heuristic
Affect Infusion
Affordances
Aggression
Agreeableness
Alcohol Myopia Effect
Altruism
Altruistic Punishment
Ambivalence
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
Androgyny
Anger
Anonymity. See Deindividuation
Anticipatory Attitude Change
Antisocial Behavior
Anxiety
Apparent Mental Causation
Applied Social Psychology
Approach–Avoidance Conflict
Arousal
Assimilation Processes
Associative Networks
Attachment Styles
Attachment Theory
Attention
Attitude–Behavior Consistency
Attitude Change
Attitude Formation
vii
Attitudes
Attitude Strength
Attraction
Attributional Ambiguity
Attribution Cube. See Kelley’s Covariation Model
Attributions
Attribution Theory
Authenticity
Authoritarian Personality
Authority Ranking. See Relational Models Theory
Autobiographical Narratives
Automatic Processes
Auto-Motive Model
Autonomy
Availability Heuristic
Aversive Racism
Awe
Babyfaceness
Bad Is Stronger Than Good
Balance Theory
Barnum Effect
Base Rate Fallacy
Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)
Behavioral Contagion
Behavioral Economics
Belief Perseverance
Beliefs
Benevolent Sexism
Bennington College Study
Betrayal
Big Five Personality Traits
Binge Eating
Biopsychosocial Model
Blaming the Victim
Bobo Doll Studies

viii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Bogus Pipeline
Brainstorming
Brainwashing
Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions
Buffering Effect
Bulimia
Bullying
Bystander Effect
Catharsis of Aggression
Central Traits Versus Peripheral Traits
Cheater-Detection Mechanism
Choking Under Pressure
Close Relationships
Cognitive Consistency
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Cohesiveness, Group
Collective Self
Collectivistic Cultures
Commons Dilemma. See Social Dilemmas
Communal Relationships
Communal Sharing. See Relational Models Theory
Companionate Love
Compassion
Complementarity, of Relationship Partners
Compliance
Confirmation Bias
Conflict Resolution
Conformity
Consciousness
Consensus, in Attribution Theory. See Kelley’s
Covariation Model
Consistency, in Attributions. See Kelley’s
Covariation Model
Construal Level Theory. See Temporal Construal
Theory
Consumer Behavior
Contact Hypothesis
Content Analysis
Contingencies of Self-Worth
Contingency Model of Leadership
Contrast Effects
Control
Control Condition
Controlled Processes
Control Motivation
Cooperation
Coping
Correctness of Personality Judgments. See
Personality Judgments, Accuracy of
Correspondence Bias
Correspondent Inference Theory
Counterfactual Thinking
Counterregulation of Eating
Creativity
Critical Social Psychology
Cross-Lagged Panel Correlation
Crowding
Cultural Animal
Cultural Differences
Culture
Culture of Honor
Curiosity
Date Rape
Debiasing
Deception (Lying)
Deception (Methodological Technique)
Decision and Commitment in Love
Decision Making
Decision Model of Helping
Defensive Attribution
Defensive Pessimism
Deindividuation
Delay of Gratification
Demand Characteristics
Dependence Regulation
Depression
Depressive Realism
Deviance
Diagnosticity
Diffusion of Responsibility
Dilution Effect
Discontinuity Effect
Discounting, in Attribution
Discourse Analysis. See Discursive Psychology
Discrimination
Discursive Psychology
Disgust
Displaced Aggression
Distinctiveness, in Attribution
Distributive Justice
Dominance, Evolutionary
Door-in-the-Face Technique

Downward Comparison. See Downward Social
Comparison
Downward Social Comparison
Drive Theory
Dual Attitudes
Dual Process Theories
Dynamical Systems Theory
Ecological Rationality
Ecological Validity
Effort Justification
Egocentric Bias
Ego Depletion
Ego Shock
Elaboration Likelihood Model
Elevation
Embarrassment
Emotion
Emotional Contagion
Emotional Intelligence
Empathic Accuracy
Empathy
Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis
Encoding
Endowment Effect. See Mere Ownership Effect
Entitativity
Environmental Psychology
Envy
Equality Matching. See Relational Models Theory
Equity Theory
Erotic Plasticity
Error Management Theory
Escape Theory
Ethnocentrism
Ethology
Evolutionary Psychology
Exchange Relationships
Excitation-Transfer Theory
Excuse
Executive Function of Self
Exemplification
Expectancy Effects
Expectations
Experimental Condition
Experimental Realism
Experimentation
Experimenter Effects
Expertise
Extraversion
Extrinsic Motivation
Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of
Facial Expression of Emotion
Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
False Consciousness
False Consensus Effect
False Uniqueness Bias
Falsification
Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Fear Appeals
Feedback Loop
Fight-or-Flight Response
Focalism
Foot-in-the-Door Technique
Forced Compliance Technique
Forensic Psychology
Forewarning
Forgiveness
Free Will, Study of
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
Fundamental Attribution Error
Gain–Loss Framing
Gambler’s Fallacy
Gender Differences
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior
Goals
Gossip
Gratitude
Grim Necessities
GRIT Tension Reduction Strategy
Group Cohesiveness
Group Decision Making
Group Dynamics
Group Identity
Group Performance and Productivity
Group Polarization
Groups, Characteristics of
Groupthink
Guilt
Guilty Pleasures
Habits
Halo Effect
List of Entries———ix

x———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Happiness
Hardiness
Health Psychology
Hedonic Treadmill
Helping Behavior
Helplessness, Learned
Heuristic Processing
Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion
Hindsight Bias
History of Social Psychology
Home-Field Advantage and Disadvantage
Hope
Hormones and Behavior
Hostile Attribution Bias
Hostile Masculinity Syndrome
Hostile Media Bias
Hot Hand Effect
Hyperbolic Discounting
Identity Crisis
Identity Status
Ideology
Illusion of Control
Illusion of Transparency
Illusory Correlation
Implementation Intentions
Implicit Association Test
Implicit Attitudes
Implicit Personality Theory
Impression Management
Independence of Positive and Negative Affect
Independent Self-Construals
Individual Differences
Inference
Influence
Informational Influence
Ingratiation
Ingratiator’s Dilemma
Ingroup–Outgroup Bias
Inoculation Theory
Integrative Complexity
Interdependence Theory
Interdependent Self-Construals
Intergroup Anxiety
Intergroup Emotions
Intergroup Relations
Interpersonal Attraction Processes. See Attraction
Interpersonal Cognition
Intimacy
Intimate Partner Violence
Intimidation. See Self-Presentation
Intrinsic Motivation
Introspection
Introversion
Ironic Processes
Jealousy
Jigsaw Classroom
Justice Motive
Just-World Hypothesis
Kelley’s Covariation Model
Kin Selection
Law of Small Numbers
Lay Epistemics
Leadership
Learned Helplessness
Learning Theory
LISREL
Locus of Control
Logical Positivism
Loneliness
Looking-Glass Self
Loss Aversion
Lost Letter Technique
Love
Lowballing
Marital Satisfaction
Market Pricing. See Relational Models Theory
Masculinity/Femininity
Matching Hypothesis
Meaning Maintenance Model
Media Violence and Aggression
Memory
Mental Accounting
Mental Control
Mere Exposure Effect
Mere Ownership Effect
Meta-Analysis
Meta-Awareness
Metacognition
Metatraits

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
Mimicry
Mindfulness and Mindlessness
Mind-Wandering
Minimal Group Paradigm
Minority Social Influence
Misattribution of Arousal
Modeling of Behavior
MODE Model
Modern Racism. See Symbolic Racism
Moral Cognitions. See Moral Reasoning
Moral Development
Moral Emotions
Moral Hypocrisy
Moral Reasoning
Mortality Salience
Motivated Cognition
Motivated Reasoning
MUM Effect
Mundane Realism
Naive Cynicism
Naive Realism
Name Letter Effect
Narcissism
Narcissistic Entitlement
Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Sexual Coercion
Need for Affiliation
Need for Closure
Need for Cognition
Need for Power
Need to Belong
Negative-State Relief Model
Neuroticism
Nonconscious Emotion
Nonconscious Processes
Nonexperimental Designs
Nonverbal Cues and Communication
Normative Influence
Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive
Objectification Theory
Omission Neglect
Operationalization
Opponent Process Theory of Emotions
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Order Effects
Organizational Behavior
Ostracism
Other–Total Ratio
Outgroup Homogeneity
Overconfidence
Overjustification Effect
Path Analysis
Peace Psychology
Personalities and Behavior Patterns,
Type A and Type B
Personality and Social Behavior
Personality Judgments, Accuracy of
Personal Space
Person Perception
Person-Positivity Heuristic
Persuasion
Phenomenal Self
Placebo Effect
Planned Behavior Theory. See Theory of
Planned Behavior
Planning Fallacy
Pluralistic Ignorance
Polarization Processes
Political Psychology
Pornography
Positive Affect
Positive Illusions
Positive–Negative Asymmetry
Positive Psychology
Power
Power Motive
Preference Reversals
Prejudice
Prejudice Reduction
Primacy Effect, Attribution
Primacy Effect, Memory
Priming
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Procedural Justice
Procrastination
Projection
Propinquity
Prosocial Behavior
Prospect Theory
Prototypes
Psychological Entitlement
List of Entries———xi

xii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Psychology of Terrorism. See Terrorism,
Psychology of
Public Goods Dilemma
Quasi-Experimental Designs
Racial Resentment. See Symbolic Racism
Racism
Rape
Reactance
Realistic Group Conflict Theory
Reasoned Action Theory
Recency Effect
Reciprocal Altruism
Reciprocity Norm
Reductionism
Reference Group
Regret
Regulatory Focus Theory
Rejection
Rejection Sensitivity
Relational Models Theory
Relationship Violence. See Intimate Partner Violence
Religion and Spirituality
Representativeness Heuristic
Research Methods
Resisting Persuasion
Responsibility Attribution
Ringelmann Effect
Risk Appraisal
Risk Taking
Risky Shift
Robbers Cave Experiment
Roles and Role Theory
Romantic Love
Romantic Secrecy
Rosenthal Effect. See Experimenter Effects
Rubicon Model of Action Phases
Rumor Transmission
Salience
Satisficing
Scapegoat Theory
Scarcity Principle
Schemas
Scripts
Search for Meaning in Life
Self
Self-Affirmation Theory
Self-Attribution Process
Self-Awareness
Self-Categorization Theory
Self-Complexity
Self-Concept
Self-Concept Clarity
Self-Control Measures
Self-Deception
Self-Defeating Behavior
Self-Determination Theory
Self-Disclosure
Self-Discrepancy Theory
Self-Efficacy
Self-Enhancement
Self-Esteem
Self-Esteem Stability
Self-Evaluation Maintenance
Self-Expansion Theory
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Self-Handicapping
Self-Monitoring
Self-Perception Theory
Self-Presentation
Self-Promotion
Self-Reference Effect
Self-Regulation
Self-Reports
Self-Schemas. See Schemas
Self-Serving Bias
Self-Stereotyping
Self-Verification Theory
Semantic Differential
Sensation Seeking
Sequential Choice
Sex Drive
Sexism
Sex Roles
Sexual Desire
Sexual Economics Theory
Sexual Harassment
Sexual Selection
Sexual Strategies Theory
Shame
Shifting Standards
Shyness
Similarity-Attraction Effect
Simulation Heuristic

Simultaneous Choice
Sleeper Effect
Social Anxiety
Social Categorization
Social Cognition
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Comparison
Social Compensation
Social Desirability Bias
Social Dilemmas
Social Dominance Orientation
Social Exchange Theory
Social Exclusion
Social Facilitation
Social Identity Theory
Social Impact Theory
Social Influence. See Influence
Social Justice Orientation
Social Learning
Social Loafing
Social Neuroscience
Social Power
Social Projection
Social Psychophysiology
Social Relations Model
Social Support
Social Trap. See Social Dilemmas
Social Value Orientation
Sociobiological Theory
Sociobiology
Socioeconomic Status
Sociological Social Psychology
Sociometric Status
Spontaneous Trait Inferences
Spotlight Effect
Spreading of Alternatives
Stanford Prison Experiment
Stealing Thunder
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Stereotype Threat
Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love.
See Triangular Theory of Love
Stigma
Stress and Coping
Stress Appraisal Theory (Primary and
Secondary Appraisal)
Structural Equation Modeling
Subliminal Perception
Subtyping
Suicide
Sunk Cost
Supplication
Surprise
Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic Racism
Symbolic Self-Completion
System Justification
Systems Theory. See Dynamical Systems Theory
Teasing
Temporal Construal Theory
Tend-and-Befriend Response
Territoriality
Terrorism, Psychology of
Terror Management Theory
Testosterone
Thematic Apperception Test
Theory of Mind
Theory of Planned Behavior
Thin Slices of Behavior
Threatened Egotism Theory of Aggression
Three-Dimensional Model of Attribution
Token Effects
Traits
Transactive Memory
Triangular Theory of Love
Trust
Twin Studies
Type A Personality. See Personalities and
Behavior Patterns, Type A and Type B
Type B Personality. See Personalities and
Behavior Patterns, Type A and Type B
Uniqueness
Unrequited Love
Urban Myth. See Rumor Transmission
Validity of Personality Judgments. See Personality
Judgments, Accuracy of
Value Pluralism Model
Value Priorities
Values
Visceral Influences
Volunteerism
Zeal
List of Entries———xiii

Reader’s Guide
This Reader’s Guide performs two functions within the encyclopedia. One, the headings alone describe, at a
broad level, the kinds of topics covered in the field of social psychology. Looking at the overarching categories,
one can see that social psychology studies cognition (thought) and action, helpful and hurtful behaviors, emotions
and decisions, culture and evolution, the self and social relationships, as well as health and problematic
behaviors. That’s quite a range of topics! The second purpose of the Reader’s Guide is related to the first in that
it helps readers who are already interested in a topic find new topics that may be of interest. In this way, the
Reader’s Guide provides links among topics. Either way it is used, we hope that you find yourself reading entries
from all of the general categories, given the wealth of interesting and important information to learn here.
Action Control
Action Identification Theory
Adaptive Unconscious
Apparent Mental Causation
Approach-Avoidance Conflict
Authenticity
Auto-Motive Model
Autonomy
Behavioral Contagion
Choking Under Pressure
Control
Controlled Processes
Decision Making
Delay of Gratification
Drive Theory
Ego Depletion
Excitation-Transfer Theory
Extrinsic Motivation
Feedback Loop
Free Will, Study of
Goals
Grim Necessities
Guilty Pleasures
Habits
Helplessness, Learned
Home-Field Advantage and Disadvantage
xv
Hormones and Behavior
Implementation Intentions
Intrinsic Motivation
Ironic Processes
Learned Helplessness
Learning Theory
Locus of Control
Mental Control
Meta-Awareness
Mindfulness and Mindlessness
Modeling of Behavior
Nonconscious Processes
Overjustification Effect
Procrastination
Reasoned Action Theory
Regulatory Focus Theory
Risk Taking
Rubicon Model of Action Phases
Scripts
Self-Awareness
Self-Control Measures
Self-Defeating Behavior
Self-Determination Theory
Self-Discrepancy Theory
Self-Efficacy
Self-Handicapping
Self-Regulation

xvi———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Social Facilitation
Social Learning
Social Loafing
Stereotype Threat
Stress Appraisal Theory (Primary and
Secondary Appraisal)
Temporal Construal Theory
Theory of Planned Behavior
Zeal
Antisocial Behaviors
Aggression
Antisocial Behavior
Aversive Racism
Betrayal
Bobo Doll Studies
Bullying
Catharsis of Aggression
Cheater-Detection Mechanism
Conflict Resolution
Date Rape
Deception (Lying)
Displaced Aggression
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
GRIT Tension Reduction Strategy
Hostile Masculinity Syndrome
Intimate Partner Violence
Media Violence and Aggression
Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
Moral Hypocrisy
Narcissistic Reactance Theory
of Sexual Coercion
Ostracism
Rape
Rejection
Sexual Harassment
Social Exclusion
Stanford Prison Experiment
Terrorism, Psychology of
Threatened Egotism Theory of Aggression
Attitude
Anticipatory Attitude Change
Attitude–Behavior Consistency
Attitude Change
Attitude Formation
Attitudes
Attitude Strength
Balance Theory
Beliefs
Brainwashing
Cognitive Consistency
Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Dual Attitudes
Effort Justification
Elaboration Likelihood Model
Forced Compliance Technique
Forewarning
Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion
Implicit Attitudes
MODE Model
Motivated Reasoning
Polarization Processes
Satisficing
Theory of Planned Behavior
Values
Culture
Collective Self
Collectivistic Cultures
Cultural Animal
Cultural Differences
Culture
Culture of Honor
Erotic Plasticity
Ethnocentrism
Ideology
Independent Self-Construals
Interdependent Self-Construals
Moral Development
Mortality Salience
Objectification Theory
Pornography
Relational Models Theory
Sexual Economics Theory
Terror Management Theory
Emotions
Affect
Affect-as-Information

Affect Heuristic
Affect Infusion
Ambivalence
Anger
Anxiety
Arousal
Awe
Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Affect
Buffering Effect
Companionate Love
Decision and Commitment in Love
Disgust
Elevation
Embarrassment
Emotion
Emotional Contagion
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy
Envy
Facial Expression of Emotion
Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
Fear Appeals
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Guilt
Happiness
Hedonic Treadmill
Hope
Independence of Positive and Negative Affect
Intergroup Anxiety
Intergroup Emotions
Jealousy
Loneliness
Love
Mere Exposure Effect
Moral Emotions
Nonconscious Emotion
Opponent Process Theory of Emotions
Positive Affect
Regret
Romantic Love
Shame
Social Anxiety
Stress and Coping
Surprise
Unrequited Love
Visceral Influences
Evolution
Affordances
Cheater-Detection Mechanism
Cultural Animal
Dominance, Evolutionary
Ecological Rationality
Error Management Theory
Ethology
Evolutionary Psychology
Fight-or-Flight Response
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior
Kin Selection
Sexual Selection
Sexual Strategies Theory
Sociobiological Theory
Sociobiology
Groups
Reader’s Guide———xvii
Brainstorming
Bystander Effect
Close Relationships
Cohesiveness, Group
Collective Self
Communal Relationships
Conformity
Contact Hypothesis
Contingency Model of Leadership
Crowding
Deindividuation
Deviance
Diffusion of Responsibility
Discontinuity Effect
Distributive Justice
Entitativity
Gossip
Group Cohesiveness
Group Decision Making
Group Dynamics
Group Identity
Group Performance and Group Productivity
Group Polarization
Groups, Characteristics of
Groupthink
Ingroup-Outgroup Bias
Intergroup Anxiety

xviii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Intergroup Emotions
Intergroup Relations
Jigsaw Classroom
Leadership
Minimal Group Paradigm
Minority Social Influence
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Organizational Behavior
Other–Total Ratio
Outgroup Homogeneity
Polarization Processes
Power
Procedural Justice
Realistic Group Conflict Theory
Ringelmann Effect
Risky Shift
Robbers Cave Experiment
Roles and Role Theory
Rumor Transmission
Scapegoat Theory
Self-Categorization Theory
Self-Stereotyping
Sex Roles
Social Compensation
Social Dominance Orientation
Social Identity Theory
Social Impact Theory
Social Justice Orientation
Social Loafing
Social Power
Socioeconomic Status
Subtyping
System Justification
Territoriality
Token Effects
Health
Binge Eating
Biopsychosocial Model
Buffering Effect
Bulimia
Coping
Depression
Hardiness
Health Psychology
Sexual Desire
Social Neuroscience
Social Psychophysiology
Stress and Coping
Tend-and-Befriend Response
Testosterone
History
Bennington College Study
Bobo Doll Studies
History of Social Psychology
Logical Positivism
Reductionism
Robbers Cave Experiment
Stanford Prison Experiment
Thematic Apperception Test
Influence
Compliance
Conformity
Debiasing
Door-in-the-Face Technique
Fear Appeals
Foot-in-the-Door Technique
Forced Compliance
Forewarning
Heuristic-Systematic
Model of Persuasion
Influence
Informational Influence
Ingratiation
Ingratiator’s Dilemma
Inoculation Theory
Mere Exposure Effect
Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
Minority Social Influence
Normative Influence
Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive
Persuasion
Reactance
Reciprocity Norm
Reference Group
Resisting Persuasion
Scarcity Principle
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Sleeper Effect

Social Power
Stealing Thunder
Supplication
Interpersonal Relationships
Attachment Theory
Betrayal
Close Relationships
Communal Relationships
Companionate Love
Complementarity, of Relationship Partners
Decision and Commitment in Love
Dependence Regulation
Empathic Accuracy
Equity Theory
Exchange Relationships
Forgiveness
Gossip
Interdependence Theory
Interpersonal Cognition
Intimacy
Intimate Partner Violence
Loneliness
Love
Marital Satisfaction
Matching Hypothesis
Mimicry
Need to Belong
Nonverbal Cues and
Communication
Ostracism
Pornography
Propinquity
Rejection
Romantic Love
Romantic Secrecy
Self-Disclosure
Self-Evaluation Maintenance
Self-Expansion Theory
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Sex Drive
Sexual Desire
Sexual Economics Theory
Similarity-Attraction Effect
Social Exchange Theory
Social Exclusion
Social Support
Social Value Orientation
Teasing
Transactive Memory
Triangular Theory of Love
Trust
Unrequited Love
Reader’s Guide———xix
Judgment and Decision Making
Behavioral Economics
Decision Making
Fast and Frugal Heuristics
Free Will, Study of
Grim Necessities
Group Decision Making
Group Polarization
Hindsight Bias
Hot Hand Effect
Hyperbolic Discounting
Illusion of Transparency
Illusory Correlation
Ingroup-Outgroup Bias
Integrative Complexity
Law of Small Numbers
Loss Aversion
Mental Accounting
Mere Ownership Effect
Naive Cynicism
Naive Realism
Omission Neglect
Overconfidence
Planning Fallacy
Pluralistic Ignorance
Preference Reversals
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Prospect Theory
Public Goods Dilemma
Recency Effect
Representativeness Heuristic
Risk Taking
Risky Shift
Satisficing
Sequential Choice
Simulation Heuristic
Simultaneous Choice
Social Dilemmas

xx———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Spreading of Alternatives
Sunk Cost
Visceral Influences
Methods
Autobiographical Narratives
Behavioral Economics
Bennington College Study
Big Five Personality Traits
Bobo Doll Studies
Bogus Pipeline
Content Analysis
Control Condition
Critical Social Psychology
Cross-Lagged Panel Correlation
Deception (Methodological Technique)
Demand Characteristics
Discursive Psychology
Dynamical Systems Theory
Ecological Validity
Ethnocentrism
Experimental Condition
Experimental Realism
Experimentation
Experimenter Effects
Falsification
Forced Compliance Technique
Identity Status
Implicit Association Test
Individual Differences
LISREL
Logical Positivism
Lost Letter Technique
Meta-Analysis
Mundane Realism
Nonexperimental Designs
Operationalization
Order Effects
Path Analysis
Placebo Effect
Quasi-Experimental Designs
Reductionism
Research Methods
Self-Reports
Semantic Differential
Social Desirability Bias
Social Relations Model
Sociometric Status
Structural Equation Modeling
Thematic Apperception Test
Twin Studies
Personality
Achievement Motivation
Agreeableness
Androgyny
Attachment Styles
Authoritarian Personality
Babyfaceness
Big Five Personality Traits
Central Traits Versus
Peripheral Traits
Control Motivation
Curiosity
Defensive Pessimism
Depression
Expertise
Extraversion
Gender Differences
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior
Hardiness
Hostile Masculinity Syndrome
Identity Status
Implicit Personality Theory
Individual Differences
Introversion
Locus of Control
Masculinity/Femininity
Metatraits
Narcissism
Narcissistic Entitlement
Need for Affiliation
Need for Closure
Need for Cognition
Need for Power
Neuroticism
Personalities and Behavior Patterns,
Type A and Type B
Personality and Social Behavior
Power Motive
Rejection Sensitivity
Self-Complexity

Self-Concept Clarity
Self-Control Measures
Self-Esteem
Self-Esteem Stability
Self-Monitoring
Sensation Seeking
Sex Drive
Sex Roles
Shyness
Social Desirability Bias
Testosterone
Thematic Apperception Test
Traits
Uniqueness
Prejudice
Aversive Racism
Benevolent Sexism
Contact Hypothesis
Discrimination
Jigsaw Classroom
Prejudice
Prejudice Reduction
Racism
Scapegoat Theory
Sexism
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Stereotype Threat
Stigma
Symbolic Racism
Problem Behaviors
Binge Eating
Bulimia
Bullying
Coping
Counterregulation of Eating
Date Rape
Deception (Lying)
Depression
Narcissistic Reactance
Theory of Sexual Coercion
Objectification Theory
Rape
Self-Defeating Behavior
Self-Handicapping
Shyness
Social Loafing
Suicide
Prosocial Behaviors
Altruism
Altruistic Punishment
Attraction
Bystander Effect
Compassion
Cooperation
Decision Model of Helping
Distributive Justice
Empathic Accuracy
Empathy
Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis
Gratitude
GRIT Tension Reduction Strategy
Helping Behavior
Negative-State Relief Model
Positive Psychology
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Prosocial Behavior
Public Goods Dilemma
Reciprocal Altruism
Religion and Spirituality
Search for Meaning in Life
Volunteerism
Self
Actor–Observer Asymmetries
Apparent Mental Causation
Barnum Effect
Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)
Brainwashing
Close Relationships
Collective Self
Contingencies of Self-Worth
Deindividuation
Downward Social Comparison
Egocentric Bias
Ego Shock
Escape Theory
Executive Function of Self
Reader’s Guide———xxi

xxii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Exemplification
Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
Identity Crisis
Illusion of Control
Illusion of Transparency
Impression Management
Independent Self-Construals
Ingratiator’s Dilemma
Interdependent Self-Construals
Introspection
Looking-Glass Self
Mental Control
Mere Ownership Effect
Misattribution of Arousal
Moral Development
Mortality Salience
Name Letter Effect
Objectification Theory
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Overjustification Effect
Personal Space
Phenomenal Self
Positive Illusions
Procrastination
Projection
Psychological Entitlement
Reactance
Regulatory Focus Theory
Roles and Role Theory
Schemas
Self
Self-Affirmation Theory
Self-Attribution Process
Self-Awareness
Self-Categorization Theory
Self-Complexity
Self-Concept
Self-Concept Clarity
Self-Control Measures
Self-Deception
Self-Defeating Behavior
Self-Determination Theory
Self-Disclosure
Self-Discrepancy Theory
Self-Efficacy
Self-Enhancement
Self-Esteem
Self-Esteem Stability
Self-Evaluation Maintenance
Self-Expansion Theory
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Self-Handicapping
Self-Monitoring
Self-Perception Theory
Self-Presentation
Self-Promotion
Self-Reference Effect
Self-Regulation
Self-Reports
Self-Serving Bias
Self-Stereotyping
Self-Verification Theory
Social Comparison
Social Identity Theory
Spotlight Effect
Stigma
Symbolic Self-Completion
Terror Management Theory
Threatened Egotism
Theory of Aggression
Uniqueness
Value Priorities
Zeal
Social Cognition
Accessibility
Accountability
Action Identification Theory
Actor–Observer Asymmetries
Adaptive Unconscious
Alcohol Myopia Effect
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic
Assimilation Processes
Associative Networks
Attention
Attributional Ambiguity
Attributions
Attribution Theory
Automatic Processes
Availability Heuristic
Bad Is Stronger Than Good
Barnum Effect
Base Rate Fallacy

Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)
Belief Perseverance
Blaming the Victim
Central Traits Versus Peripheral Traits
Confirmation Bias
Consciousness
Contrast Effects
Controlled Processes
Correspondence Bias
Correspondent Inference Theory
Counterfactual Thinking
Creativity
Curiosity
Debiasing
Defensive Attribution
Depressive Realism
Diagnosticity
Dilution Effect
Discounting, in Attribution
Distinctiveness, in Attribution
Downward Social Comparison
Dual Process Theories
Egocentric Bias
Emotional Intelligence
Encoding
Excuse
Expectancy Effects
Expectations
Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of
False Consciousness
False Consensus Effect
False Uniqueness Bias
Focalism
Fundamental Attribution Error
Gain–Loss Framing
Gambler’s Fallacy
Halo Effect
Heuristic Processing
Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion
Hostile Attribution Bias
Hostile Media Bias
Hot Hand Effect
Illusory Correlation
Implicit Personality Theory
Inference
Integrative Complexity
Interpersonal Cognition
Justice Motive
Just-World Hypothesis
Kelley’s Covariation Model
Lay Epistemics
Lowballing
Matching Hypothesis
Meaning Maintenance Model
Memory
Metacognition
Mimicry
Mind-Wandering
Misattribution of Arousal
Moral Emotions
Moral Reasoning
Motivated Cognition
Motivated Reasoning
MUM Effect
Nonconscious Processes
Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive
Omission Neglect
Personality Judgments, Accuracy of
Person Perception
Person-Positivity Heuristic
Positive–Negative Asymmetry
Primacy Effect, Attribution
Primacy Effect, Memory
Priming
Projection
Prototypes
Recency Effect
Responsibility Attribution
Risk Appraisal
Salience
Satisficing
Schemas
Scripts
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Self-Reference Effect
Self-Serving Bias
Self-Verification Theory
Shifting Standards
Similarity-Attraction Effect
Social Categorization
Social Cognition
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Comparison
Social Impact Theory
Reader’s Guide———xxiii

xxiv———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Social Projection
Spontaneous Trait Inferences
Spreading of Alternatives
Subliminal Perception
Subtyping
Symbolic Interactionism
Theory of Mind
Thin Slices of Behavior
Three-Dimensional Model of Attribution
Transactive Memory
Value Pluralism Model
Subdisciplines
Applied Social Psychology
Consumer Behavior
Critical Social Psychology
Discursive Psychology
Environmental Psychology
Ethology
Evolutionary Psychology
Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of
Forensic Psychology
Health Psychology
History of Social Psychology
Organizational Behavior
Peace Psychology
Personality and Social Behavior
Political Psychology
Positive Psychology
Religion and Spirituality
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Neuroscience
Social Psychophysiology
Sociobiology
Sociological Social Psychology

About the Editors
Roy F. Baumeister holds the Eppes Eminent
Professorship in the Department of Psychology at
Florida State University. He received his Ph.D. in
experimental social psychology from Princeton
University in 1978. He has also taught and conducted
research at the University of California at Berkeley,
Case Western Reserve University, University of
Texas, University of Virginia, the Max-Planck
Institute in Munich (Germany), and Stanford’s Center
for Advanced Study. He has contributed more than
300 professional publications (including 18 books),
spanning such topics as self and identity, performance
under pressure, self-control, self-esteem, finding
meaning in life, sexuality, decision making,
thoughts on free will, aggression and violence, suicide,
interpersonal processes, social rejection, the need
to belong, and human nature. His research on selfregulation
has been funded for many years by the
National Institute of Mental Health and the Templeton
Foundation.
xxv
Kathleen D. Vohs is Assistant Professor in the
Department of Marketing, Carlson School of Management,
University of Minnesota. Vohs received her Ph.D.
in psychological and brain sciences from Dartmouth
College in 2000, after which she conducted research at
the University of Utah and Case Western Reserve
University. In 2003, she joined the Marketing Division
at the University of British Columbia, where she was
awarded the Canada Research Chair in Marketing
Science and Consumer Psychology. In 2007, Vohs was
named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the
University of Minnesota. Vohs has contributed to more
than 80 professional publications, including coediting
3 books. Her theories highlight the role of the self, and
her research has been extended to the domains
of chronic dieting, bulimic symptoms, sexuality, and
impulsive and compulsive spending. Her work has been
funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Social
Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, and the
American Cancer Society.

Contributors
Lyn Y. Abramson
University of Wisconsin
Anja Achtziger
Universitat Konstanz
Gerald Robert Adams
University of Guelph
Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
Pennsylvania State University
Christopher R. Agnew
Purdue University
Icek Ajzen
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Maria Logli Allison
University of California, Berkeley
Lauren B. Alloy
Temple University
Nalini Ambady
Tufts University
Craig A. Anderson
Iowa State University
Kathryn B. Anderson
Our Lady of the Lake University
Kristin J. Anderson
University of Houston, Downtown
xxvi
Robert M. Arkin
Ohio State University
Arthur Aron
Stony Brook University, SUNY
Joshua Aronson
New York University
Ximena B. Arriaga
Purdue University
Danny Axsom
Virginia Tech
Jodene R. Baccus
McGill University
Pamela L. Bacon
College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University
Michael Baker
Florida State University
Mark W. Baldwin
McGill University
Mahzarin R. Banaji
Harvard University
Yoav Bar-Anan
University of Virginia
Jamie Barden
Howard University

Mark A. Barnett
Kansas State University
Robert S. Baron
University of Iowa
Daniel W. Barrett
Western Connecticut State University
C. Daniel Batson
University of Kansas
Monika Bauer
Northwestern University
Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Andrew P. Becker
Northwestern University
James K. Beggan
University of Louisville
Sian L. Beilock
University of Chicago
Theodore W. Bender
Florida State University
L. Brooke Bennett
Florida State University
Leonard Berkowitz
University of Wisconsin–Madison (Retired)
Monica Biernat
University of Kansas
George Y. Bizer
Union College
Ginette C. Blackhart
Florida State University
Kevin L. Blankenship
Purdue University
Hart Blanton
Texas A&M University
Jim Blascovich
University of California, Santa Barbara
Thomas Blass
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Herbert Bless
University of Mannheim
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Northwestern University
Prashant Bordia
University of South Australia
Marc A. Brackett
Yale University
Laura A. Brannon
Kansas State University
William E. Breen
George Mason University
Marilynn B. Brewer
Ohio State University
Thomas W. Britt
Clemson University
Brandon I. Brockmyer
Reed College
Jonathon D. Brown
University of Washington
Amy B. Brunell
University of Georgia
Sabrina Bruyneel
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Roger Buehler
Wilfrid Laurier University
Contributors———xxvii

xxviii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Laura E. Buffardi
University of Georgia
Jerry M. Burger
Santa Clara University
Jeni L. Burnette
Virginia Commonwealth University
Kathleen C. Burns
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Jeremy Burrus
Columbia University
Brad J. Bushman
University of Michigan
David M. Buss
University of Texas
Jonathan Butner
University of Utah
James P. Byrnes
Temple University
John T. Cacioppo
University of Chicago
W. Keith Campbell
University of Georgia
Nicole M. Capezza
Purdue University
Kevin M. Carlsmith
Colgate University
Donal E. Carlston
Purdue University
Dana R. Carney
Harvard University
Travis J. Carter
Cornell University
Adrienne R. Carter-Sowell
Purdue University
Charles S. Carver
University of Miami
Bettina J. Casad
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Kathleen R. Catanese
Saint Leo University
Justin V. Cavallo
University of Waterloo
Jennifer L. Cerully
University of Pittsburgh
Shelly Chaiken
New York University
Jesse J. Chandler
University of Michigan
Tanya L. Chartrand
Duke University
Kevin A. Chavarria
California State University, Fullerton
Jonathan M. Cheek
Wellesley College
Zhansheng Chen
Pennsylvania State University
Troy Chenier
University of California, San Diego
Jason Chin
University of British Columbia
Karen Choi
University of Waterloo
P. Niels Christensen
Radford University

Charlene Christie
Indiana University–Purdue University at Columbus
Daniel J. Christie
Ohio State University
Natalie Ciarocco
Florida Atlantic University
Margaret Clark
Yale University
Jason K. Clark
Purdue University
Jennifer A. Clarke
United States Air Force Academy
Gerald L. Clore
University of Virginia
Dov Cohen
University of Illinois
Geoffrey L. Cohen
University of Colorado at Boulder
Elizabeth C. Collins
University of Kansas
C. Randall Colvin
Northeastern University
Regina Conti
Colgate University
Joel Cooper
Princeton University
Thomas E. Cooper
Ohio State University
Leda Cosmides
University of California, Santa Barbara
Paul T. Costa, Jr.
National Institute on Aging
Dee Lisa Cothran
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Catherine A. Cottrell
University of Florida
Andrew Cox
Central Michigan University
Elizabeth L. Cralley
American University
Chris Crandall
University of Kansas
Clayton R. Critcher
Cornell University
Faye J. Crosby
University of California, Santa Cruz
Sara A. Crump
University of California, Santa Barbara
Sheila Cunningham
University of Aberdeen
Amy N. Dalton
Duke University
Jennifer R. Daniels
University of Connecticut
Peter Darke
University of British Columbia
John Darley
Princeton University
Contributors———xxix
Kristy K. Dean
California State University, San Bernardino
Mark Dechesne
University of Maryland, College Park
Edward L. Deci
University of Rochester

xxx———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Carsten K. W. de Dreu
University of Amsterdam
Natascha de Hoog
International Graduate College
Jan De Houwer
Ghent University
Kenneth G. DeMarree
Ohio State University
M. C. DeSoto
University of Northern Iowa
C. Nathan DeWall
Florida State University
Lisa Diamond
University of Utah
Sally S. Dickerson
University of California, Irvine
Stephan Dickert
University of Oregon
Amanda B. Diekman
Miami University
Nicholas DiFonzo
Rochester Institute of Technology
Ap Dijksterhuis
Radboud University Nijmegen
Mallory Dimler
College of New Jersey
Celeste E. Doerr
Florida State University
John F. Dovidio
University of Connecticut
Geraldine Downey
Columbia University
Elizabeth W. Dunn
University of British Columbia
David Dunning
Cornell University
Anna P. Ebel-Lam
Queen’s University
Collette Eccleston
Syracuse University
John Edlund
Northern Illinois University
Jacob Eisenberg
University College Dublin
Nancy Eisenberg
Arizona State University
John H. Ellard
University of Calgary
Andrew J. Elliot
University of Rochester
Nicholas Epley
University of Chicago
K. Anders Ericsson
Florida State University
Elsa Ermer
University of California, Santa Barbara
Gary W. Evans
Cornell University
Julie Exline
Case Western Reserve University
Diane Felmlee
University of California, Davis
Florian Fessel
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Klaus Fiedler
University of Heidelberg
Eli J. Finkel
Northwestern University
Catrin Finkenauer
Free University
Agneta H. Fischer
University of Amsterdam
Helen E. Fisher
Rutgers University
Alan Page Fiske
University of California, Los Angeles
Garth Fletcher
University of Canterbury
Joseph P. Forgas
University of New South Wales
Noah Forrin
St. John’s College
Jens Förster
International University Bremen
Friedrich Försterling
University of Munich
Donelson R. Forsyth
University of Richmond
Craig Foster
United States Air Force Academy
Joshua D. Foster
University of South Alabama
R. Chris Fraley
University of Illinois
Stephen L. Franzoi
Marquette University
Shane Frederick
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Barbara L. Fredrickson
University of Michigan
Ron Friedman
University of Rochester
Irene Hanson Frieze
University of Pittsburgh
Kentaro Fujita
New York University
Shelly L. Gable
University of California, Los Angeles
Simon Gächter
University of Nottingham
Samuel L. Gaertner
University of Delaware
Matthew T. Gailliot
Florida State University
Steven W. Gangestad
University of New Mexico
Stephen M. Garcia
University of Michigan
Wendi L. Gardner
Northwestern University
Danielle Gaucher
University of Waterloo
Bertram Gawronski
University of Western Ontario
David C. Geary
University of Missouri
Robert Gifford
University of Victoria
Contributors———xxxi

xxxii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Thomas Gilovich
Cornell University
Roger Giner-Sorolla
University of Kent
Seth Gitter
Florida State University
Peter Glick
Lawrence University
Ayelet Gneezy
University of Chicago
Jennifer Goetz
Carnegie Mellon University
Gregg Gold
Humboldt State University
Jamie L. Goldenberg
University of South Florida
Brian M. Goldman
Clayton State University
Lizabeth Goldstein
College of New Jersey
Peter M. Gollwitzer
New York University
Karen Gonsalkorale
University of California, Davis
Stephanie A. Goodwin
Purdue University
Amir Goren
Princeton University
Anke Görzig
University of Mannheim
Shelly Grabe
University of Wisconsin
Jodi Grace
University of Florida
Loranel M. Graham
Our Lady of the Lake University
Steven M. Graham
Yale University
Richard H. Gramzow
Northeastern University
Elizabeth K. Gray
North Park University
Kurt Gray
Harvard University
William G. Graziano
Purdue University
Jeff Greenberg
University of Arizona
Anthony G. Greenwald
University of Washington
Rainer Greifeneder
University of Mannheim
Igor Grossmann
University of Michigan
Rosanna E. Guadagno
University of California, Santa Barbara
Meara M. Habashi
Purdue University
Geoffrey Haddock
Cardiff University
Carolyn L. Hafer
Brock University
Jonathan D. Haidt
University of Virginia

Judith A. Hall
Northeastern University
Mark Hallahan
College of the Holy Cross
Michael J. Halloran
La Trobe University
David L. Hamilton
University of California, Santa Barbara
Elliott D. Hammer
Xavier University of Louisiana
Kyunghee Han
Central Michigan University
Karlene Hanko
Cornell University
Nina Hansen
University of Jena, Germany
Cindy Harmon-Jones
Texas A&M University
Eddie Harmon-Jones
Texas A&M University
Monica J. Harris
University of Kentucky
Christine R. Harris
University of California, San Diego
Bryan J. Harrison
University of Michigan
Martie G. Haselton
University of California, Los Angeles
S. Alexander Haslam
University of Exeter
Elaine Hatfield
University of Hawaii
Curtis Haugtvedt
Ohio State University
Louise Hawkley
University of Chicago
Michelle R. Hebl
Rice University
P. J. Henry
DePaul University
C. Peter Herman
University of Toronto
Anthony D. Hermann
Willamette University
E. Tory Higgins
Colombia University
Robert Thomas Hitlan
University of Northern Iowa
Sara D. Hodges
University of Oregon
Ulrich Hoffrage
University of Lausanne
Michael A. Hogg
Claremont Graduate University
Rob W. Holland
Radboud University Nijmegen
Andrea B. Hollingshead
University of Southern California
John G. Holmes
University of Waterloo
Ann E. Hoover
Purdue University
Crystal L. Hoyt
University of Richmond
Contributors———xxxiii

xxxiv———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Jay Hull
Dartmouth College
Li-Ching Hung
Mississippi State University
Jeffrey R. Huntsinger
University of Virginia
Mark Huppin
University of California, Los Angeles
Janet Shibley Hyde
University of Wisconsin
William Ickes
University of Texas at Arlington
Chester A. Insko
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Carmen R. Isasi
AECOM
Linda M. Isbell
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Alice Isen
Cornell University
Jay W. Jackson
Indiana University–Purdue University at Columbus
Lauri A. Jensen-Campbell
University of Texas at Arlington
Blair T. Johnson
University of Connecticut
Kerri L. Johnson
New York University
Thomas E. Joiner, Jr.
Florida State University
Kai J. Jonas
University of Jena
Eric E. Jones
Purdue University
Robert Josephs
University of Texas at Austin
John T. Jost
New York University
Will Kalkhoff
Kent State University
Joanne Kane
University of Colorado at Boulder
Jan Kang
Columbia University
Richard I. Kaplan
George Washington University
Frank R. Kardes
University of Cincinnati
Todd B. Kashdan
George Mason University
Saul Kassin
Williams College
Pamela K. Keel
University of Iowa
Janice R. Kelly
Purdue University
Dacher Keltner
University of California, Berkeley
Douglas T. Kenrick
Arizona State University
Peter Kerkhof
Free University Amsterdam
Michael H. Kernis
University of Georgia

Holly Ketterer
Central Michigan University
Saera R. Khan
University of San Francisco
Shelley Dean Kilpatrick
Southwest Baptist University
Chu Kim-Prieto
College of New Jersey
Anthon Klapwijk
Free University Amsterdam
William M. P. Klein
University of Pittsburgh
Jennifer M. Knack
University of Texas at Arlington
Eric S. Knowles
University of Arkansas
Megan L. Knowles
Northwestern University
Brittany Kohlberger
College of New Jersey
Sara Konrath
University of Michigan
Sander Koole
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Brandon Kopp
Ohio State University
Spee Kosloff
University of Arizona
Robin M. Kowalski
Clemson University
Adam D. I. Kramer
University of Oregon
Alison M. Kramer
George Washington University
Joachim I. Krueger
Brown University
Justin Kruger
NYU Stern
Arie W. Kruglanski
University of Maryland
Doug Krull
Northern Kentucky University
Elizabeth A. Krusemark
University of Georgia
Koichi Kurebayashi
University of Omaha
Sangil Kwon
Michigan State University
Simon Laham
University of New South Wales
Jessica L. Lakin
Drew University
Mark J. Landau
University of Arizona
Ellen Langer
Harvard University
Carrie Langner
University of California, San Francisco
Jeff T. Larsen
Texas Tech University
Randy J. Larsen
Washington University in St. Louis
G. Daniel Lassiter
Ohio University
Contributors———xxxv

xxxvi———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Alvin Ty Law
Purdue University
Alison Ledgerwood
New York University
Justin J. Lehmiller
Purdue University
John M. Levine
University of Pittsburgh
Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr.
Monmouth University
Nira Liberman
Tel Aviv University
Debra Lieberman
University of Hawaii
Matthew D. Lieberman
University of California, Los Angeles
Susan P. Limber
Clemson University
Lisa Linardatos
McGill University
Matthew J. Lindberg
Ohio University
Patricia Linville
Duke University
David A. Lishner
University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh
Ido Liviatan
New York University
Corinna E. Löckenhoff
Stanford University
Chris Loersch
Ohio State University
Richard E. Lucas
Michigan State University
John Lydon
McGill University
Tara K. MacDonald
Queen’s University
M. Kimberly MacLin
University of Northern Iowa
Otto H. MacLin
University of Northern Iowa
C. Neil Macrae
University of Aberdeen
James E. Maddux
George Mason University
Juan M. Madera
Rice University
Lynda Mae
Western Nevada Community College
Gregory R. Maio
Cardiff University
Brenda Major
University of California, Santa Barbara
Neil Malamuth
University of California, Los Angeles
Bertram F. Malle
University of Oregon
Jon K. Maner
Florida State University
Antony S. R. Manstead
Cardiff University
William D. Marelich
California State University, Fullerton

Aimee Y. Mark
University of Kentucky
Douglas Martin
University of Aberdeen
E. J. Masicampo
Florida State University
Amy Mast
Illinois State University
Marianne Schmid Mast
Université de Neuchâtel
David M. Mayer
University of Central Florida
Dan P. McAdams
Northwestern University
Michael McCaslin
Ohio State University
Robert R. McCrae
National Institute on Aging, NIH, DHHS
Todd McElroy
Appalachian State University
Ian McGregor
York University
Nicole L. Mead
Florida State University
Pranjal Mehta
University of Texas at Austin
Barbara Mellers
University of California, Berkeley
Wendy Berry Mendes
Harvard University
Katherine Merrill
Florida State University
Sal Meyers
Simpson College
Mario Mikulincer
Bar-Ilan University
Carol T. Miller
University of Vermont
Geoffrey Miller
University of New Mexico
Norman Miller
University of Southern California
Rowland Miller
Sam Houston State University
Marianne Miserandino
Arcadia University
Scott J. Moeller
University of Michigan
Arlen C. Moller
University of Rochester
Benoît Monin
Stanford University
Matthew M. Monin
University of Pittsburgh
Margo J. Monteith
University of Kentucky
Kathryn A. Morris
Butler University
Kimberly Rios Morrison
Stanford University
Gabriel Moser
Paris Descartes University
Gordon B. Moskowitz
Lehigh University
Contributors———xxxvii

xxxviii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Judith Tedlie Moskowitz
University of California, San Francisco
Patrick A. Müller
University of Mannheim
Mark Muraven
University at Albany, SUNY
Sandra L. Murray
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Peggy J. Mycek
University of California, Irvine
Michael W. Myers
University of Oregon
Stacey L. Nairn
University of Prince Edward Island
Jenae M. Neiderhiser
George Washington University
Noelle M. Nelson
University of Minnesota
John D. Newman
National Institutes of Health
Leonard S. Newman
University of Illinois at Chicago
Christopher P. Niemiec
University of Rochester
Bernard A. Nijstad
University of Amsterdam
Jessica M. Nolan
University of Arkansas
Julie K. Norem
Wellesley College
Brian A. Nosek
University of Virginia
Laurie T. O’Brien
Tulane University
Heather N. Odle-Dusseau
Clemson University
Kathryn C. Oleson
Reed College
Michael A. Olson
University of Tennessee
An T. Oskarsson
University of Colorado at Boulder
Christopher Oveis
University of California, Berkeley
Mario Pandelaere
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Bernadette Park
University of Colorado at Boulder
Craig D. Parks
Washington State University
Elizabeth J. Parks-Stamm
New York University
Anthony M. Pascoe
Duke University
Delroy L. Paulhus
University of British Columbia
Paul B. Paulus
University of Texas at Arlington
Richard E. Petty
Ohio State University
Ethan Pew
University of Colorado at Boulder
Mark V. Pezzo
University of South Florida

Michael Pfau
University of Oklahoma
Valerie K. Pilling
Kansas State University
Dante Pirouz
University of California, Irvine
David A. Pizarro
Cornell University
E. Ashby Plant
Florida State University
Vicki Pollock
The Brian Othmer Foundation
David B. Portnoy
University of Connecticut
Tom Postmes
University of Exeter
Jonathan Potter
Loughborough University
Anthony R. Pratkanis
University of California, Santa Cruz
Deborah A. Prentice
Princeton University
Travis Proulx
University of British Columbia
John B. Pryor
Illinois State University
Kate A. Ranganath
University of Virginia
Richard L. Rapson
University of Hawaii
Jennifer J. Ratcliff
Ohio University
Catherine D. Rawn
University of British Columbia
Joseph P. Redden
University of Minnesota
Jason T. Reed
Morrisville State College
Glenn D. Reeder
Illinois State University
Contributors———xxxix
Pamela C. Regan
California State University, Los Angeles
Torsten Reimer
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Chris P. Reinders Folmer
Free University, Amsterdam
Harry T. Reis
University of Rochester
Nancy Rhodes
University of Alabama
Frederick Rhodewalt
University of Utah
Jennifer A. Richeson
Northwestern University
Cheryl A. Rickabaugh
University of Redlands
Jörg Rieskamp
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Dan D Riner
University of Arkansas
Jane L. Risen
Cornell University
Timothy D. Ritchie
Northern Illinois University

xl———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Tomi-Ann Roberts
Colorado College
Neal J. Roese
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Meg J. Rohan
University of New South Wales
Paul Rose
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
Robert Rosenthal
University of California, Riverside
Paul Rozin
University of Pennsylvania
Derek D. Rucker
Northwestern University
Lana Rucks
Ohio State University
Nicholas O. Rule
Tufts University
Caryl E. Rusbult
Free University Amsterdam
Janet B. Ruscher
Tulane University
Carey S. Ryan
University of Nebraska at Omaha
Richard M. Ryan
University of Rochester
Richard Saavedra
University of New Hampshire
Delia S. Saenz
Arizona State University
Brad J. Sagarin
Northern Illinois University
Peter Salovey
Yale University
Viktoriya Samarina
University of San Francisco
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks
University of Michigan
Lawrence J. Sanna
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alecia M. Santuzzi
Syracuse University
Aislinn R. Sapp
University of Rochester
Ken Savitsky
Williams College
Roger C. Schank
Northwestern University
Svenja K. Schattka
University of Mannheim
Steve Scher
Eastern Illinois University
Brandon J. Schmeichel
Texas A&M University
Kristina R. Schmukler
University of California, Santa Cruz
Jonathan W. Schooler
University of British Columbia
Michela Schröder-Abé
Chemnitz University of Technology
Astrid Schütz
Chemnitz University of Technology
Lori A. J. Scott-Sheldon
University of Connecticut

David O. Sears
University of California, Los Angeles
J. Patrick Seder
University of Virginia
Ya Hui Michelle See
Ohio State University
Nancy L. Segal
California State University, Fullerton
Todd K. Shackelford
Florida Atlantic University
David R. Shaffer
University of Georgia
Phillip R. Shaver
University of California, Davis
Kennon M. Sheldon
University of Missouri–Columbia
J. Nicole Shelton
Princeton University
James A. Shepperd
University of Florida
David K. Sherman
University of California, Santa Barbara
Itamar Simonson
Stanford University
Dean Keith Simonton
University of California, Davis
Stacey Sinclair
University of Virginia
Royce A. Singleton, Jr.
College of the Holy Cross
Erica Slotter
Northwestern University
Paul Slovic
Decision Research
Contributors———xli
Rachel Smallman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Jonathan Smallwood
University of Aberdeen
Laura Smart Richman
Duke University
Cary Stacy Smith
Mississippi State University
Richard H. Smith
University of Kentucky
Steven M. Smith
Saint Mary’s University
Natalie D. Smoak
University of Connecticut
C. R. Snyder
University of Kansas, Lawrence
Erin Sparks
Florida State University
Russell Spears
Cardiff University & University of Amsterdam
Steve Spencer
University of Waterloo
Jennifer R. Spoor
Butler University
Susan Sprecher
Illinois State University
Christoph Stahl
University of Freiburg, Institute for Psychology
Maureen T. Steckler
Reed College

xlii———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Claude Steele
Stanford University
Michael F. Steger
University of Minnesota
Cookie White Stephan
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Walter G. Stephan
University of Hawaii
Robert J. Sternberg
Tufts University
Tyler F. Stillman
Florida State University
E. L. Stocks
University of Texas at Tyler
Emily A. Stone
University of Utah
Jeff Stone
University of Arizona
Tamara Stone
Central Michigan University
Fritz Strack
University of Würzburg
Wolfgang Stroebe
Utrecht University
Greg Strong
Stony Brook University, SUNY
Michael J. Strube
Washington University
Jerry Suls
University of Iowa
William B. Swann, Jr.
University of Texas at Austin
Kate Sweeny
University of Florida
Ursula Szillis
University of Mannheim
Carmit T. Tadmor
University of California, Berkeley
Michael J. Tagler
Nebraska Wesleyan University
June Price Tangney
George Mason University
John M. Tauer
University of St. Thomas
Shelley Taylor
University of California, Los Angeles
Howard Tennen
University of Connecticut School of Medicine
Meredith Terry
University of Florida
Abraham Tesser
University of Georgia
Philip E. Tetlock
University of California, Berkeley
Sander Thomaes
Free University
Elisabeth M. Thompson
University of California, Santa Cruz
Joel A. Thurston
University of California, Santa Barbara
Dianne M. Tice
Florida State University
Jennifer J. Tickle
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

Andrew R. Todd
Northwestern University
John Tooby
University of California, Santa Barbara
David Trafimow
New Mexico State University
Kelly Trindel
University of Texas at Arlington
Yaacov Trope
New York University & Stern Business School
Linda Tropp
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
John C. Turner
Australian National University
Marlene E. Turner
San Jose State University
Jean M. Twenge
San Diego State University
Tom R. Tyler
New York University
David Uzzell
University of Surrey
Robin R. Vallacher
Florida Atlantic University
Rick van Baaren
University of Amsterdam
Leaf Van Boven
University of Colorado at Boulder
Paul A. M. Van Lange
Free University
Kelvin L. Van Manen
University of Nebraska, Omaha
Kimberly A. Van Orden
Florida State University
Susan E. Varni
University of Vermont
Michael E. W. Varnum
University of Michigan
Aline Vater
Chemnitz University
Phillip W. Vaughan
University of Texas at Austin
Simine Vazire
University of Texas at Austin
Penny S. Visser
University of Chicago
Kathleen D. Vohs
University of Minnesota
William von Hippel
University of New South Wales
Roos Vonk
Radboud University
Amy M. Waldrip
University of Texas at Arlington
Devin L. Wallace
Tulane University
Harry M. Wallace
Trinity University
Katherine L. Waller
Queen’s University
Andrew Ward
Swarthmore College
Louise Wasylkiw
Mount Allison University
Contributors———xliii

xliv———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
Philip C. Watkins
Eastern Washington University
Ann Weatherall
Vitoria University of Wellington
Nathan C. Weed
Central Michigan University
Duane T. Wegener
Purdue University
Daniel M. Wegner
Harvard University
Bernard Weiner
University of California, Los Angeles
Max Weisbuch
Mercer University
Carolyn Weisz
University of Puget Sound
Sarah Wert
Yale University
Eric D. Wesselmann
Purdue University
Elanor F. Williams
Cornell University
Kipling D. Williams
Purdue University
Thomas A. Wills
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Piotr Winkielman
University of California, San Diego
David G. Winter
University of Michigan
James Wirth
Purdue University
Connie Wolfe
Muhlenberg College
Joanne V. Wood
University of Waterloo
Wendy Wood
Duke University
Carrie L. Wyland
University of North South Wales
Oscar Ybarra
University of Michigan
Tricia J. Yurak
Rowan University
Alyson K. Zalta
University of Pennsylvania
Leslie A. Zebrowitz
Brandeis University
Marcel Zeelenberg
Tilburg University
Dolf Zillmann
University of Alabama

Introduction
Social psychology is the study of how normal people
think, feel, and act. In that sense, social psychology is
at the core of all the fields that study the human experience.
As one colleague (not a social psychologist)
remarked to us once, social psychology is one, and
perhaps the only, field that can communicate with
every other department in the university.
It was not always thus. The field of social psychology
only began to take shape after World War II. Early
on it consisted of a handful of creative researchers
trying to figure out how to use laboratory techniques
to test theories about people. In those early days, the
ideas were simple to the point of simplistic, the methods
primitive, the journals and conferences sparse and
obscure.
Through the decades, social psychology has blossomed
into a major enterprise. The 2007 conference
of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology,
held in Memphis, Tennessee, attracted more than
2,000 researchers. Now the Society has more than
5,000 members worldwide. There are dozens of journals,
including the largest journal published by the
American Psychological Association. (In fact, it is so
large that at one point someone calculated that if it
were split in half, the result would be the two largest
journals published by the APA!)
All this remarkable progress has, however, made
it difficult for outsiders to benefit from what social
psychologists are learning. Thousands of researchers
working in laboratories scattered around the world
produce many individual facts and findings, which
then appear in the journals one at a time. How can one
wade through all of this material to find what one needs?
The Encyclopedia of Social Psychology is designed
to make it easy for outsiders to gain access to and
xlv
benefit from this rapidly growing and important field.
It provides brief, clear, readable introductory explanations
to the vast number of ideas and concepts that
make up the intellectual and scientific content of the
field. We think of it as a map and tour guide to the field.
What is entitativity? How about erotic plasticity?
What is the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and what do social
psychologists use it for)? What’s the Ringelmann effect?
Or the availability heuristic, or the facial-feedback
hypothesis? What is door-in-the-face technique useful
for? Or the lost letter technique? What’s the problem
with the illusion of transparency?
The encyclopedia does more than just answer these
questions. It gives some background to each concept
and explains what researchers are now doing with it.
It also explains where it stands in relation to other
concepts in the field.
Why are there so many terms? Social psychologists
have been accused of making up jargon just to flatter
themselves, to confuse others, or to disguise simple
ideas to look like scientific theories. Here and there,
such accusations may have some truth to them, but for
the most part they miss the point. Jargon is needed for
precision. Scientists need precise terms with clear definitions,
and using the language of everyday speech,
with its multiple meanings and connotations and emotional
baggage, falls short. Hence, social psychologists,
like those in most other fields, have had to develop
their own terminology.
Jargon makes it easier for scientists to communicate
with each other—but it makes it much harder for
outsiders to gain access and understand what is being
said. Hence, another important function of the encyclopedia
is to translate jargon into plain terms. The
biggest part of our job as editors of this encyclopedia

xlvi———Encyclopedia of Social Psychology
was to push the authors to describe their concepts in
plain, clear, everyday language rather than speaking
in the secret language of the discipline. We think they
have succeeded magnificently (for the most part!). For
some, it was not easy, because they are accustomed to
writing about their ideas and working in the specialized
terms that experts use to communicate with each
other. But we were relentless on this, and the result is
a wonderfully clear and readable set of entries.
Students are a particular target audience for the
encyclopedia. We told our authors to imagine the
reader as a young student, fresh out of high school,
taking a first psychology course. (We thought that if
things were explained at that level, the entries would
also be very useful even for experts in other fields,
who may know a great deal about their own field but
whose knowledge of social psychology might be
comparable to that of an undergraduate. After all, even
if you have a Ph.D. in English literature or cultural
studies, if you have not taken a course in psychology,
your knowledge of this field is not all that different
from that of an undergraduate!)
The encyclopedia began in conversations between
us and the Sage editors several years ago. The need for
such an encyclopedia had first been recognized in
comments by librarians and others who field questions
from students. Simple dictionaries do not cover
all the terms that social psychologists use, and even
when they do provide definitions, these definitions do
not necessarily correspond to the current usage in the
field. And, crucially, dictionary definitions are typically
very short, providing the bare minimum of information
rather than explaining a concept along with
its background, significance, and relation to other
concepts. What was needed was an easy way for ordinary
people (including students) to find out what
experts mean when they use a term like entitativity.
Developing the list of entries was a formidable
challenge. We wanted to cover everything, but how
can someone generate a list of several hundred concepts
and terms and be sure it is complete? As a first
step, the in-house research staff at Sage combed
through the textbooks and other reference sources to
create a first list. It was an impressive start, but when
the two of us (both currently active researchers in the
field) looked it over, we quickly noticed that it missed
quite a few, especially ones that had emerged in recent
years (and therefore might be extremely important
to what social psychologists are discussing today).
And so we had to do a massive overhaul. Our first
conversation—sitting outside at a sidewalk café at the
Dam square in Amsterdam, a place that is richly stimulating
for social psychologists because there is so
much activity to observe—lasted for hours and generated
many changes.
We soon realized, however, that the task was so big
and important that we were not willing even to trust ourselves,
though we have spent many years in the field,
have written a textbook and attended numerous conferences,
and so forth. Hence, we recruited a blue-ribbon
Advisory Board and gave them the mission of reviewing
the list to make changes. The Advisory Board consisted
of prominent, well-respected researchers spanning the
many subfields of social psychology and collectively
had a truly amazing span of expertise. These busy men
and women went far beyond the call of duty. They scrutinized
the list of terms, identified which ones could be
replaced and, more important, what needed to be added.
They also pondered the importance of each term in the
field and suggested how long each entry should be.
Several Advisory Board members later reported that
they had initially thought of the task as a bit of burden,
but found the process of coming up with topics and who
would be best to write about them to be quite enjoyable.
As editors, we then had further meetings to integrate all
their suggestions and add a few of our own.
The next step was to recruit people to write the
entries. Many reference works such as this are written
by anyone who is willing to contribute. But we wanted
the best. We asked the Advisory Board to name the
most prominent authority on each topic. And then we
invited that person. We didn’t just send a standard invitation—we
sent a letter explaining how important we
thought this project is and why it would be worthwhile
for an internationally acclaimed expert to take the time
and effort to produce this. To our very pleasant surprise,
more than 95% of these leading authorities consented
to write for us. For us, one of the high points
was seeing the astonished expression on our Sage editor’s
face when we next met: “You got all the A-list

people—how did you manage that?” Fortunately for
us, social psychology has recently recognized that its
explosive growth has resulted in a vital need for
sources like this that can help communicate our knowledge
to students and to people in other disciplines.
From there, it was all over but for the hard (but also
fun) part of editing the entries and finalizing the product.
We hope you will share our enthusiasm for this product.
We want to thank several people without whom
this project could not have been as enjoyable as it was,
or as high quality. Michael Carmichael at Sage was a
terrific help and champion of this project, and our
meetings with him gave us renewed excitement. Our
developmental editors, Paul Reis and Carole Maurer,
were indispensable aids; without them, this project
either would not have been completed or it would
have been completed with a great deal of consternation
on our parts. We needed help from them almost
daily during the more intense phases of the project,
and they were ready and willing to guide us in all
aspects of the work. Our thanks to the tireless copy
editors, Colleen Brennan and Robin Gold, who worked
hard to get the encyclopedia into top shape. Catherine
Rawn was a great help with cross-referencing so that
readers would be able to find related entries. We also
Introduction———xlvii
want to extend thanks to Rolf Janke, whose meetings
with us provided a broad overview of this encyclopedia
and its placement within the suite of Sage books.
Our Advisory Board members deserve much praise
for allowing us to put some structure to the generation
of topics and potential authors. They are Galen
Bodenhausen, Ap Dijksterhuis, Wendi Gardner, Michael
Hogg, Jay Hull, Doug Kenrick, Tony Manstead, Sandra
Murray, Abe Tesser, and Penny Visser. Last, our sincerest
and most heartfelt thanks go to Nicole Mead who
was an invaluable assistant at each step along the way.
Thank goodness we had Nicole’s help, we thought at
countless points during the process.
If you are still reading this, we must ask, why? Are
you our parents? If so, hi mom. If not, you really
should get a life. Or, better yet, move on to some of
the entries in this encyclopedia. (We especially recommend
the entry Sexual Economics Theory!) There
is plenty of fascinating stuff in these pages. We hope
you will use this not just to look things up: You can
learn quite a bit just by browsing through these pages.
We learned quite a bit just by editing this project!
Enjoy and learn!
Roy F. Baumeister and Kathleen D. Vohs

ACCESSIBILITY
Definition
Accessibility refers to the ease with which an idea or
concept can be retrieved from memory. Accessible constructs
are those that are quickly retrieved from memory.
Concepts that are accessible are important because
a concept must be activated to be useful in guiding
behavior or in influencing judgments. Concepts that an
individual has thought about recently or thinks about
frequently tend to be more easily retrieved than other
concepts. In social psychology, accessibility has often
been considered in relation to attitudes. That is, attitudes
that come to mind quickly are accessible attitudes.
Accessible attitudes are generally stronger, more
resistant to persuasion, and more predictive of behavior
than are less accessible attitudes.
Background
The study of attitudes has been an important part of the
research landscape in social psychology since the early
1900s. Historically, attitudes were thought to be an
important topic to study because early researchers
assumed that attitudes are strongly related to behavior.
However, the assumption that attitudes are reflected in
behavior was criticized in 1969 by Allan Wicker, who
observed that the bulk of research findings examining
the correlation of attitudes to related behaviors found
only a weak relationship. Later, as part of the ensuing
debate about whether and how strongly attitudes guide
behavior, Russell Fazio and colleagues found that
accessible attitudes (those that are quickly brought to
A
1
mind) are more strongly related to behavior than attitudes
that take longer to bring to mind.
The concept of accessibility has also been applied to
other judgments people make in their everyday lives.
Stereotypes of minority groups, for example, can vary
in their accessibility. Priming, or presenting stereotyperelated
information to make the stereotype more accessible
in the short term, has been shown to increase the
reliance on stereotypes in making judgments of members
of minority groups. Similarly, information that is
relevant to a person’s self-concept, or that is relevant to
the attainment of a goal, tends to be accessible. The
accessibility of self-relevant and goal-related information
makes that information more likely to be relied on
in making judgments.
A classic investigation of the accessibility of social
stereotypes was conducted by Tory Higgins and his
colleagues in 1977. They conducted an experiment in
which they made trait categories accessible by having
research participants remember them during an unrelated
perceptual task. Afterward, participants read an
ambiguous description of a stimulus person. The activated
trait categories influenced participants’ ratings
and descriptions of the stimulus person. This study
demonstrated that trait categories that are made accessible
through priming are important in the interpretation
of social information.
Mechanism
To understand how accessible concepts affect judgments,
it is important to understand how concepts like
attitudes and stereotypes are represented in memory.
Concepts are thought to reside in a semantic network
in memory. The mental representation of an object or

2———Accessibility
concept is stored as a node in this network. The network
is organized such that related concepts or nodes are
linked through associative pathways. These associations,
or links, vary in their strength: A strong association
is created if a concept is frequently activated with
another concept. Strong associations exist among members
of categories and the concept of the category.
Category members that are highly typical of the category
are more strongly associated with the category than
less typical members. For example, a robin will have a
stronger link to the category label “bird” than will an
ostrich. It is efficient to be able to quickly categorize
objects that one encounters in the world: It enables
quick decisions about whether or not to approach a
novel object. Social stimuli appear to be represented
similarly, and the categories people use to understand
other people are called stereotypes.
Attitudes are similarly represented in semantic networks.
An attitude object is represented as a node in
the network. The evaluation of this attitude object is
also represented in the network. The strength of the
association between the object and the evaluation of
it will determine the accessibility of the attitude. For
highly accessible attitudes, there is a strong association
between the attitude object and its evaluation. That is,
when the node for the attitude object is activated, the
strength of the association ensures that the node containing
the evaluation of the object is also activated. In
this way, judgments can be made rapidly and without
extensive reflection. In contrast, for attitudes that are
not accessible, the associations between the object and
the evaluation of that object are not as strong. In this
case, the activation of the object does not spontaneously
activate the evaluation of the object. Consequently, it
may take more time to activate the judgment.
Having accessible attitudes toward objects in our
world is efficient. Accessible attitudes allow us to
decide quickly what to approach or avoid without having
to consider each object’s attributes and whether
we consider each attribute desirable or undesirable.
Therefore, accessible attitudes serve a knowledge function,
or as a frame of reference for how we interpret
and understand our world, and often determine what
we attend to, how we perceive objects and situations,
and how we act.
Implications
Our use of categories to organize our understanding of
social stimuli relies strongly on the accessibility of the
categories we have in memory. Recent research in the
use of stereotypes has shown that accessible constructs
are used extensively in categorizing novel social stimuli.
That is, we rely on the stereotypes that are accessible
to us in deciding how to categorize, think about, and
react to new people we meet. Importantly, the use of
stereotypes to categorize individuals can be overcome:
Work on dual process models of social cognition has
demonstrated that the stereotypic judgment, which
relies on accessible categories, is a heuristic judgment
that occurs spontaneously. With sufficient motivation
and time to think about it, this immediate judgment can
be modified by a more effortful process or by encouraging
individuals to bring to mind a counterstereotypic
example.
An important implication of accessible attitudes is
that they serve to maintain behavior based on those
judgments. Accessible attitudes tend to be stronger
than less accessible attitudes: People who hold accessible
attitudes are likely to have thought carefully
about the reasons supporting those attitudes. Accessible
attitudes are also more resistant to persuasion than less
accessible attitudes, probably because of this greater
awareness of the reasons for holding the attitude. Furthermore,
people with accessible attitudes have also
probably thought somewhat about the types of arguments
that might be used to persuade them to change
their attitude and thus are prepared to counterargue
efforts to change their minds. Finally, accessible attitudes
are more predictive of behavior than less accessible
attitudes. Because these attitudes are thought
about frequently, they easily come to mind in the presence
of the attitude object and thus are more likely to
guide behavior.
Accessible attitudes provide unique challenges to
people concerned with persuasion, such as health professionals
seeking to change unhealthy behavior. For
example, cigarette smokers have been found to have
highly accessible prosmoking attitudes, and these attitudes
serve to maintain their smoking behavior: The
more people smoke, the more frequently they think
about their reasons for smoking, and the more strongly
entrenched their attitudes and their smoking behavior
become. Because accessible attitudes can bias the
interpretation of persuasive information, these smokers
may become more resistant to the idea of quitting
smoking. To change such attitudes, it may be useful to
find components of the attitude that are less accessible
and less central to the arguments to continue smoking.
For example, change may be possible by persuading
smokers to support laws to limit the access of minors
to cigarettes.

In contrast, there may be times when an accessible
attitude is desirable, such as an antismoking attitude
or an attitude that is favorable toward healthy eating.
Attitudes can be made more accessible by repeated
expression. That is, someone who reports his or her
attitude more times will have a more accessible attitude.
Therefore, strengthening positive attitudes toward
healthy behaviors may occur in settings in which
people are given repeated opportunities to judge the
attitude object or behavior. Interventions that engage
at-risk groups in discussions of healthy behaviors and
allow them to express positive attitudes toward those
behaviors may be effective in fostering the desirable
behaviors.
Nancy Rhodes
See also Associative Networks; Attitudes; Person Perception;
Priming; Social Cognition; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Blair, I. V., Ma, J., & Lenton, A. (2001). Imagining
stereotypes away: The moderation of implicit stereotypes
through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 81, 828–841.
Fazio, R. H. (1995). Attitudes as object-evaluation
associations: Determinants, consequences, and correlates
of attitude accessibility. In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick
(Eds.), Attitude strength: Antecedents and consequences
(pp. 247–292). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2005). Accessibility
effects on implicit social cognition: The role of
knowledge activation and retrieval experiences. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 672–685.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge activation: Accessibility,
applicability and salience. In E. T. Higgins &
A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of
basic principles (pp. 133–168). New York: Guilford Press.
ACCOUNTABILITY
Definition
Accountability is the condition of having to answer,
explain, or justify one’s actions or beliefs to another.
It often includes the possibility that you will be held
responsible and punished if your acts cannot be justified,
or rewarded if your actions are justified. Accountability
is a composite of numerous factors: being held
Accountability———3
responsible for one’s actions, presence of another, being
identifiable as an actor, evaluation by an audience, and
providing validation for one’s behavior.
History and Modern Usage
The most salient component of accountability, the idea
that we are responsible for our actions, is central to a
long-standing debate among philosophers and psychologists:
that of determinism versus free will. Determinism
suggests that people act based on cause-and-effect relationships
and therefore could not have acted any differently
than what they actually did, whereas theories of
free will suggest that people act of their own volition.
Proponents of free will admit that genetics and environment
influence decisions; nevertheless, decisions
ultimately depend on individual choice. The distinction
between the two perspectives lies in the degree of
accountability to which people are held. Determinism
does not give people the power of choice and therefore
denies accountability. Supporters of free will, however,
hold people accountable for their behavior in that
people ultimately have some choice in what they do.
Many current psychological perspectives follow a
deterministic line of thinking. Behavioral psychology
explains all of human behavior as a response to expected
consequences of environmental stimuli. Neuroscience
examines human behavior from the perspective of brain
activity and neurotransmitters. Cognitive psychologists
liken the mind to a complex processor of information
that receives input, processes that input in a systematic
manner, and spits out behavior. Even social psychology
focuses mainly on deterministic perspectives,
rooting the cause of behavior in situational determinants.
This focus on deterministic perspectives may
be due to the cause and effect nature of science itself,
making the study of free will almost impossible from
a scientific standpoint. Nevertheless, this places the
role of accountability at nil for most explanations of
behavioral responses.
Despite the difficulties of studying accountability
in its purest sense, recent social psychological research
has focused on the effects of choice, control, responsibility,
and accountability for one’s actions. Evidence
has shown that people feel responsible for their behavior,
and that people often feel and act as if they may
be held accountable for the things that they do. People
like to have choices and react aversively when those
choices are restricted. Also, accountability seems to
be a necessary component to many emotions. It is hard
to imagine a situation in which a person would feel

4———Accountability
pride, guilt, shame, or embarrassment for acts that he
or she does not feel accountable for. Indeed, perceived
accountability seems to have a large effect on the way
people act.
Effects of Accountability
The mere presence of others is likely responsible for
many of the effects of accountability. Human beings
are the only animals that participate in complex societies
and cultures. Much of our success as individuals
hinges on our ability to play by society’s rules. Thus,
people display a strong need to belong and want to be
evaluated positively by others in the group. Those
who do so are more likely to reap the positive benefits
inherent in group living. When others are in our presence,
we have a sense that our behavior is being evaluated.
This increases our sense of accountability and
results in increased adherence to unspoken social rules
and laws outlined by culture.
Nevertheless, accountability is a multifaceted phenomenon.
Therefore, its effect on behavior can vary from
situation to situation. First of all, the presence of others
is not entirely necessary for people to feel accountable.
People can feel accountable if they simply believe
they will be evaluated and have to justify their decisions.
Increased accountability will alter decision-making
strategies. When expecting evaluation from an audience,
people will think more carefully about their
decisions than they normally would. They will consider
the outcomes of their judgments and process the
relevant information more deliberatively. Under lowaccountability
situations, people can process the relevant
information superficially, knowing that any
decision made will not be scrutinized. Nevertheless,
when under increased accountability, a greater consideration
of possible counterarguments is necessary as
the person must be able to fend off criticism during
the evaluation process.
Critical to the decision-making process is whether
the opinions of the audience are known or not. If the
opinions of the evaluator are known, people will tend
to conform to that opinion, as any argument against
the majority opinion will be more difficult to defend.
Conversely, when the opinions of the evaluator are
unknown, people will think more analytically and selfcritically
about their decision and attempt to look at the
issue from multiple perspectives. This is in people’s
best interest, as they may be asked to justify their decision
if it is against what the audience believes.
The effects of accountability will also vary depending
on when the person is informed that he or she will
be evaluated. If informed about evaluation before making
a decision, people will expend more effort to make
what they feel to be the correct decision. If informed
after their decision has been made, however, people
will stick with their original decision and more effort
will be expended toward justification of that decision.
The presence of others does not always increase
accountability. As group size increases, accountability
can decrease. Through a process called deindividuation,
people lose their sense of self and become an
inseparable part of a collective group. As group size
increases, each individual member becomes less identifiable
and consequently perceives him- or herself
as less accountable for the actions of the group. The
reduction in felt responsibility is said to account for
the behaviors of people during riots, though this is
undoubtedly an extreme example. Deindividuation can
also have an effect on group performance at a much
smaller level.
Social loafing occurs when the individual members
of a group perform at a lower level than they would if
they were to perform the task alone. The performance
of a group is often measured as the final output of
the group rather than individual output. In this lowaccountability
situation, individuals decrease their own
effort in the hopes that others in the group will pick up
the slack. Nevertheless, this is only true when individual
performance is not measured. If members of a
group are told that their individual performance will
be assessed, they are more likely to perform as they
would if executing the task alone. Under these conditions,
people are under an increased degree of accountability,
and individual and group performance will
increase. Therefore, two heads can be better than one,
but only when the individuals are held accountable.
Seth Gitter
E. J. Masicampo
See also Deindividuation; Free Will, Study of; Need to
Belong; Social Loafing
Further Readings
Lerner, J. S., & Tetlock, P. E. (1999). Accounting for the
effects of accountability. Psychological Bulletin, 125,
255–275.

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION
Definition
The term achievement motivation may be defined by
independently considering the words achievement and
motivation. Achievement refers to competence (a condition
or quality of effectiveness, ability, sufficiency, or
success). Motivation refers to the energization (instigation)
and direction (aim) of behavior. Thus, achievement
motivation may be defined as the energization
and direction of competence-relevant behavior or why
and how people strive toward competence (success)
and away from incompetence (failure).
Research on achievement motivation has a long and
distinguished history. In fact, researchers have focused
on achievement motivation concepts since the emergence
of psychology as a scientific discipline (i.e., the
late 1800s), when William James offered speculation
regarding how competence strivings are linked to selfevaluation.
Achievement motivation is currently a
highly active area of research, particularly in the fields
of educational psychology, sport and exercise psychology,
industrial/organizational psychology, developmental
psychology, and social-personality psychology.
Achievement motivation research is conducted both in
the experimental laboratory (where variables are typically
manipulated) and in real-world achievement situations
such as the classroom, the workplace, and the
ball field (where variables are typically measured).
The task of achievement motivation researchers is to
explain and predict any and all behavior that involves
the concept of competence. Importantly, their task is not
to explain and predict any and all behavior that takes
place in achievement situations. Much behavior that
takes place in achievement situations has little or nothing
to do with competence; limiting the achievement
motivation literature to behavior involving competence
is necessary for the literature to have coherence and
structure. That being said, competence concerns and
strivings are ubiquitous in daily life and are present in
many situations not typically considered achievement
situations. Examples include the following: a recreational
gardener striving to grow the perfect orchid,
a teenager seeking to become a better conversationalist,
a politician working to become the most powerful leader
in her state, and an elderly person concerned about
losing his or her skills and abilities. Thus, the study of
achievement motivation is quite a broad endeavor.
Achievement Motivation———5
Many different achievement motivation variables
have been studied over the years. Prominent among
these variables are the following: achievement aspirations
(the performance level one desires to reach
or avoid not reaching; see research by Kurt Lewin,
Ferdinand Hoppe), achievement needs/motives (general,
emotion-based dispositions toward success and failure;
see research by David McClelland, John Atkinson), test
anxiety (worry and nervousness about the possibility of
poor performance; see research by Charles Spielberger,
Martin Covington), achievement attributions (beliefs
about the cause of success and failure; see research by
Bernard Weiner, Heinz Heckhausen), achievement
goals (representations of success or failure outcomes
that people strive to attain or avoid; see research by
Carol Dweck, John Nicholls), implicit theories of ability
(beliefs about the nature of competence and ability;
see research by Carol Dweck, Robert Sternberg),
perceived competence (beliefs about what one can and
cannot accomplish; see research by Albert Bandura;
Susan Harter), and competence valuation (importance
judgments regarding the attainment of success or
the avoidance of failure; see research by Jacqueline
Eccles, Judy Harackiewicz). Achievement motivation
researchers seek to determine both the antecedents
and consequences of these different variables.
Many achievement motivation researchers focus on
one of the aforementioned variables in their work, but
others strive to integrate two or more of these constructs
into an overarching conceptual framework. One
such model that has received significant research attention
of late is the hierarchical model of approach–
avoidance achievement motivation (see research by
Andrew Elliot and colleagues); this model is described
in the following paragraphs.
Achievement goals are the centerpiece of the model,
and these goals are differentiated according to two
basic aspects of competence: how it is defined and how
it is valenced. Competence is defined by the standard
used to evaluate it, and three such standards are identified:
an absolute (i.e., task-inherent) standard, an intrapersonal
(i.e., the individual’s past attainment or maximum
possible attainment) standard, and an interpersonal (i.e.,
normative) standard. At present, absolute and intrapersonal
standards are collapsed together within a “mastery
goal” category, and normative standards are placed
within a “performance goal” category. Competence is
valenced by whether it is focused on a positive possibility
that one would like to approach (success) or a negative
possibility that one would like to avoid (failure).

6———Achievement Motivation
Putting the definition and valence aspects of competence
together yields four basic achievement goals that
are presumed to comprehensively cover the range of
competence-based strivings. Mastery-approach goals
represent striving to approach absolute or intrapersonal
competence, for example, striving to improve one’s
performance. Mastery-avoidance goals represent striving
to avoid absolute or intrapersonal incompetence, for
example, striving not to do worse than one has done
previously. Performance-approach goals represent striving
to approach interpersonal competence, for example,
striving to do better than others. Performance-avoidance
goals represent striving to avoid interpersonal incompetence,
for example, striving to avoid doing worse than
others.
These achievement goals are posited to have an
important and direct impact on the way people engage
in achievement activities and, accordingly, the outcomes
they incur. Broadly stated, mastery-approach
and performance-approach goals are predicted to lead
to adaptive behavior and different types of positive
outcomes (e.g., mastery-approach goals are thought to
optimally facilitate creativity and continuing interest,
and performance-approach goals are thought to optimally
facilitate performance attainment). Masteryavoidance
and, especially, performance-avoidance
goals, on the other hand, are predicted to lead to
maladaptive behavior and negative outcomes such as
selecting easy instead of optimally challenging tasks,
quitting when difficulty or failure is encountered, and
performing poorly. A substantial amount of research
over the past decade has supported these predictions.
Achievement goals are viewed as concrete, situation-specific
variables that explain the specific aim or
direction of people’s competence pursuits. Other variables
are needed to explain why people orient toward
different definitions and valences of competence in
the first place, and why they adopt particular types of
achievement goals. Higher-order variables such as
achievement needs/motives, implicit theories of ability,
general competence perceptions, and features of
the achievement environment (e.g., norm-based vs.
task-based performance evaluation, harsh vs. lenient
performance evaluation) are used to explain achievement
goal adoption. These variables are not posited to
have a direct influence on achievement outcomes, but
they are expected to have an indirect influence by
prompting achievement goals that, in turn, exert a direct
influence on achievement outcomes.
Achievement needs/motives may be used as an
illustrative example. Two types of achievement
needs/motives have been identified: the need for
achievement, which is the dispositional tendency to
experience pride upon success, and fear of failure,
which is the dispositional tendency to experience
shame upon failure. The need for achievement is predicted
to lead to mastery-approach and performanceapproach
goals, whereas fear of failure is predicted to
lead to mastery-avoidance and performance-avoidance
goals. Fear of failure is also predicted to lead to
performance-approach goals, a need/motive to goal
combination that represents an active striving toward
success to avoid failure (i.e., active avoidance). The
need for achievement and fear of failure are posited to
have an indirect influence on achievement outcomes
through their impact on achievement goal adoption.
A number of empirical studies have provided evidence
in support of these predictions, as well as many other
hierarchically based predictions (involving other higherorder
variables) derived from the model.
Models of achievement motivation are of theoretical
importance because they help to explain and predict
competence-relevant behavior in a systematic and
generative fashion. Such models are also of practical
importance because they highlight how factors besides
intelligence and ability have a substantial impact on
achievement outcomes. Competence is widely considered
a basic need that all individuals require on a regular
basis for psychological and physical well-being to
accrue. The bad news from the achievement motivation
literature is that many people exhibit motivation
in achievement situations that leads to maladaptive
behavior, undesirable achievement outcomes, and, ultimately,
ill-being. The good news from the achievement
motivation literature is that motivation is amenable to
change.
See also Regulatory Focus Theory; Self-Efficacy;
Self-Regulation; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Andrew J. Elliot
Covington, M. V. (1992). Making the grade: A self-worth
perspective on motivation and school reform. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Elliot, A. J., & Dweck, C. S. (Eds.). (2005). Handbook of
competence and motivation. New York: Guilford Press.
Heckhausen, H., Schmalt, H.-D., & Schneider, K. (1985).
Achievement motivation in perspective (M. Woodruff &
R. Wicklund, Trans.). New York: Academic Press.

McClelland, D. C., Atkinson, J. W., Clark, R. A., & Lowell,
E. L. (1953). The achievement motive. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Nicholls, J. G. (1989). The competitive ethos and democratic
education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ACTION IDENTIFICATION THEORY
Definition
People usually know what they are doing, intend to do,
or have done in the past. How people achieve an unambiguous
understanding of their behavior is rather
remarkable when one considers the variety of ways in
which any action can be identified. “Taking a test,” for
example, could be identified as “showing one’s knowledge,”
“earning a grade,” or “answering questions.”
Action identification theory, developed by Robin
Vallacher and Daniel Wegner, specifies the principles by
which people adopt a single act identity for their behavior
and outlines the conditions under which people
maintain this act identity or adopt a new one. The interplay
of these principles has implications for central
issues in social psychology, including self-regulation,
vulnerability to social influence, and self-concept.
Action Identification and Behavior
The potential identities for an action, although diverse
by many criteria, are hierarchically related in an identity
structure. Lower-level identities in this structure
convey the details of the action and thus indicate how
the action is done. Higher-level identities convey a
more general understanding of the action, indicating
why the action is done or what its effects and implications
are. Identification level is relative, so whether a
particular identity is considered a means or an end, a
detail or an implication, depends on the identity with
which it is compared. The hierarchical level of two
identities is indicated when a person performs one act
identity by performing another. “Showing one’s knowledge”
is a higher-level identity than “taking a test,” for
example, because one does the former by doing the latter
rather than vice versa. “Taking a test,” however, is a
high-level identity with respect to “answering questions,”
since one takes a test by answering questions.
Action identification is important for the personal
control of behavior. Principle 1 of the theory holds that
action is undertaken with respect to the act identity that
Action Identification Theory———7
stands out in consciousness. This means that people
have an idea of what they are doing or want to do and
use this act identity as a frame of reference for implementing
the action and monitoring its occurrence.
Because act identities exist at different levels in an
identity structure, this principle specifies that people
can perform an action at different levels. A person may
intend to “give a speech,” for instance, and monitor his
or her behavior to see whether this intention has been
fulfilled, or the person may intend to “talk in a deliberate
tone” (a lower-level identity) or “persuade others”
(a higher-level identity) and monitor the attainment of
whichever identity is foremost in his or her mind.
Change in Action Identification
Action identification is a dynamic process, undergoing
periods of stability and change in accordance with two
principles. Principle 2 holds that when both a lowerand
a higher-level act identity are available, there is a
tendency for the higher-level identity to become dominant.
This means that people prefer to think about
their behavior in terms of its goals, effects, and implications,
rather than in terms of its more mechanistic
components. Thus, when a person has only a low-level
understanding of his or her behavior, he or she is predisposed
to adopt a higher-level identity offered by
other people or made available by the action context. If
the person is induced to think about the details of his
or her behavior in a recent interaction, for example, he
or she is sensitive to how this behavior is identified
by other people, because such feedback may provide
a more comprehensive (higher-level) understanding of
the behavior. As a result, the person might come to
believe his or her behavior reflects whatever interpersonal
tendency (e.g., cooperation or competition) is
conveyed in the feedback. If the feedback is evaluative
(i.e., flattering vs. critical), it can affect the person’s
self-evaluation. The tendency to embrace new highlevel
identities in favor of current lower-level identities
is referred to as the emergence process.
Because people act on the basis of their dominant
act identity, the emergence process can promote new
courses of action. If a person embraces feedback suggesting
that his or her behavior reflects competitiveness,
for example, he or she may seek out competitive
(as opposed to cooperative) activities in the future.
Research has established the relevance of the emergence
process for behavior change, including the development
of new goals (e.g., college activities) and change
in habitual behavior (e.g., alcohol consumption).

8———Action Identification Theory
The emergence process can charge even the simplest
act with significance. If it were the only means by
which action identification changed, people’s minds
would be populated by increasingly broad, abstract, and
evaluative notions of what they do and what they are
like. This possibility is constrained, however, by
Principle 3: When an action cannot be maintained in its
dominant identity, there is a tendency for a lower-level
identity to become dominant. A person may set out to
“persuade others,” for instance, but unless the action is
easily accomplished, he or she may have to think about
the action in lower-level terms such as “show command
of the facts,” “demonstrate sincerity,” or “choose the
right words.” Even if an action is easy, its details may
stand out in consciousness if it is somehow disrupted.
A poor quality sound system, for example, might disrupt
a person’s normally persuasive appeal, causing
him or her to think about his or her speech clarity or
word choice at the expense of the higher-level “persuade”
identity. An action’s lower-level identities also
tend to become conscious when performance is imminent
rather than in the distant future or distant past,
especially if the action is difficult or complex.
Optimality in Action Identification
The principles of the theory work together to promote
a level of identification that is most appropriate or optimal
for performing the action. There is a press for
higher-level action understanding and control, but the
emergent identity gives way to lower-level identities if
it proves to be an ineffective guide to action execution.
But when action control is regained at a lower level,
the emergence process is engaged again, making the
person sensitive to higher-level identities (including
those that differ from the original high-level identities).
Over time and with repeated action, the person converges
on an identity at a level that enables that individual
to perform the action up to his or her capacity.
The more difficult or disruption-prone the action, the
lower the optimal level of identification. Conversely,
action mastery is signaled by optimality at high levels
of identification, such that action details are integrated
into larger action units, which then become the basis
for conscious control of the action.
Despite the tendency toward optimality, people sometimes
identify what they do at a level that does not reflect
the action’s difficulty. The potential for non-optimal
identification is manifest in two ways. First, the action
context can make higher-level identities dominant even
when the action’s difficulty or unfamiliarity warrants
lower-level identification. The promise of external
reward, the threat of punishment, evaluation by other
people, and competition, for example, all call attention to
the outcomes, consequences, and other higher-level
meanings of action and thus can impair performance on
difficult tasks that require attention to lower-level details.
Second, an easy action can be impaired if conscious
attention is drawn to its lower-level aspects by some
means (e.g., disruption, verbal instruction). Low-level
identities are not only unnecessary for easy-to-maintain
action, they can also disassemble an action normally
integrated with respect to a higher-level understanding.
In both cases, non-optimal identification not only
impairs performance, but also has been shown to promote
anxiety and self-consciousness.
Individual Differences
Vallacher and Wegner developed a scale, the behavioral
identification form, to assess people’s characteristic
level of identification. Research employing this
scale has found theoretically meaningful differences
between individuals who tend to identify what they do
in relatively high-level terms (high-level agents) and
those who routinely identify their action in lower-level
terms (low-level agents). Specifically, low-level agents
demonstrate less expertise across different action
domains, have a weaker sense of personal control, are
more impulsive, are more vulnerable to social influence,
are less certain of what they are like with respect to
personality traits, and have a less stable self-concept.
Action Identification as a
Dynamical System
In emphasizing the link between mental representations
and behavior, action identification theory has clear relevance
to models of self-regulation. But the theory also
depicts processes that are similar to the operation of
self-organizing dynamical systems in many areas of
science. Thus, an action can be viewed as a set of interdependent
elements (lower-level identities) that influence
each other to achieve a coherent macro-level state
(a higher-level identity). The interplay between Principles
2 and 3, meanwhile, captures the repeated episodes
of emergence and disassembly that underlie the evolution
of complex systems. This dynamic scenario has
been invoked by social psychologists in recent years to
establish similarity among very different topics, from

the formation of self-concept to the development of
social norms and values in society.
Robin R. Vallacher
See also Dynamical Systems Theory; Goals; Self-Regulation;
Temporal Construal Theory
Further Readings
Vallacher, R. R., & Kaufman, J. (1996). Dynamics of action
identification: Volatility and structure in the mental
representation of behavior. In P. M. Gollwitzer &
J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The psychology of action
(pp. 260–282). New York: Guilford Press.
Vallacher, R. R., & Nowak, A. (2007). Dynamical social
psychology: Finding order in the flow of human
experience. In A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.),
Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles
(2nd ed., pp. 734–758). New York: Guilford Press.
Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people
think they’re doing? Action identification and human
behavior. Psychological Review, 94, 3–15.
Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1989). Levels of personal
agency: Individual variation in action identification.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 660–671.
ACTOR–OBSERVER ASYMMETRIES
Definition
Social psychologists speak of an observer perspective
when someone perceives, thinks about, or makes a
judgment about another person, and they speak of the
actor perspective when someone thinks or makes a
judgment about himself or herself. So if Jared storms
out the door and Evelyn wonders why he does that,
Evelyn is in the observer perspective and Jared is in
the actor perspective. When the actor and the observer
arrive at different judgments, we are faced with an
actor–observer asymmetry.
Importance
Why are actor–observer asymmetries interesting? Actor
and observer are the two fundamental perspectives in
social cognition: People make judgments either about
self or about others; there is no third. So to understand
the nature of social cognition, scientists must understand
Actor–Observer Asymmetries———9
the nature of these two perspectives, especially the conditions
under which they differ. That is because some of
the biggest challenges of social life involve the discrepancy
between actor and observer perspectives. For
example, people typically know why they act the way
they do, but often they are confused about why others
act the way they do. Similarly, to get along with others
it isn’t enough to understand our own goals and attitudes;
we need to understand other people’s goals and
attitudes as well—especially when they might be different
from our own. Actor–observer asymmetries cause
gaps in people’s understanding of the social world, and
scientific research on actor–observer asymmetries tries
to identify these gaps and perhaps sharpen people’s
tools to bridge the gaps—tools such as explanation, perspective
taking, and negotiation.
The Classic Hypothesis
The primary actor–observer asymmetry social psychologists
have studied is an asymmetry in causal
attribution—in how actors and observer explain social
behavior or social outcomes. Suppose a student received
a D on the statistics exam; why did he or she receive
this grade? As observers, we might think the student
didn’t study or just isn’t good at statistics. But if the student
is asked to explain the D, the student might say
that the exam was very hard or that the teacher must
have graded it harshly. This difference in explanations
is typically described as one between observers citing
person causes—causes that reside in the actor (the student
didn’t study or lacks ability)—and the actor citing
situation causes—causes that lie outside the actor (the
exam was hard or the teacher graded harshly). This is
in fact what social psychologists Edward E. Jones and
Richard Nisbett formulated in 1972 as the now classic
actor–observer hypothesis: Actors tend to explain their
own behavior with situation causes, whereas observers
tend to explain the actor’s behavior with person causes.
Virtually all textbooks in social psychology and general
psychology mention this hypothesis and describe it as a
well-established truth. But a hypothesis is only as good
as the research evidence that supports it, so what does
the research say?
Empirical Tests
Recently, Bertram Malle reviewed more than 100
research articles that had tested the classic actor–
observer hypothesis. When the results of all these

10———Actor–Observer Asymmetries
articles were averaged, there was very little evidence
that the hypothesis is true. How little evidence?
Researchers can measure the strength of a hypothesis
by determining how much better it allows them to predict
an event than a blind guess would. If researchers
try to predict whether an actor will cite a person cause
or a situation cause, they could either guess (e.g., flip
a coin), and will by chance be correct in 50% of cases,
or they could use the actor–observer hypothesis. If
they rely on this hypothesis, they will be correct in
53% of the cases. Thus, the classic actor–observer
hypothesis is barely better than a blind guess.
There are situations, however, when the classic
actor–observer hypothesis does better. If researchers
want to predict how actors and observers explain negative
events and if they follow the hypothesis that the
actor will provide a situation cause, they will be right
in about 57% of the cases. Unfortunately, the opposite
happens when they want to predict how actors and
observers explain positive events. If they bet again on
the actor giving more situation causes, they will be
wrong in 56% of the cases. This means that the opposite
hypothesis is actually true: For positive events,
actors give more person causes and observers give
more situation causes. If the classic actor–observer
hypothesis holds reasonably true for negative events
but the opposite hypothesis holds true for positive
events, it means that on average (across events), there
may just be no actor–observer asymmetry.
But this finding contradicts intuitions. Actors do
know more about their own goals and feelings and
about their own history (e.g., past exam grades, past
actions). Shouldn’t that lead to an asymmetry between
actors and observers in how they explain behaviors and
outcomes (even positive ones)? The answer is yes—
but the relevant differences cannot be seen if the explanations
are interpreted as simple decisions between
“person causes” and “situation causes.”
New Hypotheses
People’s explanations of behaviors and outcomes are
more complex than the person–situation dichotomy suggests.
First, people make a sharp distinction between
unintentional and intentional events. Unintentional
events (e.g., tripping, being sad) are explained by
causes, and—if needed—these causes can be classified
as located in the person or in the situation. But when it
comes to intentional actions, people have a more
sophisticated approach. They recognize that one can
explain a person’s action by mentioning the reasons the
person had for acting—in light of the goal and beliefs
held by the person pursuing the action (e.g., “I studied
all week because...I knew the test counted for 60% of
my grade, and I really want to do well in this class”).
Such reason explanations are the most common explanations
people give for intentional actions. In addition,
people sometimes explain intentional actions by referring
to background factors, such as the person’s personality,
culture, childhood experiences, unconscious
forces—all things that can influence intentional actions
but are not the reasons for which the agent chose them
(e.g., “She studied all week, never went out because...
she is from a hardworking family, she’s very dedicated”).
These explanations are called causal history of reason
explanations. When Ann says, “I voted for him because
I wanted to see a more open-minded social policy,” she
is giving a reason explanation; when Blake says, “Ann
voted for him because she grew up in a liberal family,”
Blake is giving a causal history of reason explanation.
Blake’s explanation implies that Ann had some reason,
but he may not know the specific reason and therefore
offers a background factor that he does know about.
Research shows that actors give far more reason
explanations (relative to causal history of reason
explanations) than observers do. Knowing about this
asymmetry allows us to be right in 67% of cases (and
wrong in 33% of cases) when predicting actors’ and
observers’ explanations. So this is a powerful asymmetry,
and it holds whether the explained action is
negative or positive.
There are other features of explanation that show
actor–observer asymmetries. Among the reasons
people give to explain actions are some that refer to
the agent’s thoughts or beliefs that went into the
action (called belief reasons) and some that refer to
the agent’s goals or desires (called desire reasons).
Desire reasons focus on what the agent wants (and
doesn’t have), whereas belief reasons highlight the
agent’s thinking and rational consideration of the
world. Research has found a strong actor–observer
asymmetry here: Actors offer more belief reasons (relative
to desire reasons) than observers do, and knowing
about this asymmetry allows researchers to be
right in 62% of the cases when predicting actors’ and
observers’ explanations.
There are a few other interesting asymmetries,
described in more detail in the literature, but this much
is clear: The intuition that actors and observers give
different explanations is true after all. But to capture

these differences, it isn’t enough to talk about person
and situation causes; researchers must consider how
people actually explain behavior: with causal histories
of reasons, reasons, belief reasons, and so on.
Researchers also have begun to explore why these
asymmetries exist and have identified two main
processes. One is cognitive: how much the explainer
knows about the behavior or outcome. Giving reason
explanations, especially belief reasons, requires specific
knowledge that observers sometimes lack, and
that is in part why actors offer more (belief) reasons.
The second process is motivational: whether the
explainer is specifically trying to portray the agent
(self or other) in a positive light. Here, reasons and
especially belief reasons make the agent look more
rational and “in control,” so actors prefer to offer those
kinds of explanations.
Research on the original actor–observer asymmetry
in attributions had a strong impact on the study of
other asymmetries, and social psychologists discovered
a number of them. For example, in social interactions,
actors focus their attention more on their own
experiences, whereas observers focus more on the
other person’s actions. Also, most people consider their
own personality to be more complex and less fixed
than other people’s personalities.
What social psychologists have learned from this
research is that people face a fundamental challenge
in social life: Perceiving, understanding, and reasoning
about people are different when they are about
oneself than when they are about another person. This
challenge must be met, and the gaps between actors
and observers overcome, if social interactions are to
be successful.
Bertram F. Malle
See also Attributions; Attribution Theory; Self-Serving Bias;
Social Cognition
Further Readings
Alicke, M. D., Dunning, D. & Krueger, J. I. (Eds.). (2005).
The self in social perception. New York: Psychology Press.
Jones, E. E., & Nisbett, R. E. (1972). The actor and the
observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior.
In E. E. Jones, D. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett,
S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the
causes of behavior (pp. 79–94). Morristown, NJ: General
Learning Press.
Malle, B. F. (2006). The actor–observer asymmetry in causal
attribution: A (surprising) meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 132, 895–919. Retrieved from http://
darkwing.uoregon.edu/~bfmalle/
ADAPTIVE UNCONSCIOUS
Adaptive Unconscious———11
Definition
Automatic processes are processes that are unconscious,
unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient (i.e.,
they do not require cognitive resources). The term
adaptive unconscious refers to the fact that these automatic
processes evolved because they are beneficial
to people who rely on them. People have to process
extensive amounts of information on a daily basis to be
able to function effectively and navigate their social
worlds. Because people have limited amounts of cognitive
resources, there would be no way to process all
of this information at a conscious level. In other words,
people can only consciously think about a very small
amount of the information with which they are
confronted. Therefore, people have developed a set of
automatic processes that can help them to accomplish
all of their daily tasks. Due to the usefulness and helpfulness
of these unconscious processes, they are collectively
referred to as the adaptive unconscious.
History and Modern Usage
The existence and characteristics of the unconscious
have been important areas of study in philosophy and
psychology. Although many people discussed unconscious
processes prior to the work of Sigmund Freud,
most psychologists would acknowledge that he was
one of the first people to recognize that many mental
processes occur without conscious awareness. Because
some of Freud’s ideas have not been supported, the
unconscious processes that he discussed are somewhat
different from the unconscious processes that form the
adaptive unconscious.
It is difficult to list all of the unconscious processes
that are a part of the adaptive unconscious because
there are so many of them. Some processes are unconscious
because they evolved before consciousness did.
For example, some parts of the human mind simply
cannot be understood consciously. People have no
conscious access to perceptual processes (e.g., light

12———Affect
waves transforming into images, sound waves transforming
into sound), how memories are formed, how
humans balance while walking, or how people learn
and process language. Yet all of these processes occur,
and it is the adaptive unconscious that allows them to
happen. Beyond these sensory processes, there also
are higher-order processes that are part of the adaptive
unconscious. People often express emotions and personality,
make judgments and decisions, form impressions
and evaluations, learn information, and even
pursue goals without conscious awareness or attention.
Thus, the cognitive processes that form the adaptive
unconscious are both useful and sophisticated.
It is important to note that although these unconscious
processes are called adaptive, that does not
mean that they always result in accurate knowledge or
correct decisions. For example, relying on unconscious
processes to form impressions could result in using
stereotypes to understand another person’s behavior.
More often than not, however, these processes allow
people to survive in their social worlds, which was,
and still is, an evolutionary adaptation.
See also Automatic Processes; Controlled Processes
Further Readings
Jessica L. Lakin
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable
automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–479.
Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering
the adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
AFFECT
Definition
Affect refers to the positive or negative personal reactions
or feelings that we experience. Affect is often
used as an umbrella term to refer to evaluations,
moods, and emotions. Affect colors the way we see
the world and how we feel about people, objects, and
events. It also has an important impact on our social
interactions, behaviors, decision making, and information
processing.
Distinctions Among Types of Affect
Evaluations are general positive or negative feelings in
response to someone or something specific. For example,
if you experience negative feelings in response to
your new roommate, your evaluation of the person is
based upon these feelings. Such evaluations are said to
be affect based.
Moods, like evaluations, are also experienced as
general positive or negative feelings; however, they are
not elicited in response to anyone or anything specific.
When you are in a bad mood, you are unable to identify
the specific cause of your feelings. For this reason,
people sometimes say that they are in a bad mood
because they “woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
Moods are not directed toward a person or an object.
Thus, for example, while you may have a negative reaction
to your roommate, you would not have a negative
mood toward your roommate. Moods are like evaluations
in that they tend to be relatively long-lasting.
In contrast to both evaluations and moods, emotions
are highly specific positive or negative reactions to a
particular person, object, or event. Emotions tend to be
experienced for relatively short periods of time and
generally have shorter durations than moods or evaluations.
Emotions tend to be more intense than moods
and allow us to describe how feel more clearly than do
moods or evaluations. That is, we can specify exactly
what type of negative feelings we are experiencing.
For example, if your roommate steals your book, you
may say that you feel angry, rather than simply say that
you feel negatively. Further, other negative emotions
(e.g., sadness and fear) can be differentiated from
anger by the different situations and circumstances that
produced them and how they are experienced.
Relationship Between
Affect and Cognition
Affect is often contrasted with cognition (i.e., thoughts),
but their relationship is not clear-cut. Some researchers
believe that affect cannot occur without cognition preceding
it, whereas others believe that affect occurs
without a preceding cognitive component. Much of this
debate has to do with the specific type of affect that
individuals are referring to. Many scholars agree that
cognition is necessary in order for emotions to be experienced,
whereas cognition may not be necessary for
individuals to express preferences or evaluations.

Affect can exert an influence on cognitive processes.
For example, one’s affect can influence one’s tendency
to use stereotypes. Individuals in happy moods are more
likely to use stereotypes when forming impressions of
others than are people in sad moods. Further, individuals
in happy moods are less influenced by the strength
of a persuasive argument than are those in sad moods.
Happy moods also lead to increased helping behavior.
Linda M. Isbell
Kathleen C. Burns
See also Affect-as-Information; Emotion; Nonconscious
Emotion; Positive Affect
Further Readings
Lazarus, R. S. (1982). Thoughts on the relations between
emotion and cognition. American Psychologist, 37,
1019–1024.
Wyer, R. S., Clore, G. L., & Isbell, L. M. (1999). Affect and
information processing. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances
in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 31, pp. 1–77).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need
no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151–175.
AFFECT-AS-INFORMATION
Definition
How do we know whether or not we approve of some
action or like some person? According to the affectas-information
hypothesis, our feelings provide such
information. Just as our smiles and frowns provide
information about our reactions to others, our positive
and negative feelings provide such information to ourselves.
Like many psychological processes, emotional
appraisals are generally unconscious. Hence, having
evaluative information available from affective feelings
can be highly useful.
Affective reactions are forms of evaluation, and
experiencing one’s own affective reactions provides
information that something good or bad has been
encountered. Such information can be compelling,
because it may involve not only thoughts but also feelings,
bodily reactions, and even action. Thus, specific
Affect-as-Information———13
emotions, like embarrassment, involve distinctive
thoughts, feelings, and expressions, whereas general
moods are less differentiated. Affective states can
be thought of as having two components—affective
valence, which provides information about how good
or bad something is, and affective arousal, which signals
its importance or urgency. Most research focuses
on valence, but recent studies also examine arousal.
They find that assessing events as important causes a
release of adrenaline, which results in its consolidation
into long-term memory. Thus, people remember well
the events of September 11, 2001, but perhaps not so
well those of September 10, 2001. For victims of highly
traumatic events, such arousal-powered memories can
become stressful and even disabling.
Judgment
Psychologists have traditionally argued that attitudes
and evaluations depend on people’s beliefs about what
they are judging. In the early 1970s, social psychologist
Charles Gouaux examined how variation in feelings
(from mood-inducing films) and beliefs (about
another person’s political opinions) influenced liking.
Gouaux found that the affective feelings of one person
influenced attraction or dislike of another over and
above the influence of the cognitive beliefs about that
person.
But even after many demonstrations that affect
influences attitude, the assumption persisted that such
evaluative judgments must reflect evaluative beliefs.
Positive or negative feelings were assumed to activate
positive or negative beliefs about the person, which in
turn influenced judgment. In contrast, the affect-asinformation
view said that evaluative judgments are
often made simply by asking oneself, “How do I feel
about it?”
As part of a study of this process, people were telephoned
and asked questions about their life satisfaction.
They were called on early spring days that were
either warm and sunny or cold and rainy. People
reported more positive moods and greater life satisfaction
on sunny than on rainy days. The explanation was
that the weather influenced satisfaction ratings,
because people misattributed their feelings about the
weather as feelings about their “life as a whole.” To
test this explanation, experimenters said they were
calling from another city, so that they could ask some
respondents, “How’s the weather down there?” When

14———Affect-as-Information
respondents’ attention was directed to the weather,
the mood influences on life satisfaction disappeared.
Asking about the weather did not influence the feelings
themselves, but it did influence their apparent
meaning. The experiment established that affect could
influence evaluative judgment directly by conveying
information about value.
Since emotions are rapid reactions to current mental
and perceptual content, people generally know what
their emotions are about. But the causes of moods and
depressed feelings are often unclear. Without a salient
cause, feelings become promiscuous, attaching themselves
to whatever comes to mind. As a result, the affect
from moods can influence judgments, and enduring
feelings of depression and anxiety can create a discouraging
and threatening world.
These considerations suggest that many influences
of affect depend on the attributions that people make
for their feelings, rather than on the feelings themselves.
To study this process, experiments often encourage
misattributions of feelings from their true source to
a different object. Efforts to get people to misattribute
their feelings are also common in everyday life. For
example, advertisers often pair products with exciting
or suggestive images to foster misattribution of that
excitement to the product being marketed.
Despite the fact that experiments and advertising
are sometimes designed to fool people, social psychologists
generally view affect as adaptive and functional,
in contrast to traditional views of affect as a source of
irrationality and bias. Emotion does sometimes conflict
with rational choice, but affect is also essential to
good judgment. Studies of neurological damage show
that the inability to use affective reactions to guide
judgments and decisions is costly. Similarly, research
on emotional intelligence suggests that being able to
extract information from one’s own and others’ affective
reactions is highly beneficial.
Decision Making
Psychologists now believe that the process of decision
making takes place largely unconsciously. As a result,
deciding explicitly often involves entertaining alternatives
until one is visited by a feeling that one has
decided. When ordering food from a menu or selecting
a video to watch, one may look until something feels
right. Thus, decisions are hard when none of the alternatives
feels right or when more than one alternative
elicits such feelings. Making important decisions in
the absence of an experience of rightness may therefore
be stressful. For men and women considering
marriage, for example, saying yes without feeling anything
would surely be anxiety provoking.
A well-known model and actress recently described
her devastation when, after realizing her lifelong dream
of having a baby, she felt nothing as she held her new
daughter. Feelings of attachment, intimacy, and nurturance
are so basic to birth and motherhood that the
woman concluded from their absence that she was
profoundly unworthy. She even considered suicide, but
fortunately, treatment for postpartum depression allowed
the appropriate feelings to arise. Only then could she
say confidently that she loved her daughter or herself.
Affect-as-Evidence
The affect-as-information hypothesis assumes that
people’s feelings inform them about what they like,
want, and value. When a belief that one values something
is not validated by embodied affective reactions,
the person is faced with an epistemic problem. Such
disparities between affective beliefs and embodied
affect have been studied in the laboratory. Investigators
have developed simple procedures for activating happy
or sad thoughts and also for eliciting feelings, facial
expressions, and actions characteristic of happiness
and sadness. They find that when people’s cognitions
and affect do not agree, their ability to remember presented
material suffers, as does the speed with which
they can make simple choices. From the standpoint of
cognitive efficiency, when thinking sad thoughts, it is
apparently better to feel sad than to feel happy. Just as
people’s beliefs about the world are subject to validation
by what they see and hear, so too do evaluative
beliefs appear to require validation by one’s own feelings,
expressions, and actions.
Thinking
Affect guides not only judgments and decisions but
also attention and styles of thinking. During task performance,
affect may be experienced as information
about the task or about how one is doing, rather than as
information about how much one likes something.
Such task information leads to adjustments in cognitive
processing or cognitive tuning. Research suggests
that positive affect promotes global, interpretative processing
and negative affect leads to local, perceptual
processing. Thus, whether one focuses on the forest or

the trees and whether one uses one’s own mental associations
or not appear to be controlled by affect. Since
many of the phenomena that have defined cognitive
psychology involve reliance on such cognitive responses,
it turns out that many of them are not observed in sad
moods. Research shows that such textbook phenomena
as categorization, stereotyping, persuasion, impression
formation, false memory, heuristic reasoning, and others
are all more apparent in happy moods than in sad
moods. Ultimately, whether it is better to be happy or
sad when engaged in cognitive tasks depends on the
nature of the task. Positive affect may promote creativity
and performance on constructive cognitive tasks,
but it may promote error on some detailed tasks such
as solving logical syllogisms. These effects too have
been found to depend on the attributions that participants
make for their affect.
Summary
According to the affect-as-information view, people
are informed by their affect, even though they produce
it themselves. Moreover, rather than being fixed and
reflex-like, affective influences can often be altered by
simple cognitive manipulations. Thus, the information
value of the affect, rather than the affect itself, is often
the critical factor in its influence. This view can also
be generalized to nonaffective feelings. For example,
the information from bodily feelings of pain depends
on attributions about its source (e.g., where it hurts).
Likewise, cognitive feelings of the ease of recalling
something influence whether it seems true. Moreover,
the impact of these feelings also depends on attributions
about their source.
Gerald L. Clore
Yoav Bar-Anan
See also Affect; Attributions; Decision Making; Depression;
Emotion; Misattribution of Arousal; Self-Perception
Theory
Further Readings
Gasper, K., & Clore, G. L. (2002). Attending to the big
picture: Mood and global vs. local processing of visual
information. Psychological Science, 13, 34–40.
Gouaux, C. (1971). Induced affective states and interpersonal
attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
20, 37–43.
Martin, L. L., & Clore, G. L. (Eds.). (2001). Theories of
mood and cognition: A user’s handbook. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983). Mood, misattribution,
and judgments of well-being: Informative and directive
functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 45, 513–523.
AFFECT HEURISTIC
Definition
Affect Heuristic———15
A judgment is said to be based on a heuristic when a
person assesses a specified target attribute (e.g., the
risk of an approaching stranger in the street) by substituting
a related attribute that comes quickly to mind
(e.g., intuitive feelings of fear or anxiety) for a more
complex analysis (e.g., detailed reasons or calculations
indicating why the risk is high or low).
The affect heuristic describes an aspect of human
thinking whereby feelings serve as cues to guide judgments
and decisions. In this sense, affect is simply a
feeling of goodness or badness, associated with a
stimulus object. Affective responses occur rapidly and
automatically—note how quickly you sense the feelings
associated with the word treasure or the word
hate. Reliance on such feelings can be characterized
as the affect heuristic.
Examples and Implications
A cartoon by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau shows
two rather innocuous-looking strangers approaching
each other on a street at night and trying to decide
whether it’s safe to acknowledge the other with a
greeting. The bubbles above each man’s head give the
reader a view of their thought processes as they decide.
Both are going through a checklist of risk factors (race,
gender, hair length, style of dress, etc.) pertaining to the
approaching person and a checklist of risk-mitigating
factors (age over 40, carrying Fed Ex package, carrying
briefcase, etc.). For both, the risk-mitigating factors
outnumber the risk factors 4 to 3, leading the risk
to be judged acceptable. The men greet each other.
What is interesting and perhaps amusing about this
cartoon is that no one would judge the risk of meeting
a stranger on a dark street this way, even if his or her
life depended on making the right judgment. Instead

16———Affect Infusion
this “risk assessment” would be done intuitively. The
features of the approaching stranger would trigger
positive or negative feelings, of reassurance or alarm.
These feelings would be integrated quickly into an
overall feeling of safety or concern, and that feeling
would motivate behavior—“Good evening,” eye contact
or not, perhaps even crossing the street. Reliance
on feelings is an example of the affect heuristic.
The cartoon is psychologically important because
it acknowledges, in part implicitly, that there are two
ways people process information when making judgments
and decisions. One way, called the analytic
system, is conscious, deliberative, slow, and based on
reasons, arguments, and sometimes even formulas or
equations (e.g., the risk checklist). The other is fast,
intuitive, based on associations, emotions, and feelings
(affect); it is automatic and perhaps at an unconscious
level. This is called the experiential system.
The experiential system and the analytic system
are continually active in one’s brain, cooperating and
competing in what has been called “the dance of affect
and reason.” Philosophers have been discussing the
intricacies of this dance for centuries, often concluding
that the analytic system enables one to be “rational,”
whereas feelings and emotions “lead one astray.”
Today, this interplay between “the heart and the
mind” is actively being studied by social and cognitive
psychologists, decision theorists, neuroscientists, and
economists. This scientific study has led to some new
insights into thinking and rationality. Researchers now
see that both systems are rational and necessary for
good decisions. The experiential system helped human
beings survive the long evolutionary journey during
which science wasn’t available to provide guidance.
Early humans decided whether it was safe to drink the
water in the stream by relying on sensory information,
educated by experience. How does it look? Taste?
Smell? What happened when I drank it before? In the
modern world, people have come to demand more of
risk assessment. Scientists now have tools such as analytic
chemistry and toxicology to identify microscopic
levels of contamination in water and describe what this
means for people’s health, now as they drink it and
perhaps even decades into the future.
Social psychologists study the dance of affect and
reason by creating controlled experiments that show
these two systems, experiential and analytic, in action.
In one experiment, subjects are recruited to take part in
a study of memory. They go into Room 1, where they
are given a short (two-digit) or a long (seven-digit) number
to memorize. They are asked to walk to Room 2 and
report this number. On the way to Room 2, they are
offered a choice of a snack, either a piece of chocolate
cake or a bowl of fruit salad. The study’s hypothesis,
which was confirmed, was that persons holding the
seven-digit number in memory would be less able to
rely on analytic thinking which, if used, would provide
reasons why the fruit salad was better for them. Instead,
they were predicted to rely on the experiential (feelingbased,
affective) system, which is less demanding of
cognitive resources and this would lead them to choose
the appealing chocolate cake. Among persons holding
seven digits in memory, 63% chose the cake. Only 41%
of those memorizing two digits chose the cake. This
study showed that reliance on experiential thinking, relative
to analytic thinking, increased as cognitive capacity
was reduced (by the memory task). Research is
actively under way to determine whether the balance
between analytic and experiential thinking is also
changed by factors such as time pressure, task complexity,
poor health, advanced age, and powerfully affective
outcomes and images.
The affect heuristic is an efficient and generally adaptive
mechanism that helps individuals navigate easily
through many complex decisions in daily life. However,
it can also mislead people. For example, advertisers and
marketers have learned how to manipulate people into
purchasing their products by associating these products
with positive images and feelings. Cigarette advertising
is a prime example of this.
Paul Slovic
See also Affect; Automatic Processes; Dual Process Theories;
Heuristic Processing
Further Readings
Slovic, P., Finucane, M., Peters, E., & MacGregor, D. G.
(2002). The affect heuristic. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, &
D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The
psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 397–420). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
AFFECT INFUSION
Definition
Affect infusion occurs when feelings (moods, emotions)
exert an invasive and subconscious influence on the
way people think, form judgments, and behave in social

situations. Affect can influence both the content of
thinking and behavior (informational effect), and the
process and style of thinking (processing effects). Some
examples of affect infusion include (a) forming more
negative judgments of a person when in a bad mood,
(b) being more cooperative and friendly in a bargaining
encounter due to a positive affective state, and (c) paying
more systematic attention to the details of a judgmental
task when in a negative rather than a positive
affective state. Mild, subconscious moods can be an
especially important source of affect infusion, and paradoxically,
affect infusion is most likely when a person
needs to deal with a more complex and demanding task
that requires more open, constructive thinking.
History
The possibility that affective states can exert an invasive
influence on thinking and behavior has long been recognized
by writers and philosophers, but the reasons for
these effects remained incompletely understood until
very recently. Some classical conditioning theories
suggest that unrelated affective states can influence
thoughts and actions simply because they coincide in
space and time. For example, in John B. Watson’s wellknown
Little Albert Studies, young children could be
conditioned to respond with fear to a previously innocuous
target, a furry rabbit, when encountering the rabbit
coincided with loud noise. In other work, evaluations of
a newly met person could be influenced by the irrelevant
affective states elicited by being in a pleasant or
an unpleasant room. Within psychodynamic (Freudian)
work, attempts to repress affective states were thought
to result in the infusion of affect into unrelated judgments
and activities. For example, people who were
instructed to suppress their fear of an expected electric
shock were more likely to see others as fearful (project
fear) compared to another group who were not trying to
suppress their fear.
Mechanisms
Contemporary theories emphasize the cognitive (mental)
processes that underlie affect infusion and link feelings
to thoughts and behavior. Affect can influence the
content of thinking due to two psychological processes:
through memory processes (affect priming effects) and
through misattribution processes (affect-as-information
effects). According to affect priming theory, affective
states make it easier for people to remember, think of,
and use affect-related thoughts and ideas (mood
Affect Infusion———17
congruence), as well as concepts that were experienced
in a matching rather than a nonmatching affective state
(mood–state dependence). Thus, a happy person will
selectively remember and use concepts that are positive
rather than negative, and so will make more positive
judgments and interpretations about ongoing events
than will a sad person. The greater availability in memory
of affectively congruent ideas can also exert an
affect-consistent influence on what people pay attention
to, what they recall, the kind of inferences they
make, as well as judgments and, ultimately, behaviors.
According to the second process, people may sometimes
mistakenly use their affective state as a shortcut
(heuristic cue) to infer their evaluative reactions to a target
(the “how-do-I-feel-about-it” heuristic). This latter
process is most likely when the processing capacity and
processing motivation are limited, and so a simple,
easy-to-generate response is acceptable.
Not only can affect color the information people
remember and use and the content of their thinking, it
can also influence how a task is processed. Generally,
positive affective states tend to produce a more open,
constructive, creative information processing style,
where preexisting schematic knowledge predominates
(assimilative processing). Negative affect in turn promotes
a more systematic, detail-oriented, and externally
focused processing style (accommodative processing).
These processing differences are most likely due to the
influence of positive and negative affective states in signaling
to the person that the surrounding situation is
either beneficial or threatening. Positive mood indicates
that the situation is safe and preexisting knowledge can
be applied, and negative mood signals that the situation
is potentially dangerous and requires a more detailed
information-processing style that pays greater attention
to new information.
Integrative theories such as the affect infusion
model emphasize the critical role that different information
processing strategies play in determining
whether, and to what extent, affective states are likely
to infuse thoughts, judgments, and behaviors. This
model identifies four distinct processing strategies relative
to the degree of effort (how hard a person tries to
deal with a problem) and the degree of openness (the
extent to which new information is sought rather than
old knowledge is used). The four processing (thinking)
strategies identified by the affect infusion model are
direct access processing (low effort, closed), motivated
processing (high effort, closed), heuristic processing
(low effort, open), and substantive processing (high
effort, open). Responses based on the direct access and

18———Affordances
motivated processing styles should be impervious to
affect infusion, but heuristic and substantive processing
should produce affect infusion.
Evidence
Affect Congruent Effects
Numerous experimental studies have demonstrated
affect infusion into memory, thinking, judgments, inferences,
and behaviors. Simple, uninvolving, off-the-cuff
judgments in response to telephone surveys or street surveys,
when processing motivation and resources were
limited, show significant affect infusion consistent with
the heuristic processing strategy. More elaborately and
substantively processed judgments about the self, others,
attributions for success and failure, and intimate
relationships all show affect congruence consistent with
affect-priming mechanisms and the substantive processing
strategy. Several experiments have specifically measured
processing variables such as processing latencies
and recall memory and found evidence supporting the
process-mediation of these effects. Affect infusion was
also found to exert an affect-congruent influence on
complex, strategic social behaviors that require substantive
processing, such as negotiation, the use of verbal
requests, and responses to public situations.
Consistent with the affect infusion model, several
studies found that tasks that require more open and
elaborate thinking will, paradoxically, be more influenced
by a person’s affective state. This occurs because
more extensive thinking tends to magnify affect infusion,
as people are more likely to use affectively primed
thoughts and associations to perform such more
demanding tasks. For example, affect was found to
have a great influence on judgments about more unusual
rather than typical people, badly matched rather than
well-matched couples, and serious rather than simple
relationship conflicts.
Processing Effects
Other experiments have found that positive and
negative affect promote qualitatively different information
processing styles. People in induced negative
moods paid better attention to the situation they found
themselves in, were less likely to succumb to common
judgmental biases such as the fundamental attribution
error, were more resistant to incorporating misleading
details into their eyewitness memories, and produced
higher-quality and more effective persuasive arguments,
consistent with the more accommodating, systematic,
and externally focused processing style recruited by
negative affect.
Significance and Implications
These findings suggest that the experience of an affective
state, including mild, everyday moods, can often
have an insidious and little appreciated influence on
almost everything people think and do. This occurs
even when the source of the affective state has nothing
to do with the task at hand. For example, feeling happy
because it is a sunny day can make a person form more
positive judgments about a variety of issues that have
nothing to do with the weather. Negative affect can
subtly influence the way people evaluate themselves,
their partners, and the world, and positive affect can
lead to more optimistic judgments and inferences and
more confident and cooperative interpersonal behaviors.
Many of these effects can be understood as the
cognitive consequences of affective states, affect priming
mechanisms in particular. A better understanding
of when, why, and how affect infusion occurs is of
considerable practical importance in clinical, organizational,
and health psychology.
See also Affect; Impression Management
Further Readings
Joseph P. Forgas
Forgas, J. P. (2002). Feeling and doing: The role of affect in
interpersonal behaviour. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 1–28.
AFFORDANCES
Definition
When you look around a room, what do you see? You
may say that you see chairs, tables, flooring, bookshelves,
and walls. And at one level, perhaps you do.
According to James J. Gibson’s ecological theory of perception,
at another level you see possibilities for action.
These possibilities for action are termed affordances.
Analysis
The mantra of this approach is, as Gibson noted in
1979, that “perception is for doing.” We perceive the
world not to create an accurate internal representation
of an external reality as an end in itself. Rather, our

perceptual systems have been tuned, over the course
of evolution, to pick up information that is useful—
ultimately, from an evolutionary perspective, useful to
tasks that, in ancestral environments, would have
enhanced survival and reproduction. To pick up that
information, it is unnecessary to first create a big picture
of the world inside of our head and then identify,
within that picture, what we find useful. Rather, according
to Gibson, information pertinent to useful action is
perceived “directly.”
Gibson invented the term affordance to refer to the
features of objects that are useful to action. A meaning
of the term afford is “to make available” or “to
provide.” An affordance is a feature that makes available
a course of action. A passageway affords movement
through space. A doorknob affords grasping.
A ripe apple affords eating.
Affordances, Gibson argued, really do exist in the
world. The world is there to be navigated though,
climbed, consumed, and it contains dangers that must
be avoided as well. Features of the world that facilitate
effective action are directly perceived and acted upon.
Gibson’s approach can be contrasted with a different
view of perception—the idea that we first construct a
view of the world—create a “picture” of the world in
our heads—and then identify within that picture what
is useful. Gibson argued that much useful information
is embodied in the environment. Value and utility for
organisms exist in the world. Our perceptual senses
have been tuned to “pick up” this information.
Because features have different affordances for different
organisms, different organisms will see the world
differently at a fundamental level. Indeed, a good way
to appreciate what Gibson meant by an affordance is to
imagine the world through two different sets of eyes.
For you, a “stair” affords climbing. If a stair riser’s
height is less than 88% of an individual’s lower leg
length, the stair can be climbed in a bipedal fashion. If
its height is greater than that amount, it cannot. A stair
of appropriate height affords climbing, and we pick up
information about climbability. That affordance exists
in the world for us. For a house cat, this same stair also
affords climbing—though of course the cat will not
climb it with two feet, as we will. A house cat will also
pick up the feature “climbable” in a set of stairs.
Now consider a table. For you, a table has an affordance
to set things upon. It has an affordance to sit
at—and thereby to eat at and work at. For a cat, a table
does not have these affordances. Instead, a table has an
affordance to be jumped upon and thereby explored.
You do not typically perceive a table as something to
Affordances———19
be jumped upon to be explored. According to Gibson,
then, you and a cat perceive a table in fundamentally
different ways. You look at a table and see “something
to set things upon.” A cat looks at a table and sees
“something to be jumped upon.”
Consider an interesting thought experiment: Imagine
what it must be like to exist as another organism—
a cat, a bird, a snake, a housefly. In fact, technological,
“virtual reality” tools that allow us to strap on a pair of
special glasses and take a true “bird’s eye” view of the
world as it flies may soon be available. Or perhaps virtual
reality technology that allows us to see the world
from the perspective of a rattlesnake lying in the grass
waiting for a prey animal to wander by is in the near
future. Or is it? According to Gibson’s theory, probably
not. Though technology that allows us to see the world
as we would see it if we could fly like a bird or lie in the
grass like a snake might be possible, we cannot truly
see the world as these animals do, for we do not have
bird or snake brains that have been tuned, over the
course of their evolution, to pick up information useful
to them in particular ways. (We may see a rabbit pass
by when in a machine, giving us a virtual reality picture
of what it’d be like to be lying curled up in tall grass,
but we will not see a passing rabbit in the same way as
a snake does because rabbits don’t have affordances for
us that they do for rattlesnakes—things to be struck at.)
Because perception of affordances is so fundamental,
grown people can’t possibly see the world as anything
but one that grown people have been designed to see—
a world defined in terms of information useful to grown
people.
In 1983, Leslie Zebrowitz McArthur and Reuben
Baron published an important article in Psychological
Review introducing Gibson’s approach to many social
psychologists. (Gibson himself actually had a longstanding
interest in social psychology and taught the
course at Cornell for many years.) At the time of this
writing, there is a set of papers claiming that people are
inaccurate in their social perceptions because people
use shortcuts to quickly size up the world rather than
fully consider all of the information. McArthur and
Baron argued that some shortcuts might actually be
very effective ways to size up social situations in natural
environments. Might this person be a friend?
A foe? And how can you make a decision?—quick!
They urged research into the affordances that exist
within the social world. This form of thinking appears
in recent work in evolutionary psychology.
Steven W. Gangestad

20———Aggression
See also Automatic Processes; Evolutionary Psychology
Further Readings
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual
perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Jones, K. S. (2003). What is an affordance? Ecological
Psychology, 15, 107–114.
McArthur, L. Z., & Baron, R. M. (1983). Toward an
ecological theory of social perception. Psychological
Review, 90, 215–238.
AGGRESSION
Definition
In sports and in business, the term aggressive is frequently
used when the term assertive, enthusiastic,
or confident would be more accurate. For example, an
aggressive salesperson is one who tries really hard
to sell you something. Within psychology, the term
aggression means something different. Most social
psychologists define human aggression as any behavior
that is intended to harm another person who wants
to avoid the harm. This definition includes three
important features. First, aggression is a behavior. You
can see it. For example, you can see a person shoot,
stab, hit, slap, or curse someone. Aggression is not an
emotion that occurs inside a person, such as feeling
angry. Aggression is not a thought that occurs inside
someone’s brain, such as mentally rehearsing a murder
one is about to commit. Aggression is a behavior you
can see. Second, aggression is intentional. Aggression
is not accidental, such as when a drunk driver accidentally
runs over a child on a tricycle. In addition, not all
intentional behaviors that hurt others are aggressive
behaviors. For example, a dentist might intentionally
give a patient a shot of novocaine (and the shot hurts!),
but the goal is to help rather than hurt the patient.
Third, the victim wants to avoid the harm. Thus, again,
the dental patient is excluded, because the patient is
not seeking to avoid the harm (in fact, the patient probably
booked the appointment weeks in advance and
paid to have it done!). Suicide would also be excluded,
because the person who commits suicide does not want
to avoid the harm. Sadomasochism would likewise be
excluded, because the masochist enjoys being harmed
by the sadist.
The motives for aggression might differ. Consider
two examples. In the first example, a husband finds his
wife and her lover together in bed. He takes his hunting
rifle from a closet and shoots and kills both individuals.
In the second example, a “hitman” uses a rifle to kill
another person for money. The motives appear quite different
in these two examples. In the first example, the
man appears to be motivated by anger. He is enraged
when he finds his wife making love to another man, so
he shoots both of them. In the second example, the hitman
appears to be motivated by money. The hitman
probably does not hate his victim. He might not even
know his victim, but he kills that person anyway for the
money. To capture different types of aggression based
on different motives, psychologists have made a distinction
between hostile aggression (also called affective,
angry, impulsive, reactive, or retaliatory aggression) and
instrumental aggression (also called proactive aggression).
Hostile aggression is “hot,” impulsive, angry
behavior that is motivated by a desire to harm someone.
Instrumental aggression is “cold,” premeditated, calculated
behavior that is motivated by some other goal (e.g.,
obtain money, restore one’s image, restore justice).
One difficulty with the distinction between hostile
and instrumental aggression is that the motives for
aggression are often mixed. Consider the following
example. On April 20, 1999, the 110th anniversary of
Adolf Hitler’s birthday, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
entered their high school in Littleton, Colorado (United
States), with weapons and ammunition. They murdered
13 students and wounded 23 others before turning the
guns on themselves. Harris and Klebold were repeatedly
angered and provoked by the athletes in their
school. However, they planned the massacre more than
a year in advance, did research on weapons and explosives,
made drawings of their plans, and conducted
rehearsals. Was this an act of hostile or instrumental
aggression? It is hard to say. That is why some social
psychologists have argued that it is time to get rid of the
distinction between hostile and instrumental aggression.
Another distinction is between displaced and direct
aggression. Displaced aggression (also called the
“kicking the dog” effect) involves substituting the target
of aggression: The person has an impulse to attack
one person but attacks someone else instead. Direct
aggression involves attacking the person who provoked
you. People displace aggression for several reasons.
Directly aggressing against the source of provocation
may be unfeasible because the source is unavailable
(e.g., the provoker has left the situation) or because the

source is an intangible entity (e.g., hot temperature,
loud noise, foul odor). Fear of retaliation or punishment
from the provoker may also inhibit direct aggression.
For example, an employee who is reprimanded by his
boss may be reluctant to retaliate because he does not
want to lose his job.
Violence is aggression that has extreme physical
harm as its goal, such as injury or death. For example,
one child intentionally pushing another off a tricycle
is an act of aggression but is not an act of violence.
One person intentionally hitting, kicking, shooting, or
stabbing another person is an act of violence. Thus, all
violent acts are aggressive acts, but not all aggressive
acts are violent; only the extreme ones are.
Is Aggression Innate or Learned?
For decades, psychologists have debated whether
aggression is innate or learned. Instinct theories propose
that the causes of aggression are internal, whereas
learning theories propose that the causes of aggression
are external. Sigmund Freud argued that human motivational
forces such as sex and aggression are based
on instincts. In his early writings, Freud proposed the
drive for sensory and sexual gratification as the primary
human instinct, which he called eros. After witnessing
the horrors of World War I, however, Freud
proposed that humans also have a destructive, death
instinct, which he called thanatos.
According to Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel Prize–
winning scientist, aggressive behavior in both humans
and nonhumans comes from an aggressive instinct.
This aggressive instinct presumably developed during
the course of evolution because it promoted survival
of the human species. Because fighting is closely
linked to mating, the aggressive instinct helped ensure
that only the strongest individuals would pass on their
genes to future generations.
Other psychologists have proposed that aggression is
not an innate drive, like hunger, in search of gratification.
According to Albert Bandura’s social learning theory,
people learn aggressive behaviors the same ways
they learn other social behaviors—by direct experience
and by observing others. When people observe and copy
the behavior of others, this is called modeling. Modeling
can weaken or strengthen aggressive responding. If the
model is rewarded for behaving aggressively, aggressive
responding is strengthened in observers. If the
model is punished for behaving aggressively, aggressive
responding is weakened in observers.
Aggression———21
This nature versus nurture debate has frequently
generated more heat than light. Many experts on
aggression favor a middle ground in this debate. There
is clearly a role for learning, and people can learn
how to behave aggressively. Given the universality of
aggression and some of its features (e.g., young men
are always the most violent individuals), and recent
findings from heritability studies, there may be an
innate basis for aggression as well.
Some Factors Related to Aggression
Frustration and Other Unpleasant Events
In 1939, a group of psychologists from Yale
University published a book titled Frustration and
Aggression. In this book, they proposed the frustration–
aggression hypothesis, which they summarized on the
first page of their book with these two statements:
(1) “The occurrence of aggressive behavior always presupposes
the existence of frustration” and (2) “the existence
of frustration always leads to some form of
aggression.” They defined frustration as blocking goaldirected
behavior, such as when someone crowds in
front of you while you are waiting in a long line.
Although they were wrong in their use of the word
always, there is no denying the basic truth that aggression
is increased by frustration.
Fifty years later, Leonard Berkowitz modified the
frustration–aggression hypothesis by proposing that all
unpleasant events—instead of only frustration—deserve
to be recognized as causes of aggression. Other examples
of unpleasant events include hot temperatures,
crowded conditions, foul odors, secondhand smoke,
air pollution, loud noises, provocations, and even pain
(e.g., hitting your thumb with a hammer).
All of these unpleasant environmental factors probably
increase aggression because they make people
feel bad and grumpy. But why should being in a bad
mood increase aggression? One possible explanation
is that angry people aggress because they think it will
make them feel better. Because many people believe
that venting is a healthy way to reduce anger and
aggression, they might vent by lashing out at others to
improve their mood. However, research has consistently
shown that venting anger actually increases anger
and aggression.
It is important to point out that like frustration,
being in a bad mood is neither a necessary nor a sufficient
condition for aggression. All people in a bad

22———Aggression
mood do not behave aggressively, and all aggressive
people are not in a bad mood.
Aggressive Cues
Weapons. Obviously using a weapon can increase
aggression and violence, but can just seeing a weapon
increase aggression? The answer is yes. Research has
shown that the mere presence of a weapon increases
aggression, an effect called the weapons effect.
Violent Media. Content analyses show that violence is a
common theme in many types of media, including television
programs, films, and video games. Children are
exposed to approximately 10,000 violent crimes in the
media per year. The results from hundreds of studies
have shown that violent media increase aggression. The
magnitude of the effect of violent media on aggression
is not trivial either. The correlation between TV violence
and aggression is only slightly smaller than that
correlation between smoking and lung cancer. Smoking
provides a useful analogy for thinking about media violence
effects. Not everyone who smokes gets lung
cancer, and not everyone who gets lung cancer is a
smoker. Smoking is not the only factor that causes lung
cancer, but it is an important factor. Similarly, not
everyone who consumes violent media becomes
aggressive, and not everyone who is aggressive consumes
violent media. Media violence is not the only
factor that causes aggression, but it is an important factor.
Like the first cigarette, the first violent movie seen
can make a person nauseous. After repeated exposure,
however, the person craves more and more. The effects
of smoking and viewing violence are cumulative.
Smoking one cigarette probably will not cause lung
cancer. Likewise, seeing one violent movie probably
will not make a person more aggressive. But repeated
exposure to both cigarettes and media violence can
have harmful long-term consequences.
Chemical Influences
Numerous chemicals have been shown to influence
aggression, including testosterone, cortisol, serotonin,
and alcohol.
Testosterone. Testosterone is the male sex hormone.
Both males and females have testosterone, but males
have a lot more of it. Testosterone has been linked
to aggression. Robert Sapolsky, author of The Trouble
With Testosterone, wrote, “Remove the source of
testosterone in species after species and levels of
aggression typically plummet. Reinstate normal testosterone
levels afterward with injections of synthetic
testosterone, and aggression returns.”
Cortisol. A second hormone that is important to
aggression is cortisol. Cortisol is the human stress hormone.
Aggressive people have low cortisol levels,
which suggests that they experience low levels of
stress. How can this explain aggression? People who
have low cortisol levels do not fear the negative consequences
of their behavior, so they might be more likely
to engage in aggressive behavior. Also, people who
have low cortisol become easily bored, which might
lead to sensation-seeking behavior such as aggression.
Serotonin. Another chemical influence is serotonin. In
the brain, information is communicated between neurons
(nerve cells) by the movement of chemicals across
a small gap called the synapse. The chemical messengers
are called neurotransmitters. Serotonin is one of
these neurotransmitters. It has been called the “feel
good” neurotransmitter. Low levels of serotonin have
been linked to aggression in both animals and humans.
For example, violent criminals have a serotonin deficit.
Alcohol. Alcohol has long been associated with violent
and aggressive behavior. Well over half of violent
crimes are committed by individuals who are intoxicated.
Does all of this mean that aggression is somehow
contained in alcohol? No. Alcohol increases rather than
causes violent or aggressive tendencies. Factors that
normally increase aggression, such as provocation,
frustration, aggressive cues, and violent media, have a
much stronger effect on intoxicated people than on
sober people.
Self and Culture
Norms and Values. Amok is one of the few Indonesian
words used in the English language. The term dates
back to 1665, and describes a violent, uncontrollable
frenzy. Running amok roughly translated means “going
berserk.” A young Malay man who had suffered some
loss of face or other setback would run amok, recklessly
performing violent acts. The Malays believed it was
impossible for young men to restrain their wild, aggressive
actions under those circumstances. However, when
the British colonial administration disapproved of the
practice and began to hold the young men responsible
for their actions, including punishing them for the harm
they did, most Malays stopped running amok.

The history of running amok thus reveals three
important points about aggression. First, it shows the
influence of culture: The violence was accepted in one
culture and prohibited in others, and when the local
culture changed, the practice died out. Second, it shows
that cultures can promote violence without placing a
positive value on it. There is no sign that the Malays
approved of running amok or thought it was a good,
socially desirable form of action, but positive value
wasn’t necessary. All that was needed was for the culture
to believe that it was normal for people to lose
control under some circumstances and act violently
as a result. Third, it shows that when people believe
their aggression is beyond control, they are often
mistaken—the supposedly uncontrollable pattern of
running amok died out when the British cracked down
on it. The influence of culture was thus mediated
through self-control.
Self-Control. In 1990, two criminologists published a
book called A General Theory of Crime. Such a flamboyant
title was bound to stir controversy. After all,
there are many crimes and many causes, and so even
the idea of putting forward a single theory as the main
explanation was pretty bold. What would their theory
feature: Poverty? Frustration? Genetics? Media violence?
Bad parenting? As it turned out, their main theory
boiled down to poor self-control. The authors
provided plenty of data to back up their theory. For
one thing, criminals seem to be impulsive individuals
who simply don’t show much respect for norms, rules,
and standards of behavior. If self-control is a general
capacity for bringing one’s behavior into line with
rules and standards, criminals lack it. Another sign is
that the lives of criminals show low self-control even
in behaviors that are not against the law (e.g., smoking
cigarettes).
Social psychology has found many causes of violence,
including frustration, anger or insult, alcohol
intoxication, violence in the media, and hot temperatures.
This raises the question of why there isn’t more
violence than there is. After all, who hasn’t experienced
frustration, anger, insult, alcohol, media violence,
or hot weather in the past year? Yet most people
do not hurt or kill anyone. These factors may give rise
to violent impulses, but most people restrain themselves.
Violence starts when self-control stops.
Culture of Honor. The southern United States has long
been associated with greater levels of violent attitudes
and behaviors than the northern United States. In
comparison to northern states, southern states have
more homicides per capita, have fewer restrictions on
gun ownership, allow people to shoot assailants and
burglars without retreating first, are more accepting of
corporal punishment of children at home and in
schools, and are more supportive of any wars involving
U.S. troops.
Social psychologist Richard Nisbett hypothesized
that these regional differences are caused by a southern
culture of honor, which calls for violent response to
threats to one’s honor. This culture apparently dates
back to the Europeans who first came to the United
States. The northern United States was settled by English
and Dutch farmers, whereas the southern United States
was settled by Scottish and Irish herders. A thief could
become rich quick by stealing another person’s herd.
The same was not true of agricultural crops in the
North. It is difficult to quickly steal 50 acres of corn.
Men had to be ready to protect their herds with a violent
response. A similar culture of violence exists in
the western United States, or the so-called Wild West,
where a cowboy could also lose his wealth quickly by
not protecting his herd. (Cowboys herded cows, hence
the name.) This violent culture isn’t confined to the
southern and western United States; cultural anthropologists
have observed that herding cultures throughout
the world tend to be more violent than agricultural
cultures.
Humiliation appears to be the primary cause of violence
and aggression in cultures of honor. Humiliation
is a state of disgrace or loss of self-respect (or of
respect from others). It is closely related to the concept
of shame. Research shows that feelings of shame
frequently lead to violent and aggressive behavior. In
cultures of honor there is nothing worse than being
humiliated, and the appropriate response to humiliation
is swift and intense retaliation.
Age and Aggression
Aggression———23
Research has shown that the most aggressive
human beings are toddlers, children 1 to 3 years old.
Researchers observing toddlers in daycare settings
have found that about 25% of the interactions involve
some kind of physical aggression (e.g., one child
pushes another child out of the way and takes that
child’s toy). High aggression rates in toddlers are most
likely due to the fact that they still lack the means to
communicate in more constructive ways. No adult
group, not even violent youth gangs or hardened criminals,
resorts to physical aggression 25% of the time.

24———Aggression
Young children do not commit many violent crimes,
especially as compared to young men. This is most
likely due to the fact that young children can’t do much
physical damage, because they are smaller and weaker.
Longitudinal studies show that serious aggressive
and violent behavior peaks just past the age of puberty.
After the age of 19, aggressive behaviors begin to
decline. However, a relatively small subgroup of people
continue their aggressive behavior after adolescence.
These “career criminals” typically started violent offending
in early life. The earlier the onset of aggressive or
violent behavior is, the greater is the likelihood that it
will continue later in life.
Gender and Aggression
In all known societies, young men just past the age
of puberty commit most of the violent crimes. Rarely
women. Rarely older men. Rarely young children.
Research shows that males are more physically
aggressive than females, but this difference shrinks
when people are provoked. Males are also more verbally
aggressive than females, although the difference
is much smaller. Females are often taught to be less
direct in expressing aggression, so they often resort to
more indirect forms of aggression. When it comes to
relational aggression, for example, females are more
aggressive than males. Relational aggression is defined
as intentionally harming someone’s relationships with
others. Some examples of relational aggression
include saying bad things about people behind their
backs, withdrawing affection to get what you want,
and excluding others from your circle of friends. Thus,
rather than simply stating that males are more aggressive
than females, it is more accurate to state that both
sexes can behave aggressively, but they tend to engage
in different types of aggression.
Biased Social Information Processing
People do not passively respond to the things happening
around them, but they actively try to perceive,
understand, and attach meaning to these events. For
example, when someone bumps a shopping cart into
your knee in the local supermarket, you will likely do
more than just feel the pain and take another carton of
milk from the shelf. Instead, you will try to make
sense of what happened to you (often this occurs automatically
and so fast that you’re not even aware of it):
Why did this person bump me? Was it an accident or
was it intentional?
According to the social information processing
model, the way people process information in a situation
can have a strong influence on how they behave. In
aggressive people, the processing of social information
takes a different course than in nonaggressive people.
For example, aggressive people have a hostile perception
bias. They perceive social interactions as more
aggressive than nonaggressive people do. Aggressive
people pay too much attention to potentially hostile
information and tend to overlook other types of information.
They see the world as a hostile place. Aggressive
people have a hostile expectation bias. They expect
others to react to potential conflicts with aggression.
Furthermore, aggressive people have a hostile attribution
bias. They assume that others have hostile intentions.
When people perceive ambiguous behaviors as
stemming from hostile intentions, they are much more
likely to behave aggressively than when they perceive
the same behaviors as stemming from other intentions.
Finally, aggressive people are more likely than others to
believe that “aggression pays.” In estimating the consequences
of their behavior, they are overly focused on
how to get what they want, and they do not focus much
on maintaining good relationships with others. This is
why aggressive people often choose aggressive solutions
for interpersonal problems and ignore other solutions.
Intervening With Aggression
and Violence
Most people are greatly concerned about the amount
of aggression in society. Most likely, this is because
aggression directly interferes with people’s basic
needs of safety and security. Accordingly, it is urgent
to find ways to reduce aggression. Aggression has multiple
causes. Unpleasant events, biased social information
processing, violent media, and reduced self-control
are just some of the factors that can increase aggression.
The fact that there is no single cause for aggression
makes it difficult to design effective interventions.
A treatment that works for one individual may not work
for another individual. One subgroup of extremely
aggressive and violent people, psychopaths, is even
believed to be untreatable. Indeed, many people have
started to accept the fact that aggression and violence
have become an inevitable, intrinsic part of society.
This being said, there certainly are things that can
be done to reduce aggression and violence. Although
aggression intervention strategies will not be discussed
in detail here, there are two important general points to
be made. First, successful interventions target as many

causes of aggression as possible and attempt to tackle
them collectively. Most often, these interventions are
aimed at reducing factors that promote aggression in
the direct social environment (family, friends), general
living conditions (housing and neighborhood, health,
financial resources), and occupation (school, work, spare
time). Common interventions include social competence
training, family therapy, parent management training
(in children and juveniles), or a combination of these.
Interventions that are narrowly focused at removing a
single cause of aggression, however well conducted,
are bound to fail.
Aggression is often stable over time, almost as stable
as intelligence. If young children display excessive
levels of aggression (often in the form of hitting, biting,
or kicking), it places them at high risk for becoming
violent adolescents and even violent adults. It is
much more difficult to alter aggressive behaviors when
they are part of an adult personality than when they are
still in development. Thus, as a second general rule, it
is emphasized that aggressive behavior problems are
best treated in early development, when they are still
malleable. The more able professionals are to identify
and treat early signs of aggression, the safer our communities
will be.
Brad J. Bushman
Sander Thomaes
See also Catharsis of Aggression; Media Violence and
Aggression
Further Readings
Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human
aggression. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 27–51.
Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Is it time to pull
the plug on the hostile versus instrumental aggression
dichotomy? Psychological Review, 108, 273–279.
AGREEABLENESS
Definition
Agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions of
personality within the five-factor, structural approach
to personality (also known as the Big Five). It is an
abstract, higher-level summary term for a set of family
relations among lower-level traits that describe individual
differences in being likable, pleasant, and
harmonious in interactions with others. Research
shows that persons who are “kind” are also “considerate”
and “warm,” implicating a larger, overarching dimension
that is relatively stable over time and related to a
wide range of thoughts, feelings, and social behaviors.
Of the five major dimensions of personality in the Big
Five, Agreeableness is most concerned with how individuals
differ in their orientations toward interpersonal
relationships.
Background
Agreeableness has a curious history, relative to many
other recognized dimensions of personality. Unlike
the supertraits of Extraversion and Neuroticism,
Agreeableness was not widely researched because of
top-down theorizing about its link to biology or to
especially conspicuous social behaviors. Instead, systematic
research on Agreeableness began as a result of
reliable research findings arising in descriptions of the
self and of others. Because of its bottom-up empirical
origins, there is room for debate about a suitable label
for this hypothetical construct. Not all theorists concur
that Agreeableness is the best summary label for the
interrelated lower-level traits, habits, and dispositions.
Other labels used to describe the dimension are tendermindedness,
friendly compliance versus hostile noncompliance,
likeability, communion, and even love
versus hate. To avoid problems of overlap with everyday
meanings, some theorists proposed that the dimensions
be given a number (the Roman numeral II has
been used in the past) or a letter A (for agreeableness,
altruism, or affection). Whatever the label picked, the
empirical regularities with attraction, helping, and positive
relations remain.
Relations to Other Personality Traits
Big Five
Agreeableness———25
As for the Big Five dimensions, one might intuitively
expect Agreeableness to be related to Extraversion
because both are concerned with social relations. Indeed
some theorists have tried to force Agreeableness-related
traits to fit under the Extraversion umbrella, placing
traits like “warm” with Extraversion, not Agreeableness.
Empirically, however, the two major dimensions are
related to different social behaviors. Extraversion is
linked to the excitement aspects of social relations and
to dominance, whereas Agreeableness is related to
motives for maintaining harmonious relationships with
others. Extraversion is about having impact on others,

26———Agreeableness
whereas Agreeableness is about having harmony and
pleasant relationships. Overall, empirical research suggests
that Agreeableness is distinctive and is not highly
correlated with the other dimensions of the Big Five, at
least in young adults.
Empathy
Agreeableness may not be highly correlated with
other Big Five dimensions of personality, but it is
probably related to other traits, habits, and attitudes.
Intuitively, one might expect empathy to be one component
of Agreeableness. Studies show that Agreeableness
is related to dispositional empathy. Persons high in
Agreeableness report greater ease in seeing the world
through others’ eyes (perspective taking), in feeling the
suffering of others (empathic concern), but not necessarily
in experiencing self-focused negative emotions
(personal distress) or in observing victims in sorrow.
Past research showed that these cognitive and emotional
processes are related to overt helping, so one
might expect persons high in Agreeableness to offer
more help and aid to others, even to strangers, than do
their peers. Recent empirical research supports the
claim that Agreeableness is related to both empathy
and helping.
Frustration Control
Moving further away from intuition toward theory,
Agreeableness seems to be related to frustration control.
Because of their motivation to maintain good relations
with others, persons high in Agreeableness are
more willing or better able to regulate the inevitable
frustrations that come from interacting with others.
Theorists proposed that Agreeableness (along with its
conceptual cousin Conscientiousness) may have its
developmental origins in an early-appearing temperament
called effortful control.
Relation to Social Behaviors
Agreeableness can also be understood by examining
social behaviors that are related to it. Overall, Agreeableness
seems to be positively related to adaptive social
behaviors (i.e., conflict resolution, emotional responsiveness,
helping behavior) and negatively related to maladaptive
social behaviors (i.e., prejudice, stigmatization).
Emotional Responsiveness
Agreeableness is a major predictor of emotional
experience and expression. Research using both
self-report and objective physiological measures shows
that high-agreeable people are more responsive in emotionally
evocative situations than low-agreeable people.
High-agreeable adults and children report greater
efforts to control their emotional reactions in social
situations, especially when asked to describe emotional
content to a friend or stranger. Recent research shows
that Agreeableness is related to emotional responsiveness
in situations involving people in relationships but
not necessarily excitement or danger. In sum, Agreeableness
seems to be related to patterns of controlled
emotional responsiveness to interpersonal situations.
Group Behavior
In studies of group processes, research shows that
Agreeableness is related to lower within-group conflict
and higher overall group evaluations. More specifically,
high-agreeable people are more liked by their
group members and report more liking for the other
members of their group. Research has also shown that
Agreeableness is negatively related to competitiveness
in groups and positively related to expectations
of group interactions. High-agreeable people expect
to enjoy the group interaction more than their lowagreeable
counterparts. Agreeableness also predicts
the type of conflict resolution tactics people use. For
instance, Agreeableness is positively related to constructive
conflict resolution tactics (e.g., negotiation)
and negatively related to destructive resolution tactics
(e.g., physical force).
Helping
Research shows that Agreeableness is related to
prosocial behaviors, such as helping. High-agreeable
people offer help across a range of situational contexts.
Low-agreeable people, however, seem to be much more
influenced by situational variations, such as victim’s
group membership, cost of helping, and experimentally
induced empathy. Low-agreeable people are more likely
to offer help when the victim is a member of one’s
own group or costs of helping are low. High-agreeable
people also report greater feelings of liking and similarity
toward the victim. Agreeableness is also related
to two of the major dimensions of prosocial emotions,
namely empathic concern and personal distress.
Agreeableness is the only dimension of the Big Five
approach to personality to predict both empathic concern
and personal distress. Overall, Agreeableness
seems to predict dispositional prosocial motives to help.

Prejudice
So far, research on Agreeableness and prejudice has
focused on one type of prejudice, antifat bias. Research
shows that low-agreeable people exhibit more prejudice
toward overweight women than their highagreeable
counterparts. Not only do people low in
Agreeableness exhibit more dislike for an overweight
interaction partner, but when given the opportunity to
switch from an overweight to an average weight interaction
partner, low-agreeable people switch more often
than do high-agreeable people. Agreeableness predicts
other forms of prejudice as well. Agreeableness is negatively
related to prejudice against a wide range of both
positive (i.e., handicapped) and negative (i.e., rapists)
social groups, and positively related to efforts to suppress
such prejudice. To examine this idea of suppression,
people were brought into the lab and put under
cognitive load when making decisions about liking for
these groups. Results indicate that when looking at the
groups rated most negatively by everyone (e.g., rapists,
child molesters) suppression has no effect on either
high- or low-agreeable raters. When looking at groups
that are common targets of prejudice (e.g., African
Americans, Hispanics, gays), suppression is linked to
lower prejudice in high-agreeable persons. Apparently,
those high in Agreeableness suppress their prejudices at
least for certain groups.
Implications and Future Directions
Agreeableness is a summary term for individual differences
in liking and attraction toward others. Persons
high in Agreeableness differ systematically from their
peers in emotional responsiveness, empathic responding,
in reports of feeling connected and similar to others,
and in efforts to maintain positive relations with
others. Low levels of Agreeableness are associated with
psychopathology, such as antisocial personality and
narcissism, and with other failures to regulate emotion
and social responses to others.
So far, Agreeableness has been primarily a descriptive
term for behavioral differences. Recently,
researchers have begun probing processes that might
underlie the behavior differences. This focus on
process will help uncover other differences linked to
this major dimension of personality.
Meara M. Habashi
William G. Graziano
See also Attraction; Empathy; Extraversion; Personality and
Social Behavior; Prosocial Behavior
Further Readings
Graziano, W. G. (1994). The development of Agreeableness
as a dimension of personality. In C. F. Halverson, Jr.,
G. A. Kohnstamm, & R. P. Martin (Eds.), The developing
structure of temperament and personality from infancy to
adulthood (pp. 339–354). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Graziano, W. G., & Eisenberg, N. (1997). Agreeableness:
A dimension of personality. In S. Briggs, R. Hogan, &
W. Jones (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology
(pp. 795–824). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five Trait
taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical
perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.),
Handbook of personality: Theory and research
(2nd ed., pp. 102–138). New York: Guilford Press.
ALCOHOL MYOPIA EFFECT
Alcohol Myopia Effect———27
Definition
Alcohol myopia theory states that alcohol intoxication
(getting drunk) decreases the amount of information
that individuals can process. Consequently, when people
are intoxicated, the range of information that they
can pay attention to is restricted, such that intoxicated
people are able to pay attention to only some of the
information that could be registered by a sober person.
In addition, their ability to fully analyze the information
that they have registered is impaired.
Background and History
When asked about the effect of alcohol consumption
on behavior, most people can probably tell a story or
two about a friend who did something really silly or
zany after drinking. On a more serious note, you have
probably also heard about instances where alcohol
intoxication was associated with dangerous behaviors,
such as drunk driving, violence, or unprotected sex. It
is generally believed that alcohol affects behavior
through a process of disinhibition, in that intoxicated
people let go of common sense and do things that they
are normally unwilling to do. Psychological research,
however, suggests that disinhibition alone is an insufficient
explanation for the effects of alcohol on behavior.
Claude Steele and his colleagues have put forth
alcohol myopia theory, which is an alternative theory
to explain the effects of alcohol on behavior.

28———Alcohol Myopia Effect
Importance and Consequences
Alcohol myopia theory explains why alcohol consumption
can sometimes lead to unexpected behaviors
or moods. For example, sometimes a person might
become “the life of the party” after drinking alcohol,
yet in another circumstance, that person might become
quiet and withdrawn after consuming alcohol.
According to alcohol myopia theory, the effect that
alcohol will have on a person is determined by the
pieces of information, or cues, that are most obvious to
the drinker. Because the drinker can attend to only a
small subset of information, the cues that are more
prominent will have the greatest influence on mood
and behavior. Cues that might influence mood and
behavior range from external factors (things that are in
the person’s immediate environment) to internal factors
(things that the person experiences internally, such
as thoughts and feelings). For example, an intoxicated
individual who listens to upbeat music might experience
an elevation in mood, whereas an intoxicated
individual who watches a sad movie is likely to feel
sad. Furthermore, when someone is in a good mood
and thinking about happy things, alcohol consumption
may lead to an elevated mood because the individual
attends primarily to these positive thoughts. By the
same logic, someone who is down in the dumps and
experiencing negative thoughts would be prone to an
increase in sadness after becoming intoxicated.
Alcohol myopia theory also provides an explanation
for why people are often more likely to engage in risky,
dangerous behaviors after drinking, such as unprotected
sex (even when they know the potential costs of these
behaviors). Intoxicated people do not have the ability to
pay attention to both the risks associated with the
behavior (inhibiting cues) and the benefits of the behavior
(impelling cues). Because the immediate benefits of
the behavior (e.g., gratification of sexual arousal) are
often the most attention-grabbing cues, intoxicated
people are most likely to focus on these, at the expense
of taking risk factors into account (e.g., potentially contracting
an STD or causing a pregnancy).
For example, in a study by MacDonald and colleagues,
sober and intoxicated university students were
recruited from a local bar. As they entered the bar,
students received a hand stamp. On some nights, the
hand stamp said, “AIDS kills.” This stamp was intended
to be a salient cue reminding people of one of the major
risks involved in having unprotected sex (contracting an
STD). On other nights, students were given neutral,
innocuous hand stamps (a smiley face). The results of
this study might surprise you. For participants with the
neutral hand stamp, intoxicated participants were more
likely than the sober participants to say they would
have unprotected sex. In contrast (and here is the surprising
part), among those with the “AIDS kills” hand
stamp, intoxicated participants were actually less likely
than sober participants to say they would have unprotected
sex. This result is very counterintuitive to most
people, but it makes sense in the context of alcohol
myopia theory. Presumably, the sober participants were
able to take both the impelling cues (such as sexual
arousal) and the inhibiting cues (such as risk of STDs),
into account when making their decision. As a result,
introducing the “AIDS kills” hand stamp did little to
influence their decision because they were already
considering the full range of relevant information. The
intoxicated participants, on the other hand, were only
capable of focusing on one set of cues. When they had
a neutral hand stamp, the impelling cues were more
attention-grabbing, which made them more open to the
idea of having sex even though a condom was not available.
However, when the “AIDS kills” hand stamp
(a prominent inhibiting cue) was introduced, they
became myopically focused on this inhibiting information
to the exclusion of the impelling cues.
Therefore, alcohol myopia theory predicts that
alcohol intoxication may make people behave in
either a riskier, or more cautious, manner—depending
on the cues that are noticeable. When the benefits of a
risky behavior are very prominent, alcohol should be
associated with riskier behavior. In contrast, when the
costs of a risky behavior are very prominent, alcohol
should be associated with safer behavior. Knowledge
of alcohol myopia can be used to help social psychologists
design interventions that will be effective in
helping to curb some of the dangerous behaviors that
tend to be associated with alcohol consumption.
Katherine L. Waller
Tara K. MacDonald
See also Accessibility; Risk Appraisal; Risk Taking;
Self-Regulation
Further Readings
MacDonald, T. K., Fong, G. T., Zanna, M. P., & Martineau,
A. M. (2000). Alcohol myopia and condom use: Can
alcohol intoxication be associated with more prudent
behavior? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
78, 605–619.

Steele, C. M., & Josephs, R. A. (1990). Alcohol myopia: Its
prized and dangerous effects. American Psychologist,
45, 921–933.
ALTRUISM
Definition
Altruism refers to a motive for helping behavior that
is primarily intended to relieve another person’s distress,
with little or no regard for the helper’s self-interest.
Altruistic help is voluntary, deliberate, and motivated
by concern for another person’s welfare. When help is
given for altruistic reasons, the helper does not expect
repayment, reciprocity, gratitude, recognition, or any
other benefits.
Background and History
Questions about the nature and importance of altruism
have a long history in moral philosophy. For example,
the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, who ministered
to a traveler’s wounds at personal cost while
expecting nothing in return, has become synonymous
with the idea of selfless giving. Among social psychologists,
interest in altruism grew in response to early
studies of helping behavior. Those studies tended to
focus on the act of helping itself, that is, whether or not
one person gave help to another person. As researchers
sought to identify the motives responsible for acts of
helping, it became apparent that two major classes of
motives could underlie helping: egoistic and altruistic.
Egoistic motives are concerned chiefly with benefits
the helper anticipates receiving. These might be material
(repayment, the obligation for future favors in
return), social (appreciation from the recipient, public
recognition), or even personal (the gratifying feeling of
pride for one’s actions). Altruistic motives, on the other
hand, focus directly on the recipient’s need for assistance
and involve sympathy and compassion for the
recipient.
A key debate has contrasted altruistic motivation
with one particular type of egoistic motive, sometimes
called distress reduction. Witnessing another person’s
distress can be profoundly upsetting, and if the helpful
act is motivated first and foremost by the desire to
relieve one’s own upset feelings, the act would be seen
as more egoistic than altruistic. The difference is that
whereas altruistic helping focuses on the recipient’s
need (“You were suffering and I wanted to help”),
egoistic helping focuses on the helper’s feelings
(“I was so upset to see your situation”).
The distinction between egoistic and altruistic
motives for helping behavior has sometimes been controversial.
One reason is that altruistic explanations do
not lend themselves to the kinds of reward–cost theories
that dominated the psychological analysis of motivation
during the mid-20th century. These theories
argued in essence that behavior occurs only when it
maximizes the actor’s rewards while minimizing his or
her costs, a framework that does not facilitate altruistic
interpretations of helping. Nevertheless, it is clear that
acts of helping often involve great personal cost with
little or no reward; one need only consider the behavior
of individuals who rescued Jews from Nazi persecution
or Tutsis from the Rwandan massacre to realize
that helping often does take place for altruistic reasons.
Social psychologist Daniel Batson was instrumental
in introducing methods for studying helping that is
altruistically motivated. One such method involves
using experimental variations to differentially emphasize
either the need of the recipient or the opportunity
to fulfill more egoistic motives. Increases in helping
from one condition to the other can then be attributed
to whichever motive has been strengthened. Another
method involves sophisticated techniques that help
identify what people were thinking about as they considered
helping. In both cases, research has shown
unequivocally that altruistic motives often play an
important role in helping behavior. This sort of helping
is sometimes called true altruism or genuine altruism,
tacit acknowledgment that some forms of helping
behavior are more egoistic in nature. Although from
the perspective of the needy recipient, it may not
matter whether a given act is motivated by egoistic or
altruistic concerns, from a scientific standpoint, the
difference is substantial.
Factors That Contribute to
Altruistic Helping
Altruism———29
The factors that contribute to altruistic helping may be
grouped into two broad categories: those that describe
the individual who helps and those that are more contextual
in nature. Concerning the former, research has
shown that people who are more likely to provide
altruistically motivated help tend to have strong
humanitarian values and feel a relatively great sense of

30———Altruistic Punishment
responsibility for the welfare of others. They also tend
to be more empathic and caring about others than are
more egoistically oriented helpers. In one interesting
line of research, Mario Mikulincer, Phillip Shaver, and
their colleagues have shown that people with a secure
attachment style—that is, people who feel secure and
trusting in their relationships with their closest caregivers
(parents, romantic partners, and others)—tend
to have more altruistic motives in a variety of helping
contexts, including volunteerism (e.g., charity work).
Insecure attachment styles, on the other hand, either
discourage helping or foster more egoistic motives for
helping.
Among the contextual factors that influence altruism,
characteristics of the relationship between helper
and recipient are very important. Empathy is strongly
related to altruistic helping, in two ways: Empathy
involves taking the perspective of the other, and empathy
fosters compassionate caring. Both are more likely
in close, personal relationships, and because people
typically care about the welfare of their close friends,
both tend to increase the likelihood of altruistically
motivated helping.
Identifying with the other person is another contextual
factor thought to increase the likelihood of altruism.
This sense of connection with the other appears to
be particularly important for explaining altruistic helping
to kin and in group contexts. The former refers to
the well-documented fact that the probability of an
altruistic act is greater to the extent that the recipient
shares the helper’s genes; for example, people are
more likely to help their children than their nieces and
nephews but are more likely to help the latter than their
distant relatives or strangers. As for the latter, altruistic
helping is more common with members of one’s
ingroups (the social groups to which one feels that he
or she belongs) than with outsiders to those groups.
Many examples of personal sacrifice during wartime
can be understood as ingroup altruism.
Other studies have shown that when the potential
helper’s sense of empathy is aroused, altruistically
based helping tends to increase. This can be done, for
example, by asking research participants to imagine
how the other person feels in this situation, as opposed
to staying objective and detached. This kind of research
is particularly useful for researchers seeking ways to
increase altruistic helping in the modern world. It suggests
that awareness of the needs of others, combined
with some desire to assist them, may be effective.
Harry T. Reis
See also Empathy; Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis; Helping
Behavior; Prosocial Behavior
Further Readings
Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a
social-psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
ALTRUISTIC PUNISHMENT
Definition
An act is altruistic if it is costly for the acting individual
and beneficial for someone else. Thus, punishment
is altruistic if it is costly for the punisher and if the
punished person’s behavior changes such that others
benefit. This definition does not require an altruistic
motivation.
Example
Think of queuing as an instructive example. Telling a
queue jumper to stand in line is probably (psychologically)
costly for the person confronting the queue
jumper. If the queue jumper gets back into line, all
people who were put at a disadvantage by the queue
jumper benefit.
Evidence
Scientific evidence for altruistic punishment comes
from laboratory “public goods” experiments. In a typical
public goods experiment, participants are randomly
allocated to groups of four players. Each player
is endowed with money units and has to decide how
many to keep for him- or herself and how many to
invest into a “the public good.” The experimenter doubles
the sum invested into the public good and distributes
the doubled sum equally among the four group
members. Thus, every group member receives a quarter
of the doubled sum, irrespective of his or her contribution.
This experiment describes a cooperation
problem: If everyone invests into the public good, the
group is better off collectively; yet free riding makes
everyone better off individually.
The experiments are conducted anonymously,
and participants get paid according to their decisions.
The public goods game is conducted several times
but with new group members in each repetition. To

contribute under such circumstances is altruistic:
Contributing is costly, and all other group members
benefit. The typical result is that people initially invest
into the public good, but altruistic cooperation eventually
collapses.
Now consider the following treatment: After participants
make their contribution, they learn how much others
contributed. Participants then have the possibility to
punish the other group members. Punishment is costly:
The punishing individual has to pay one money unit,
and the punished individual loses three money units.
A money-maximizing individual will never punish,
because punishment is costly and there are no further
interactions with the punished individual. Yet, numerous
experiments have shown that many people nevertheless
punish and free riding becomes rare. Thus, punishment
is altruistic because people incur costs to punish irrespective
of no future interactions with the punished individual
and because the future partners of the punished
free rider benefit from the free rider’s cooperation.
Theoretical Relevance
Evolutionary and economic theories can explain cooperation
by selfish individuals if the benefits of cooperating
exceed the costs. Kinship, repeated interactions with
the same individuals and reputation formation are channels
through which benefits might exceed costs. From
the viewpoint of these theories, altruistic punishment is
a puzzle, because none of these channels was possible in
the experiments and because the costs of punishing outweigh
the benefits for the punishing individual.
See also Altruism; Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis;
Reciprocal Altruism
Further Readings
Simon Gächter
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003). The nature of human
altruism. Nature, 425, 785–791.
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in
humans. Nature, 415, 137–140.
AMBIVALENCE
Definition
People like some things yet dislike others, love some
people but hate others, and sometimes feel happy and
Ambivalence———31
other times sad. From this perspective, feelings—
generally referred to as affect, which includes such
phenomena as attitudes, emotions, and moods—work
in much the same way as temperature. Just as temperature
falls along a simple dimension ranging from hot
to cold, so, too, does affect fall along a simple dimension
ranging from positive to negative.
A closer look, however, reveals that affect may be
more complex than it first appears. Consider your attitude
toward ice cream. You may like ice cream because
it tastes good but also dislike ice cream because that
great taste comes at the expense of vast amounts of fat,
sugar, and calories. If so, you would have what social
psychologists call an ambivalent attitude toward ice
cream. That is, you feel good and bad about it, rather
than simply good or bad. Many people are ambivalent
not only about unhealthy foods but about broccoli and
other healthy foods as well. Similarly, many people are
ambivalent about such unhealthy behaviors as smoking,
as well as such healthy behaviors as exercising. As
people who describe themselves as having love/hate
relationships know, other people can also be a common
source of ambivalence. For instance, many people are
ambivalent about U.S. presidents Bill Clinton or
George W. Bush. Perhaps people feel ambivalent about
politicians because they feel ambivalent about the
social issues that politicians debate. In addition to disagreeing
with each over such troubling issues as legalized
abortion, capital punishment, and civil rights,
people often disagree with themselves.
Such instances of ambivalence suggest that the analogy
between temperature and affect can be taken only
so far. It is impossible for liquids to freeze and boil at
the same time, but it appears that people can feel both
good and bad about the same object. According to John
Cacioppo and Gary Berntson’s evaluative space model,
one implication is that it is better to think of positive
and negative affect as separate dimensions rather than
opposite ends of a single dimension ranging from positive
to negative. From this perspective, people can feel
any pattern of positive and negative affect at the same
time, including high levels of both.
Attitudinal Ambivalence
Contemporary interest in ambivalence stems from
social psychologists’ enduring efforts to understand
the nature of attitudes, which refer to people’s opinions
of people, ideas, and things. Social psychologists have
long measured attitudes by asking people to indicate
how they feel about attitude objects (e.g., ice cream)

32———Ambivalence
on scales with options ranging from extremely good to
extremely bad. In his chapter on attitude measurement
in the 1968 Handbook of Social Psychology, William
Scott pointed out that responses in the middle of bipolar
attitude scales are difficult to interpret. Though
typically assumed to reflect the absence of positive or
negative feeling (i.e., indifference), Scott pointed out
that such responses may in fact reflect ambivalence, or
the presence of both positive and negative affect.
Ambivalence Toward Social Categories
Research has revealed that stereotypes and attitudes
toward racial groups and other social categories are
often ambivalent. For instance, many White Americans
have ambivalent attitudes toward African Americans.
These ambivalent racists sympathize with Blacks for
having been denied the opportunities afforded to other
Americans, but also disparage Blacks because they
perceive Blacks as having failed to uphold the
Protestant work ethic. Peter Glick and Susan Fiske
have explored men’s ambivalent sexism, which is illustrated
by the saying, “Women—you can’t live with
’em and you can’t live without ’em.” Benevolent sexism
involves a sort of protective paternalism in which
men see it as their duty to care for women. In contrast,
hostile sexism involves dominative paternalism in which
men oppose women’s entry into male-dominated professions
and criticize bold, assertive women even though
they praise bold, assertive men. More recently, Glick
and Fiske have demonstrated that stereotypes about
social groups generally represent a tradeoff between
perceptions of warmth and competence. Whereas
homemakers are seen as nurturing but incompetent, for
instance, wealthy individuals are seen as hardworking
but cold.
Measuring Ambivalence
In the early 1970s, Martin Kaplan had the insight to
distinguish ambivalent attitudes from indifferent attitudes
by modifying traditional one-dimensional, bipolar
attitude scales. Rather than asking people to rate
how good or bad they felt about attitude objects,
Kaplan asked them to rate how good and bad they felt
about the attitude object on two separate scales.
Kaplan quantified the amount of ambivalence as the
smaller of the two ratings. In his formula, individuals
who feel exclusively positive (positive = 5, negative = 0),
exclusively negative (0, 5), or indifferent (0, 0) about
some attitude object experience no ambivalence. On
the other hand, people who have some combination of
positive and negative feelings experience some level
of ambivalence depending on the exact combination of
those positive and negative ratings. For instance, if two
individuals feel extremely positive, but one feels moderately
negative (5, 3) and the other only slightly negative
(5, 1), the first is quantified as having more
ambivalence.
The Feeling of Ambivalence
Having ambivalent reactions toward the same thing
often leaves people feeling torn between the two.
Indeed, subsequent researchers found that ambivalence
as measured by Kaplan’s formula is correlated
with ratings of tension, conflict, and other unpleasant
emotions. Interestingly, however, the correlations tend
to be relatively weak. Thus, having both positive and
negative reactions does not necessarily result in feelings
of conflict. Research has revealed a number of
reasons for the weak correlation. One reason is that
feelings of conflict are not only the result of ambivalent
positive and negative reactions. Specifically,
people sometimes feel conflicted, even though they do
not have ambivalent positive and negative reactions,
because they hold attitudes that are at odds with those
of people important to them. For instance, students
who greatly oppose studying (and are not in favor of
it all) may nonetheless feel conflicted if their parents
like them to study. Thus, ambivalence is not only an
intrapersonal phenomenon (i.e., one that happens
within a single person) but an interpersonal phenomenon
(i.e., one that happens between people) as well.
Another reason for the weak correlation is that
people’s ambivalent positive and negative reactions
toward an attitude object only produce feelings of
conflict when the mixed reactions come to mind readily,
which is not always the case.
The Role of Personality
There are also stable individual differences or personality
characteristics that play a role in attitudinal
ambivalence. In fact, a third reason for the low correlation
between having ambivalent positive and negative
reactions and experiencing conflict deals with the
fact that some people have a weaker desire for consistency
than others. As it turns out, Megan Thompson
and Mark Zanna have demonstrated that these people
are not particularly bothered about feeling both good
and bad about the same thing. Perhaps that explains

why these individuals tend to be more likely to have
ambivalent attitudes toward a variety of social issues,
including state-funded abortion, euthanasia (i.e.,
“mercy killing”), and capital punishment. In addition,
people who enjoy thinking tend to have lessambivalent
attitudes, presumably because they manage
to sift through and ultimately make sense of conflicting
evidence for and against different positions on
complex issues.
Consequences of Attitudinal Ambivalence
Ambivalence has a variety of effects on how attitudes
operate. Attitudes are important to social psychology,
in large part because they help predict
behavior. If social psychologists know that someone
has a negative attitude toward capital punishment, for
instance, they can predict with some certainty that the
person will vote to ban capital punishment if given the
opportunity. Compared to other attitudes, however,
ambivalent attitudes do not predict behavior very well.
In addition, ambivalent attitudes are less stable over
time than other attitudes. Thus, if asked about their
attitude toward capital punishment one month and
again the next, people who are ambivalent toward capital
punishment will be less likely than others to report
the same attitude.
Ambivalence also affects how much people change
their minds in the face of advertisements and other
persuasive appeals, messages designed by one person
or group of people to change other people’s attitudes.
For instance, Gregory Maio and colleagues found that
when people are presented with a persuasive message
dealing with issues that they are ambivalent about,
they pay especially close attention to whether the
message makes a compelling case or not. Thus, they
tend to be more persuaded by strong arguments than
are people with nonambivalent attitudes but also less
persuaded by weak arguments. One explanation for
this finding is that people with ambivalent attitudes
scrutinize persuasive messages more carefully in
hopes that the message will contain new information
that will help them resolve their ambivalence. It
appears that people with ambivalent attitudes are also
more likely to change their attitudes to bring them into
line with their peers’ attitudes. The picture that has
emerged is that when people feel ambivalent, they will
do whatever it takes to make up their minds, whether
that involves the hard work of paying close attention
to persuasive messages or the easier work of looking
to their peers for guidance.
Mixed Emotions
Contemporary work on attitudinal ambivalence has
recently prompted research on emotional ambivalence.
Whereas attitudes represent affective reactions
to some object, such as capital punishment or a political
figure, emotions represent one’s own current affective
state.
Most individuals at least occasionally experience
such positive emotions as happiness, excitement, and
relaxation and such negative emotions as sadness, anger,
and fear, just to name a few. Research on attitudinal
ambivalence makes clears that sometimes people can
feel both good and bad about the same object, but this
does not mean that people can experience such seemingly
opposite emotions as happiness and sadness at the
same time. Indeed, one prominent model of emotion
contends that happiness and sadness are mutually exclusive.
In contrast, John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson’s
evaluative space model contends that people can sometimes
experience mixed emotions.
The Historical Debate
This disagreement represents the latest chapter in
a long debate over the existence of mixed emotions.
Socrates suggested that, for instance, tragic plays elicit
mixed emotions by evoking pleasure in the midst of
tears. Centuries later, David Hume argued for mixed
emotions, but the Scottish philosopher Alexander
Bain argued against mixed emotions. In the first two
decades of the 20th century, students of Wilhelm Wundt,
Hermann Ebbinghaus, and other pioneering psychologists
conducted more than a dozen experiments in
hopes of gathering data that would answer the question
of mixed emotions. In an illustrative study, observers
described how they felt after viewing pairs of pleasant
and unpleasant photographs that alternated more than
100 times per minute. Nevertheless, researchers were
unable to agree on how to interpret observers’ descriptions
of their feelings. As a result, this early literature
has largely been forgotten.
Contemporary Evidence for
Mixed Emotions
Ambivalence———33
Thanks in part to the development of more valid
measures of emotion, researchers have recently been
able to reopen the question of mixed emotions. The
question is far from settled, but recent evidence suggests
that people can feel both happy and sad at the

34———Ambivalence
same time. In a study conducted by Jeff Larsen and colleagues,
moviegoers reported whether they felt happy,
sad, and a variety of other emotions before or after seeing
the tragicomic 1998 Italian film Life Is Beautiful,
which depicts a father’s attempts to keep his son alive
and unaware of their plight during their imprisonment
in a World War II concentration camp. Before the
movie, nearly everyone felt happy or sad, not both.
After the film, however, half the people surveyed felt
both happy and sad. In similar studies, college students
were more likely to feel both happy and sad immediately
after graduating or turning in the key to their dormitories
than during typical days on campus.
In other research, people played a variety of computerized
card games in which they had the opportunity
to win one of two amounts of money, such as $12
or $5. Winning $12 instead of $5 led people to feel
good and not at all bad. Winning $5 instead of $12,
however, led people to feel both good and bad. These
outcomes can be seen as disappointing wins: Winning
$5 feels good, but it also feels disappointing if there
was an opportunity to win even more.
Mixed Emotions in Children
Developmental psychologists have studied the
development of children’s understanding of mixed
emotions. In one study, children listened to a story
about a child who had received a new kitten to replace
one that had run away. During a subsequent interview,
4- and 5-year-olds rejected the notion that the child
would feel both happy and sad about getting the new
kitten. Older children, however, thought the child
would feel mixed emotions. In a similar study, children
were interviewed about their emotions after viewing a
clip from the animated film The Little Mermaid in
which a mermaid must say goodbye to her father forever
after marrying a human. Older children were
more likely to feel mixed emotions of happiness and
sadness than were younger children. Taken together,
the results of these studies suggest that both the understanding
and experience of mixed emotions represent
developmental milestones.
Consequences of Mixed Emotions
Little research to date has examined the consequences
of mixed emotions. One notable exception is
evidence that European Americans find advertisements
that evoke mixed emotions more unpleasant than do
Asian Americans, who tend to have a greater propensity
for dealing with contradictory information. As a
result, the advertisements were also less persuasive for
European Americans than Asian Americans. Among
European Americans, younger individuals find mixed
emotional advertisements more unpleasant than older
individuals, suggesting that the effects of age on mixed
emotions, demonstrated by developmental psychologists,
extend far beyond childhood.
Conclusion
People probably feel good or bad about most things
and happy or sad most of the time. Indeed, it appears
that ambivalence is a relatively uncommon phenomenon.
It is nonetheless a particularly intriguing phenomenon
because it gives us a unique glimpse into
how affect works. It may appear that feelings fall
along a simple dimension ranging from good to bad,
but the evidence for ambivalence suggests that positive
and negative affect are, in fact, separate processes
that can be experienced at the same time.
Jeff T. Larsen
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Attitude–Behavior
Consistency; Attitude Change; Attitudes; Attitude
Strength; Dual Attitudes; Emotion; Prejudice
Further Readings
Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (1994). Relationship
between attitudes and evaluative space: A critical review,
with emphasis on the separability of positive and negative
substrates. Psychological Bulletin, 115, 401–423.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. (2001). An ambivalent alliance:
Hostile and benevolent sexism as complementary
justifications for gender inequality. American
Psychologist, 56, 109–118.
Jonas, K., Broemer, P., & Diehl, M. (2000). Attitudinal
ambivalence. European Review of Social Psychology,
11, 35–74.
Larsen, J. T., McGraw, A. P., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2001). Can
people feel happy and sad at the same time? Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 684–696.
Larsen, J. T., McGraw, A. P., Mellers, B. A., & Cacioppo, J. T.
(2004). The agony of victory and thrill of defeat: Mixed
emotional reactions to disappointing wins and relieving
losses. Psychological Science, 15, 325–330.
Priester, J. R., & Petty, R. E. (1996). The gradual threshold
model of ambivalence: Relating the positive and negative

ases of attitudes to subjective ambivalence. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 431–449.
Thompson, M. M., Zanna, M. P., & Griffin, D. W. (1995).
Let’s not be indifferent about (attitudinal) ambivalence.
In R. E. Petty & J. A. Krosnick (Eds.), Attitude strength:
Antecedents and consequences (pp. 361–386). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
ANCHORING AND
ADJUSTMENT HEURISTIC
Definition
Life requires people to estimate uncertain quantities.
How long will it take to complete a term paper? How
high will mortgage rates be in five years? What is the
probability of a soldier dying in a military intervention
overseas? There are many ways to try to answer
such questions. One of the most common is to start
with a value that seems to be in the right ballpark and
then adjust it until a satisfactory estimate is obtained.
“My last paper took a week to write, but this one is
more demanding so maybe two weeks is a good
guess.” “Mortgage rates are low by historic levels, so
perhaps they’ll be a couple of points higher in five
years.” “The fatality rate in the last war was 1.5%, but
our enemies are catching up technologically; maybe
4% is a more likely figure in the next conflict.”
Estimates such as these are based on what psychologists
call the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. You
start with an initial anchor value and then adjust until an
acceptable answer is found. The choice of the term
anchor for the starting value speaks to one of the most
interesting features of this procedure: People typically
fail to adjust sufficiently. That is, the initial value exerts
some “drag” on the final estimate, systematically biasing
the result.
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who brought
the anchoring and adjustment heuristic to psychologists’
attention, provided a clear demonstration of the
insufficiency of adjustment. They spun a “wheel of
fortune” and asked participants if certain quantities
were higher or lower than the number on which the
wheel landed. The participants were then asked to estimate
the precise value of the quantity in question. For
example, some participants were asked whether the
percentage of African countries in the United Nations
is higher or lower than 10%. Their subsequent average
Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic———35
estimate of the actual percentage was 25%. Other participants
were initially asked whether the percentage of
African countries in the United Nations is higher or
lower than 65%. Their average subsequent estimate
was 45%. Thus, the initial anchor value, even when its
arbitrary nature was quite apparent, had a pronounced
effect on final judgments.
In another telling demonstration, Tversky and
Kahneman asked people to tell them within five seconds
the product of either 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 × 5 × 6 × 7 × 8 or
8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1. Because the allotted time
was too short to permit an exact calculation, respondents
had to estimate. The first group did so by extrapolating
from a relatively low number (“one times two is two,
two times three is six...so it’s probably about...”).
The second group started from a larger number (“eight
times seven is fifty-six...so...”). Because the two
groups of respondents started with different anchor values,
they came up with predictably different estimates.
The average estimate of the first group was 512,
whereas the average estimate of the second group was
2,250. If initial anchor values did not bias final estimates,
the average estimates of the two groups would
have been the same. Clearly, they were not. Note that the
actual answer is 40,320, which shows even more powerfully
that both groups adjusted insufficiently.
The anchoring and adjustment heuristic is of great
interest to psychologists because it helps to explain a
wide variety of different psychological phenomena.
For example, people’s estimates of what other people
are thinking are often egocentrically biased (i.e.,
people assume that others think more similarly to how
they themselves think than is actually the case)
because they tend to start with their own thoughts and
then adjust (insufficiently) for another person’s perspective.
People suffer from a hindsight bias, thinking
that past outcomes were more predictable at the time
than they really were, because they anchor on current
knowledge and then adjust (insufficiently) for the fact
that certain things that are known now were not known
back then. Also, people tend to assume that they will
do better than others on easy tasks because they start
with an assumption that they will do well themselves
and then adjust (insufficiently) for the fact that other
people are also likely to do well on such easy tasks.
Beyond its importance to psychologists, the anchoring
and adjustment heuristic has important implications
for all of us in our daily lives. We must all be alert
to the influence that arbitrary starting values can have
on our estimates, and we must guard against individuals

36———Androgyny
who might try to sway our judgments by introducing
starting values that serve their interests, not ours. It has
been shown, for example, that an opening proposal in
a negotiation often exerts undue influence on the final
settlement, and so we may want to pay considerable
attention to how the opening proposals are made and
who makes them. It has also been shown that the items
we buy in the grocery store are powerfully affected by
the anchor values that are put in our heads by advertisers.
In one study, for example, an end-of-the-aisle promotional
sign stated either “Snickers Bars: Buy 18 for
your Freezer” or “Snickers Bars: Buy them for your
Freezer.” Customers bought 38% more when the
advertisers put the number 18 in customers’ heads.
Buyer beware.
Thomas Gilovich
See also Behavioral Economics; Door-in-the-Face Technique;
Heuristic Processing; Hindsight Bias; Persuasion
Further Readings
Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). Putting adjustment back in
the anchoring and adjustment heuristic: Self-generated
versus experimenter provided anchors. Psychological
Science, 12, 391–396.
Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. W., & Kahneman, D. (2002).
Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive
judgment. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185,
1124–1131.
Wansink, B., Kent, R. J., & Hoch, S. J. (1998). An anchoring
and adjustment model of purchase quantity decisions.
Journal of Marketing Research, 35, 71–81.
ANDROGYNY
Definition
The term androgyny is derived from the Greek andro
(man) and gyne (woman). The popular conception of
androgyny is a blend of male and female characteristics
or a person who is neither male nor female.
Psychological androgyny refers to men and women
who exhibit both masculine and feminine attributes.
Background and History
Psychologists have measured masculinity and femininity,
along with other important personality traits, since
the early 20th century. These early tests were developed
by identifying items that reflected differences
in men’s and women’s responses. For example, the
masculinity–femininity scale of the original Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory included items that
male participants endorsed as being descriptive of their
personality attributes. At that time, psychologists shared
the Western cultural assumption that mentally healthy
men were masculine and mentally healthy women were
feminine. Therefore, it was expected that male participants
would have higher masculinity scores than would
female participants.
These early tests measured masculinity–femininity
as a single dimension, with masculinity at one end of
a continuum and femininity at the other end of the
continuum. Therefore, the higher participants would
score on masculinity, the lower they would score on
femininity. Likewise, the higher participants would
score on femininity, the lower they would score on
masculinity. It was impossible to score high on both
masculinity and femininity.
In the 1970s, many psychologists criticized these traditional
tests. This criticism paralleled a shift in Western
cultural assumptions about men, women, and traditional
sex role socialization. During that time, Sandra Lipsitz
Bem designed a new psychological test, the Bem
Sex Role Inventory (BSRI). The BSRI was designed
to address some of the criticisms of the traditional
masculinity–femininity tests. Instead of items selected
on the basis of sex differences in participants’ responses,
the BSRI contains items that male and female participants
rated as desirable for American men and women.
The masculinity scale consists of items that were rated
as slightly more socially desirable for men (e.g., aggressive
and ambitious). The femininity scale consists of
items that were rated as slightly more socially desirable
for women (e.g., affectionate and cheerful). Moreover,
the BSRI assesses masculinity and femininity as independent,
separate dimensions. Male and female participants
can score high on masculinity and low on
femininity (traditional masculinity), low on masculinity
and high on femininity (traditional femininity), high on
both masculinity and on femininity (androgynous), and
low on both masculinity and femininity (undifferentiated).
These latter two groups were impossible to identify
with the early psychological tests.

Sex-Role Flexibility and Mental Health
Research on androgyny has addressed two questions
based on Western cultural assumptions about socialization
to traditional sex roles: psychological adjustment
and mental health. One line of research has tested
the hypothesis that socializing men and women to traditional
masculine or feminine sex roles would lead to
rigidity and restricted behavior in many social situations.
Because androgynous people have masculine
and feminine attributes, they should have the flexibility
to adapt to situations that require masculine or feminine
behaviors. One series of studies, for example,
found that androgynous men and women were more
nurturing toward an infant than were masculine men
and women. Moreover, androgynous men and women
performed better in another experimental situation that
required independence than did feminine men and
women. In another study, masculine men and feminine
women were more likely to choose an experimental
activity that was appropriate for their sex (e.g., oiling
squeaky hinges on a metal box vs. mixing infant formula
and preparing a bottle) than were androgynous
men and women. Moreover, masculine men and feminine
women reported feeling worse after performing a
sex-inappropriate activity than did androgynous men
and women.
Other studies have addressed the relationship of
androgyny, psychological adjustment, and mental
health. Whereas some studies have found androgynous
people to have higher self-esteem than traditional masculine
or feminine people, the results of other studies
are contradictory or mixed. An extensive review of published
studies in the area concluded that androgynous
and masculine men and women scored higher on several
indices of mental health than did feminine men and
women. However, statistical analyses indicated that it is
the masculinity component of androgyny that is related
to mental health rather than the unique combination of
masculinity and femininity. The researchers attribute
these findings to the psychological benefits masculine
men and women enjoy in a culture that encourages
assertiveness, competence, and independence.
Current Status
Psychological tests like the BSRI are an important
improvement upon the tests constructed in the early
20th century. However, critics assert that because
masculinity and femininity consist of a multitude of
dimensions, these tests are inadequate. Other critics
assert that tests such as the BSRI measure two important
dimensions that are characteristic of sex roles
across cultures: Masculinity items measure instrumental
attributes (representing agency and independence),
and femininity items measure expressive attributes
(representing nurturance and warmth). Finally, Bem
has changed her views on psychological androgyny.
She believes that masculine or feminine people think
about the world from the perspective of gender, whereas
androgynous men and women do not.
Cheryl A. Rickabaugh
See also Masculinity/Femininity; Self-Esteem; Sex Roles
Further Readings
Bem, S. L. (1975). Sex role adaptability: One consequence of
psychological androgyny. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 31, 634–643.
Bem, S. L. (1984). Androgyny and gender schema theory:
A conceptual and empirical integration. Nebraska
Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 32, pp. 179–226).
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Bem, S. L. (1987). Probing the promise of androgyny. In
M. R. Walsh (Ed.), The psychology of women: Ongoing
debates (pp. 206–222). New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Spence, J. T., & Buckner, C. E. (2000). Instrumental and
expressive traits, trait stereotypes, and sexist attitudes:
What do they signify? Psychology of Women Quarterly,
24, 44–62.
ANGER
Definition
Anger———37
The term anger has multiple meanings in everyday language.
People refer to anger as an experience or feeling,
a set of physiological reactions, an attitude toward
others, a drive leading to aggression, or an overt assault
upon some target. In social psychology, anger refers to
a particular set of feelings. The feelings usually labeled
as “anger” range in intensity from being irritated or
annoyed to being furious or enraged. These feelings
stem, to a large degree, from the internal physiological
reactions and involuntary emotional expressions produced
by an offense or mistreatment. Visual features

38———Anger
include facial changes, like frowning eyebrows and
dilated nostrils, and motor reactions, such as clenching
fists. These feelings are simultaneously influenced by
thoughts and memories (i.e., appraisals) that arise. All
of these sensory inputs are combined in a person’s mind
to form the experience of anger. This experience is not
aimed at achieving a goal; nor does it serve any useful
purpose for the individual in that particular situation.
Distinction From Other Concepts
The terms anger, hostility, and aggressiveness are often
used interchangeably in everyday life. Social psychologists
define hostility as a negative attitude toward one
or more people that is reflected in a decidedly unfavorable
judgment of the target. To differentiate, aggressiveness
is any form of behavior directed toward the
goal of harming a target. In other words, aggressiveness
can also be seen as a disposition toward becoming
aggressive. In sum, anger as an experience does not
directly activate aggressiveness.
Physiological Reactions
A large body of early research has investigated the
mental representations of bodily reactions in anger.
Across different investigations, individuals experienced
increases in cardiovascular (e.g., higher blood pressure)
and muscular (e.g., heightened bodily tension) activity,
accompanied by the face feeling hot. This latter observation
is consistent with the widespread characterization
of anger as a “hot” emotion.
Appraisal Conceptions of Anger
Several contemporary researchers started to extend the
focus from the internal physiological aspects to interpretations
of external features having an impact on
affective states. This so-called appraisal-based view of
anger contends that anger exists only when external
events are interpreted in a specific manner, that is,
when individuals give meaning (i.e., appraise) to the
specific situation they are in. More specifically,
appraisal researchers argue that the precipitating incident
has to be interpreted as an offense or mistreatment.
Furthermore, whether individuals see themselves
or another person responsible, or whether they blame
themselves or another person (i.e., appraisal of
agency), for the mistreatment triggers either anger
experienced toward the self (i.e., self-directed anger)
or the other person (i.e., other-directed anger).
There are several theoretical claims of appraisal formulations
that emphasize a different appraisal structure
and appraisal process. Much research has been dedicated
to test these different formulations against one
another. Despite these different formulations, what can
be derived from this research is that appraisal formulations
can indeed account for the experience of anger.
Anger and Behavior
If an individual is angry with someone else, the desire
to act feeds into a “moving against” tendency. The
phrase “moving against” characterizes the behavioral
impulses activated in the state of anger. Research has
shown that anger can trigger action tendencies like
striking out or attacking the perpetrator responsible for
the elicitation of anger. They are expressed, for example,
by verbally or even physically attacking a target.
Anger and Health
Besides triggering action tendencies in the short run,
anger has been shown to lead to health problems in the
long run. This line of research suggests that the experience
of anger, which is accompanied by the cardiovascular
(e.g., higher blood pressure) and muscular
(e.g., heightened bodily tension) activity, is a risk factor
for coronary heart disease.
Recognition of Anger
So how do we come to associate specific movements
and gestures of someone else with a specific emotional
state? Several researchers have proposed different
processes of emotional contagion and/or simulation
that provide the means by which we come to know
what others are feeling. The idea of emotional contagion
implies that a visual representation of another’s
expression leads us to experience what the other person
is feeling, which in turn allows us to infer that
person’s emotional state. Furthermore, research has
indicated that participants exposed to angry faces show
increased activity in specific facial muscles (e.g., by
frowning their eyebrows). Thus, these data suggest that
emotional faces generally induce their mirror images
in their observers.
Measurement
Anger is often measured as a dependent variable. In
this large body of research, individuals are asked to

indicate their level of anger. This self-report measure
has one main problem: The measure is influenced by
the respondent’s perception. Over the years, the focus
on investigating emotions has changed, and several
assessments have been developed to study different
aspects of emotions. There are three main ways to
assess the basic processes of anger. First, the physiological
arousal (in other words, the excitement of
anger) is often measured by heart rate, muscle tension,
or skin conductance. Second, the affective state that
represents the feelings and signs of anger is assessed
by facial coding of the expression. Finally, the external
consideration concerning the cause of the affective
state put forward by appraisal theorists is measured by
asking individuals directly for their interpretations of
the current situation.
See also Affect; Aggression; Emotion
Further Readings
Nina Hansen
Berkowitz, L. (1999). Anger. In T. Dalgleish & M. J. Power
(Eds.), Handbook of cognition and emotion (pp. 411–428).
New York: Wiley.
Feldman Barrett, L., Niedenthal, P. M., & Winkielman, P.
(Eds.). (2005). Emotion and consciousness. New York:
Guilford Press.
ANONYMITY
See DEINDIVIDUATION
ANTICIPATORY ATTITUDE CHANGE
Definition
Anticipatory attitude change refers to shifting or
changing one’s expressed opinion or attitude on a
topic as a result of being informed that one will be
exposed to a message or communication on the topic.
Thus, prior to receiving any aspect of the message
itself, people might adjust their opinions on a topic to
be more positive, negative, or neutral simply in anticipation
of receiving a message. In other words, when
you know someone is going to try to change your
Anticipatory Attitude Change———39
mind, you may change it some already in advance,
before even hearing what that person has to say.
Anticipatory attitude change has been studied primarily
within the domain of forewarning research, which
involves informing people they will be exposed to a persuasive
message. Within this domain, researchers have
focused on how people’s reporting of their opinions
change as a result of warning them they will receive a
message, prior to actually receiving the message.
Motives for Anticipatory
Attitude Change
Anticipatory attitude change has been argued to stem
from several different motives. First, if the topic of the
message challenges the beliefs held by individuals,
individuals may respond by becoming more negative
on the topic prior to message exposure. This negative
response might result from a simple negative feeling
associated with having one’s opinion attacked, or
might result from a more thoughtful attempt to consider
the reasons in favor of one’s attitude against the
opposing perspective.
A second motivation that might underlie anticipatory
attitude change reflects a desire to avoid feeling
gullible by providing perspectives that are in agreement
with others. Thus, individuals who are told the
position of a message may shift their attitudes, in a
manner to agree with the message, prior to message
exposure to avoid appearing as if they had been persuaded.
If the message is in favor of a position, individuals’
attitudes will become more positive toward
the position; if the message is against a position, individuals’
attitudes will become more negative toward
the position.
A final cause for anticipatory attitude change follows
from concerns about interacting with a person or
expressing one’s attitude without knowing whether
the message or person is in favor or against a particular
topic. When another person’s view is not known,
the best way to safely allow for the possibility of
agreement is simply to shift one’s attitude to be more
moderate. This allows one to more easily take a position
similar to the person or message once they learn
the position endorsed. For example, if a person
becomes more moderate in his or her views, that person
is more easily able to agree with another person
regardless of the other person’s stance on the topic.
Although evidence is still accumulating as to when
and whether each of the previously discussed motives
operates, it seems likely that each may serve as a

40———Antisocial Behavior
motive for anticipatory attitude change under the right
circumstances.
Anticipatory Attitude
Change and Topic
One important determinant of the effects of anticipatory
attitude change is the topic of the message. On the
one hand, if people perceive they will be receiving a
message that threatens a valued topic or cherished attitude,
they are likely to respond by becoming even
more entrenched in their position (i.e., shifting their
attitudes to be more opposed to the message position).
On the other hand, if people perceive they will be
receiving a message that does not challenge important
beliefs, they are more inclined to respond by showing
acquiescence and shifting their attitudes in favor of the
position perceived to be advocated by the message.
Anticipatory Attitude Change and
Likelihood of Being Persuaded
A second important moderator of whether people shift
their attitude toward the message (for less-important
topics) is whether people feel they are likely to be persuaded
by the message. Individuals are much more
inclined to show anticipatory attitude shifts if they
believe a message will persuade them. Consequently,
research has found individuals show more agreement
with a position, prior to the message, if they believe
the message is expected to be highly persuasive or to
be delivered by a highly persuasive source (e.g., a person
with expertise or knowledge). These findings are
consistent with the idea that people might sometimes
shift their attitudes to avoid appearing to have been
persuaded and gullible.
Duration of Anticipatory
Attitude Change
The long-term effects of anticipatory attitude change
may well depend on whether an actual message is
received or not. In fact, research suggests that anticipatory
attitude change may be extremely short-lived if
no message is presented. When people are informed
they will no longer be receiving a message and then
are asked to provide their attitude a second time, their
attitudes often revert back to the same attitudes they
had prior to the anticipatory attitude change. Thus, an
individual who became more negative toward a topic,
upon learning a message would be given on that topic,
would become less negative as soon as he or she
learned the message would not be given, reverting
back to his or her original opinion.
If a message is actually presented, however, the attitudes
resulting from anticipatory attitude change may
influence how the message is processed or scrutinized.
For example, individuals may attend to the information
in a message in a manner that supports the attitudes that
resulted from anticipatory attitude change. Individuals
who become more negative in anticipation of the message
may focus on the negatives within the message,
reaffirming their negative attitudes upon hearing the
message. Similarly, individuals who become more positive
in anticipation of the message may focus on the
positives within the message, reaffirming their positive
attitudes. This pattern of processing may lead to actual
and enduring attitude change. As a result, anticipatory
attitude change might also have potentially long-term
and enduring results.
Derek D. Rucker
See also Attitudes; Forewarning; Inoculation Theory;
Persuasion; Reactance
Further Readings
Quinn, J. M., & Wood, W. (2004). Forewarnings of influence
appeals: Inducing resistance and acceptance. In
E. S. Knowles & J. A. Linn (Eds.), Resistance and
persuasion (pp. 193–213). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wood, W., & Quinn, J. M. (2003). Forewarned and forearmed?
Two meta-analysis syntheses of forewarnings of influence
appeal. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 119–138.
ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Definition
Antisocial behavior refers to actions that violate social
norms in ways that reflect disregard for others or that
reflect the violation of others’ rights. The major reason
to study antisocial behavior is that it is harmful to
people. Also, it raises issues of whether people are
inherently prone to be harmful to others and whether
harmful, reckless people can be cured.

Distinctions and Examples
Antisocial behavior encompasses a wide range of
behaviors, such as initiating physical fights, bullying,
lying to others for personal gain, being reckless
toward others, and even engaging in unlawful acts that
do not directly hurt others but indirectly affect others
in a negative way (such as stealing or vandalizing personal
property). One distinction among various antisocial
acts is whether the acts are overt versus
covert—that is, whether the acts are hidden from others.
A second distinction is whether the behavior is
destructive—that is, whether the behavior directly
harms another person. For example, destructive overt
acts include physical or verbal aggression, bullying,
fighting, threatening, being spiteful, cruel, and rejecting
or ostracizing another person. Examples of nondestructive
overt acts include arguing, stubbornness, and
having a bad temper with others. Examples of destructive
covert acts include stealing, lying, cheating, and
destroying property, whereas nondestructive covert
acts might include truancy, substance use, and swearing.
When considering the most versus least harm to
others, overt destructive acts are most severe, followed
by covert destructive acts, overt nondestructive
acts, and finally nondestructive covert acts.
Boys and men are more often perpetrators of antisocial
behavior than are girls and women, and they differ
in what they do. Males are more likely to engage in
criminal activity and overt aggression; females are
more likely to engage in relational aggression or harm
caused by damaging a peer’s reputation (e.g., spreading
rumors, excluding them from the peer group).
Prevalence and Persistence
The majority of men who engage in antisocial acts do
so only during their adolescent years. Antisocial behavior
is so common during adolescence that a majority of
men do something antisocial, such as having police
contact for an infringement; roughly one third of boys
are labeled delinquent at some point during their adolescence.
However, most of them cease their antisocial
ways by their mid-20s. Terrie Moffitt termed this adolescence-limited
antisocial behavior. In contrast, she
suggests that life-course-persistent antisocial behavior
is committed only by a minority of people. These men
show antisocial tendencies and traits as children (even
during infancy). These tendencies persist throughout
their lives, even if the behaviors per se cease during mid
Antisocial Behavior———41
to late adulthood. They typically are diagnosed with
antisocial personality disorder, which means they show
a persistent pattern of frequent antisocial behavior as
adults. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM–IV), published in 1994 by the
American Psychiatric Association, describes the characteristics
that lead to this diagnosis. In short, while
many people engage in antisocial behavior once or
occasionally during adolescence, many fewer people
show a persistent antisocial behavior pattern that begins
early in life and continues into adulthood.
Causes and Treatment
Because antisocial behaviors have obvious negative
consequences for victims, especially, but also for perpetrators
(e.g., prison), substantial research has gone
toward understanding what causes antisocial behavior
and how it can be stopped.
Theory and research to understand who is likely to
engage in antisocial behavior have resulted in two different
views, resurrecting the nature versus nurture
debate. One view is that biological factors present at
birth, such as genes and inherent personality traits, are
most important in determining antisocial behavior.
The other view emphasizes environmental factors,
such as parenting style (e.g., ineffective responses to
child aggression, poor communication, weak family
bonds, child neglect and/or abuse), peer relationships
(e.g., being around others who are antisocial, being
rejected by peers, social isolation), poverty, and lack
of education.
The distinction between adolescence-limited and
life-course-persistent antisocial behavior is relevant to
understanding causes. When this distinction is omitted,
analyses that integrate information from many studies
(meta-analyses) suggest that 40% to 50% of examined
instances of antisocial behavior may be due to genetic
influences rather than environmental influences.
However, studies do not capture all instances of antisocial
behavior and likely overrepresent people whose
antisocial tendencies are persistent over time. People
whose antisocial acts persist throughout the life course
are more likely to have brains that are programmed
toward antisocial behavior that, when combined with
the right environmental factors and expectations from
others, trigger antisocial behavior. People whose antisocial
acts are limited to adolescence may suffer from
being emotionally or socially immature (relative to

42———Anxiety
their biological age), and as such, they are vulnerable
to the influence of persistent antisocial peers and models.
Moreover, the heritability of antisocial behavior
depends on the act being examined; property crimes
show a greater genetic influence than violent crimes.
If antisocial behavior cannot be effectively prevented,
it becomes important to stop it. In general,
interventions to stop life-course-persistent antisocial
behavior have had only limited to no success. Even
medical treatments are ineffective. Moreover, these
individuals are reluctant to seek help and typically are
court-ordered into treatment. Interventions on those
who engage in adolescence-limited antisocial behavior
have been more successful, particularly treatments
based on teaching behavioral skills (rather than counseling-based
treatments).
Implications
Ultimately researchers study the nature, causes, and
limits of antisocial behavior to understand whether
people are innately reckless or harmful toward others
and whether such people can be stopped. Although
there has been progress in identifying causes, the
issue of predicting with certainty who will engage in
antisocial behavior remains unresolved. Moreover,
effective treatment for persistent antisocial behavior is
in its infancy and stands to be developed further.
Ximena B. Arriaga
Nicole M. Capezza
See also Aggression; Bullying; Deception (Lying); Intimate
Partner Violence; Narcissism; Ostracism; Sexual
Harassment
Further Readings
Moffitt, T. E. (1993). Adolescence-limited and life-course
persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy.
Psychological Review, 100, 674–701.
Stoff, D. M., Breiling, J., & Maser, J. D. (1997). Handbook
of antisocial behavior. New York: Wiley.
ANXIETY
Definition
Anxiety is an unpleasant emotional state, characterized
by tension, apprehension, and worry. It occurs in
response to a perceived threat, which in the case of
fear is fairly specific and identifiable (e.g., seeing a
snake) but in the case of anxiety tends to be vague and
suspenseful (e.g., giving a speech). It is a defensive
response, one that signals danger and, like other emotions,
is thought to have an important function related
to survival. In the social arena, the threat is the perceived
potential harm to one’s self-esteem, self-worth,
or self-concept. The anxiety can be domain specific
(e.g., text anxiety, public speaking anxiety). Anxiety
can help an individual identify a negative event and
cope with it; if excessive or uncontrollable, however,
anxiety is maladaptive.
Background
The concept of anxiety has a long and revered history
in psychology, beginning at least with Sigmund Freud
who offered one early conceptualization. He saw anxiety
as a warning signal that something threatening
could happen. For Freud, neurotic anxiety was the central
concern. This is the unconscious fear that one’s
impulses (the Id) may take over and lead a person to do
things that would be punished. The anxiety is a signal
to one’s rational side (the Ego), and the unconscious
worry reflects the internal psychological battle between
these psychic forces.
Later theorists, sometimes called post-Freudian,
characterized anxiety as basic, stemming from a child’s
dependency (particularly feelings of being isolated and
helpless in a potentially hostile world). Being raised in
a nurturing home, however, where security, trust, love,
tolerance, and warmth prevail can replace such fears
of being abandoned and produce more adaptive relations
with other people. Abraham Maslow is highly
regarded for his proposal of a hierarchy of needs and
his focus on the positive side of human experience (i.e.,
self-actualization). But he is also noted for placing
safety and physical security needs at a fundamental
level on the hierarchy, suggesting that they must be satisfied
before higher-order needs such as love, esteem,
and actualization can be realized.
These ideas set the stage for contemporary research
on attachment theory, where the emotional connection
between a caregiver and child can either prove secure
and dependable (i.e., safe) or insecure. The importance
of attachment and a sense of belongingness, and trust
in relationships, have come to be central themes for
contemporary social psychology. The attachment
patterns of adults shows that these infant attachment

patterns either persist into adulthood or emerge again
in adult long-term intimate relationships.
The social psychological roots of the anxiety construct
can also be traced to William James’s hypothesis
that an emotional state is the result of an interaction
of bodily changes and cognitive life. Stanley Schachter
and Jerome Singer’s famous two-factor theory of emotion
sees an emotional state as the combination of a
diffuse physiological arousal coupled with a cognitive
interpretation of that arousal. When the source of
arousal is easily identified, the emotion is easily
labeled. However, when no arousal is expected, people
are subject to cues in the environment that would stimulate
an emotion. When those cues are vague and illdefined,
the subjective experience may be threatening
and may produce anxiety.
The Nature of Anxiety
Anxiety is generally regarded as having a set of component
parts that include cognitive functioning, physiological,
emotional, and behavioral facets. One cognitive
component is the expectation of uncertain danger, of
course. Anxiety also uses up attention capacity. One
consequence is that people with high test anxiety or high
social anxiety become less efficient in their behavior,
once anxiety is aroused, and their attention is divided.
The disruptive impact of anxiety on behavior is illustrated
by the large number of errors on performancerelated
tasks, such as speech-anxious individuals making
more speech errors, stammering more, producing more
“um” sounds.
Anxiety also stimulates intense vigilance and attention
to threat. Anxious individuals are faster to find
threat, even in a word recognition task (i.e., threatening
words) that involves reaction times measured in
fractions of a second. This shows their threat-focused
information processing style.
Anxiety is associated with increases in cardiac
reactivity (e.g., heart rate and blood pressure) and
with other physiological indices (e.g., blood flow to
major muscle groups, sweating, trembling, etc.).
Physiological arousal is characterized by heightened
activation of the automatic nervous system and serves
to energize behavior. Physiological arousal can be
interpreted positively (as elation, surprise, or attraction),
or negatively (as fear, anger, or anxiety).
Most contemporary brain researchers agree that
there are two anatomically distinct pathways that interpret
physiological arousal: the behavioral approach
system (BAS) and the behavioral inhibition system
(BIS). The BAS is sensitive to positive stimuli and
gives rise to a pleasurable emotional state. The BIS is a
parallel system associated with danger and punishment,
giving rise to unpleasurable interpretations of events.
The BIS is associated with the emotional state of anxiety.
This association of the BIS to anxiety helps explain
why anxiety is connected to attempts to escape or avoid
things that are unpleasant (e.g., worry about making
mistakes and withholding responses; shy-like behaviors,
such as avoiding criticism or rejection; withdrawing
affection in anticipation of being rejected). Of
course, escape and avoidance are maladaptive when
extreme, as in clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders,
but are common in everyday life where nonpathological
levels of anxiety occur.
Anxiety is often distinguished in terms of its state
or trait nature. State anxiety is a transitory unpleasant
emotional arousal stemming from a cognitive appraisal
of a threat of some type. Trait anxiety is a stable,
personality quality (stable individual difference) in the
tendency to respond to threat with state anxiety. One
common inventory to identify anxiety is the State-Trait
Anxiety Inventory (Charles Spielberger and colleagues);
research has also distinguished between a worry (i.e.,
cognitive) component of anxiety and an emotionality
(i.e., arousal) component of anxiety.
Robert M. Arkin
Lana Rucks
See also Arousal; Intergroup Anxiety; Social Anxiety
Further Readings
Apparent Mental Causation———43
Riskind, J. H., Williams, N. L., Gessner, T. L., Chrosniak, L. D.,
& Cortina, J. M. (2000). The looming maladaptive style:
Anxiety, danger, and schematic processing. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 837–852.
Spielberger, C. D. (1966). Theory and research on anxiety.
In C. D. Spielberger (Ed.), Anxiety and behavior
(pp. 3–20). New York: Academic Press.
APPARENT MENTAL CAUSATION
Definition
The theory of apparent mental causation outlines the
conditions under which people experience a sense of

44———Apparent Mental Causation
consciously willing their actions. Although people often
feel that their conscious thoughts cause their actions,
this feeling is illusory, as both their actions and their
experience of willing them arise independently from
unconscious sources. People feel apparent mental causation
when their thoughts precede their actions (priority),
when their thoughts are consistent with their
actions (consistency), and when their thoughts are the
only plausible cause of their actions (exclusivity).
An Example
Imagine that you’re in the park on a summer day and
a specific tree branch catches your eyes. You think,
“I wish it would move up and down,” and lo and
behold, it moves. Not only that, it moves in the exact
direction you imagined it moving, and when you
search for alternative causes for its motion, you find
nothing. There is no wind or mischievous tree-climbing
kid that can account for the motion. Did your thoughts
cause it to move? Given that there is nothing else to
account for its motion (exclusivity), and that it moved
right after you thought about it (priority) in perfectly
the right direction (consistency), you feel as if you
caused the branch to move, even though it seems
impossible. In the same way, people infer causation
between their own thoughts and actions when these
principles are in place.
Conscious Thoughts Are Not Causal
Although it feels as though conscious thoughts cause
actions, neurological evidence shows that this is highly
unlikely. In a series of experiments, Benjamin Libet
measured the brain activation of people as they made
voluntary finger movements. Specifically, he measured
the part of the motor cortex that is responsible for moving
one’s fingers, while also recording the time at
which people said they consciously decided to move
their finger. He found that participants’ conscious decisions
to move came after the time at which their motor
cortex had started to activate. This means that their
unconscious mind had already started to move their
finger when they experienced the conscious decision
to move it. As causes must precede effects, the conscious
mind must be ruled out as the cause of people’s
actions. The theory of apparent mental causation suggests
why and how it is that people nonetheless feel as
though their thoughts cause their actions.
Priority
Three Principles of Apparent
Mental Causation
People’s thoughts must immediately precede their
actions for them to experience mental causation. If
thoughts appear after action, there is no experience of
willing one’s actions. Similarly, if thoughts appear too
far in advance, this experience will also be lacking.
This is exemplified by those instances in which you
decide to grab something from your bedroom, only to
find yourself standing beside the bed with no idea
why you’re there, and no experience of mental causation
for your action.
Consistency
To experience mental causation, people’s actions
must match their thoughts, and although this is usually
the case, consistency is often lacking in failures of selfcontrol.
Imagine yourself surfing the Web one night
when you look up at the clock; you see that it’s well
past your bedtime and decide to shut down the computer
and head to bed. Twenty minutes later, in spite of
your intentions, you find yourself still madly clicking
links, with no accompanying sense of mental causation.
Exclusivity
People experience mental causation when their
thoughts are the only plausible explanation for their
actions. While the link between thoughts and actions is
usually clear, in some psychological disorders the principle
of exclusivity is violated. For instance, one symptom
of schizophrenia, called thought insertion, involves
believing that another entity (e.g., the CIA) is inserting
thoughts into one’s head. If one’s actions appear to be
caused by the thoughts of another, the experience of
mental causation will be subsequently undermined.
Evidence
Through a number of studies, Daniel Wegner demonstrated
the importance of these principles in determining
mental causation. He used a paradigm whereby a
participant did a task together with an accomplice, in
which it was questionable whether the participant or the
accomplice was controlling the action. The task was
based on an Ouija board, where it is difficult to tell who
is responsible for moving the planchette to convey

messages beyond the grave. In this study, there were
a number of pictures on the Ouija board, and at regular
intervals the accomplice stopped the planchette at one
of these pictures. Although the accomplice was always
controlling which picture the planchette pointed to, the
participant experienced a sense of mental causation for
the action when he or she had a prior thought that was
consistent with the action (e.g., by hearing the word
dog over a pair of headphones just before the planchette
stopped at the picture of a dog). This demonstrates that,
even in situations in which the participant has no control
over the task, the experience of apparent mental
causation can be manipulated by varying the three principles
that link thoughts to actions.
Implications
If people’s experience of free will is not causative and
instead results from the same unconscious process that
determines their action, then how are people to be held
responsible for their actions? This question, traditionally
raised by philosophers, is a pressing concern for
psychologists and legal theorists. Although the experience
of conscious will is only a feeling, not a guarantee
that one’s thoughts have caused one’s actions, this
feeling allows people to make a working distinction
between those actions that feel free and those that feel
forced. The experience of mental causation can be
used to provide a readout of how free one was in performing
an action. If someone takes your hand and
makes you pull the trigger of a gun, you will feel lessapparent
mental causation than if you calmly, and after
much thought, decided to pull the trigger. As people
would not wish to be punished for those actions that
lack an accompanying feeling of mental causation,
they can use that standard in evaluating others. Legal
decisions can be based on one’s experience of mental
causation, thereby leaving how a person makes judgments
of responsibility relatively unchanged.
Kurt Gray
Daniel M. Wegner
See also Consciousness; Free Will, Study of; Nonconscious
Processes
Further Readings
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Applied Social Psychology———45
APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Applied social psychology can be defined as using
social psychological theories, principles, research findings,
and experimental methods to understand social
issues and to offer real-world solutions for a variety of
social problems. As a discipline, applied social psychology
functions on the premise that social problems
are, at their heart, caused by human behavior. To
understand and change these problem behaviors,
applied social psychologists conduct a scientific examination
of individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
as they pertain to a variety of social influences.
Through their research, applied social psychologists
hope to offer practical suggestions for improving human
social behavior in areas ranging from workplace productivity
to safer sexual activity.
History and Background
While an earlier generation of psychologists had been
predominantly interested in the structure and measurement
of mental tasks in the laboratory, the 20th century
saw a substantial increase in researchers advocating
the application of theories outside the laboratory. In
1903, experimental psychologist Walter Dill Scott
wrote The Theory and Practice of Advertising, suggesting
that consumer habits could be influenced by
emotional suggestions. In 1908, psychologist Hugo
Münsterberg defined applied psychology as research
adjusted to fit the problems encountered in everyday
life. In works on industrial psychology, advertising,
and education, Münsterberg, Scott, and others began
exploring the possibilities of an applied psychology. In
1917, psychologist G. S. Hall founded the Journal of
Applied Psychology to further explore the potential of
this new field.
By the 1920s, there was an undeniable enthusiasm
for applied research in the psychological community,
despite its reputation as an “undignified” pursuit. In
addition to the new challenges it presented, applied
research was also attractive because private corporations
often provided better salaries than did academic
institutions. John B. Watson, former American Psychological
Association president and one of the founders
of modern behaviorism, began a successful career at

46———Applied Social Psychology
the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm after being
fired from Johns Hopkins University in 1920. Watson
was able to put psychological principles into practice
with such advertising industry standards as expert and
celebrity testimonials and focus group research. He
was promoted to vice president in only 4 years and
was eventually honored for his achievements by the
American Psychological Association. Even those psychologists
who stayed in traditional laboratories found
that it was easier to justify lab materials and costs if
their research had the potential for application.
The work of Kurt Lewin (1840–1947) marks the
beginning of modern applied social psychology. Lewin,
best known for his field theory suggesting that behavior
is a function of an individual’s personality and his or her
environment, proposed that social psychologists should
engage in what he called action research. A social
activist himself, Lewin believed that social issues should
inspire social psychological research. This research
could then be used to provide solutions for social problems.
Lewin’s action research sought to define a social
problem, recommend countermeasures, and test the
effectiveness of those countermeasures through community
involvement, surveys, case studies, and controlled
experiments. To this end, Lewin formed several organizations
to engage in action research, including the
Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the
Research Center for Group Dynamics, the Commission
on Community Interrelations, and the National Training
Laboratories. These groups studied interracial housing,
ingroup loyalty, and leadership styles, establishing
Lewin as one of the foremost proponents of combined
applied and theoretical social psychology in the history
of psychology.
As social psychology sought greater acceptance as
a science in the 1950s and 1960s, action research in
the field became less popular and was replaced by
basic academic social psychology. It was not until the
late 1960s and 1970s, while American society was
undergoing radical transformations as a result of the
civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the
Watergate scandal, that social psychologists returned
to the field in an attempt to understand and explain
what was happening around them. Through the 1970s
and 1980s, social psychologists debated if applied
research could inform public policy. If so, many felt
that the researchers themselves must present and
explain their findings to policymakers or risk dangerous
misinterpretation of their work.
Applied social psychology has been growing in
prestige since the 1980s. With applications ranging
from improving the criminal justice system to informing
education and health issues, the last few decades
have seen substantial increases in nontraditional funding
sources. While applied social psychological research
continues within academic institutions, private and
government grants, as well as full-time research positions
within large corporations, have allowed researchers
the flexibility and opportunity to study a diverse array
of social phenomena.
Unique Features of
Applied Social Psychology
While research in basic social psychology often
begins with scientific curiosity, work in applied social
psychology typically starts with the identification of a
specific social problem, such as teen pregnancy or hate
crimes. Applied social psychologists seek to understand
and treat these social maladies through the application
of the theories and methods of social psychology. While
basic social psychologists attempt to isolate the causal
relationships between a small number of specific variables
that can be carefully controlled in the lab, applied
social psychologists work to identify and predict largescale
effects that can be used to design and implement
social programs. Real social issues rarely involve only
one or two psychological variables. Therefore, it is often
useful for applied social psychologists to consider broad
combinations of psychological principles when attempting
to understand a social issue. It is also common for
applied social psychologists to adopt an interdisciplinary
approach to their work, incorporating economic,
sociological, and political perspectives.
Within the laboratory, social psychologists are generally
able to conduct precise and carefully controlled
experimental manipulations to test their hypotheses.
Within communities and businesses, applied researchers
often work in unpredictable and unrestricted environments,
relying on less-precise research techniques such
as surveys, self-reports, and rough “before and after”
evaluations. Often at the mercy of corporate or government
sponsors, applied social psychologists work
under program deadlines, funding restrictions, and
political pressures.
While laboratory effects need to reach statistical significance
to support the hypothesis of the experimenter,
implemented social programs need to show effects that

are not only statistically significant but also large enough
to have real-world consequences for the program’s
sponsor. Applied social psychologists must also make
quantitative estimates when designing an experimental
social program to show that the program’s benefits will
ultimately outweigh the initial costs.
Working in Applied Social Psychology
To list all the areas to which social psychology is
currently being applied would be almost impossible.
Broadly, applied social psychologists are active in
studying and improving educational programs, industrial
and organizational productivity, environmental
and health care issues, justice system reform, and all
types of mass communication, including advertising,
public relations, and politics.
Some applied social psychologists conduct research
for academic institutions, some for private foundations
and corporations, and some for government organizations.
Some evaluate the success or failure of a specific
experimental social program while others work as
internal consultants to government agencies and businesses,
providing feedback on a variety of projects.
Some applied social psychologists give policy advice
to corporate or government managers from outside an
organization while still others become managers themselves.
Finally, some applied social psychologists
become full-time advocates for social change, working
with activist groups rather than from inside a government
or corporate body.
Criticisms of Applied
Social Psychology
Criticisms of applied social psychology come from
psychologists as well as from policymakers. Laboratory
psychologists question the methodology behind much
of the applied social research. With no control groups,
few experimental manipulations, and a heavy reliance
on self-report and correlation, can applied social psychology
really contribute to social psychological theories?
After all, a successful social program will need
to be tailored differently to every community in which
it is implemented. Policymakers question whether
the effects of experimental social programs are large
enough (or cheap enough) to be widely implemented.
Others argue that the large-scale behavior modification
implied in some social psychological programs is
unethical. Ultimately, there is a genuine tradeoff between
conducting basic and applied social psychological
research. In basic studies, researchers seek general principles
that may not directly apply to more complicated
real-world problems; in applied studies, researchers
address specific problems, yet their conclusions may
fail to generalize to other situations.
While both groups have valid critiques of an admittedly
murky field, it is important to emphasize that
applied social psychologists are actively engaged in the
scientific study of social issues. While this problemoriented
approach does take some emphasis away from
theory building, the plethora of field observations and
unique program implementations essential to applied
research will only serve to strengthen and refine current
and future social psychological theories. Although
the oversimplification of research findings could lead
to the improper implementation of social programs,
applied social psychologists seek to prevent such use
by taking an active role in designing socially responsible
policy.
A final issue to note is that the implied divide
between applied and basic research ignores the contributions
that basic social psychologists often make to
areas of application. While applied social psychology
refers to research with a problem-oriented focus, it is
much more difficult to define who meets the definition
of an applied social psychologist. Many psychologists
primarily focused on basic laboratory research
are also actively involved in the Society for the
Psychological Study of Social Issues and other organizations
committed to the application of social psychological
principles.
Brandon I. Brockmyer
Kathryn C. Oleson
See also Ecological Validity; Quasi-Experimental Designs;
Research Methods
Further Readings
Applied Social Psychology———47
Bickman, L. (1980). Introduction. Applied Social Psychology
Annual, 1, 7–18.
Goodwin, C. J. (1999). A history of modern psychology
(chaps. 8 & 9). New York: Wiley.
Oskamp, S., & Schultz, P. W. (1998). Applied social psychology
(2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Schultz, P. W., & Oskamp, S. (2000). Social psychology: An
applied perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Hall.

48———Approach–Avoidance Conflict
APPROACH–AVOIDANCE CONFLICT
Definition
Approach means moving toward something. Avoidance
means moving away from it. Obviously you can’t move
toward and away from the same thing at the same time.
Approach–avoidance conflict arises when a goal has
both positive and negative aspects, and thus leads to
approach and avoidance reactions at the same time.
Kurt Lewin introduced the concept, referring to two
competing forces of positive and negative valence that
act upon an individual in parallel. For example, if a person
wants to eat a cake (positive valence) but also wants
to avoid gaining weight (negative valence), this constitutes
an approach–avoidance conflict that has to be
solved. People can also experience approach–approach
conflicts (two positive forces are activated; for example,
if the person considers two movies worth seeing),
avoidance–avoidance conflicts (two negative forces are
activated; for example, if the person has to do decide
whether to go to the dentist or to finish unpleasant
homework), or a double approach–avoidance conflict
(two choice alternatives contain both positive and negative
aspects; for example, if the decision between two
movies is complicated because both contain performers
one likes and hates). All kinds of conflicts have been
discussed throughout various areas of psychology,
including psychopathology, motivation psychology,
and organizational psychology.
Factors for Strength of Conflict
and Conflict Resolution
For approach–avoidance conflict strength and resolution,
Lewin suggested three factors: tension which is
created by a need or a desire (e.g., I am hungry vs. I
want to lose weight), magnitude of valence (e.g., I do
like cake a lot vs. I do hate being overweight), and psychological
distance (e.g., the cake is easy to get vs. it is
hard to obtain my goal of 160 pounds). If tension,
valence, and distance are equally strong, the conflict is
not easy to solve, making it so that such conflicts can
be relatively stable over time. Psychologically, one possible
solution is to change the valence of the aspects of
the goal aspects. One can, for example, devalue the
cake by actively searching for negative aspects of it,
or one can increase the importance of staying slim
by collecting even more positive aspects of it. For
approach–avoidance conflicts, distance seems to be a
crucial factor. Lewin reasoned that whereas from a distance
the positive valence looms larger, the closer one
gets to the conflicted goal, the larger looms the negative
valence. An individual first approaches the conflicted
goal at a distance, then is blocked and vacillates at
an intermediate point when avoidance and approach
become equally strong, and finally retreats when even
closer to the goal.
Further Qualifications and Findings
Neal Miller advanced this approach and combined it
with Clark Hull’s notion of goal gradients, defining
distance as a crucial variable of motivation. The closer
one is to the goal, the stronger the motivation (i.e., the
goal looms larger effect), and this gradient is steeper
for avoidance than approach goals. In other words, as
you get closer to something you want, the desire to
approach it grows stronger little by little; whereas as
you get closer to something you hate or wish to avoid,
the desire to avoid it grows stronger rapidly. Because
in conflict situations the stronger reaction usually
wins, avoidance reactions have a slight advantage over
approach reactions to be instantiated. Primary support
for the differences of approach versus avoidance gradients
came from studies by Judson Brown, in which
harnessed rats were interrupted at various stages of
approaching food and avoiding shock, showing that
avoidance reactions were stronger when the rats were
closer to shock than when they were approaching food.
Seymour Epstein was able to find similar results with
amateur parachutists before their first jump, illustrating
that fear reactions increased the closer individuals
were to their goal. On the other hand, directly before
the jump the approach reaction increased dramatically,
as presumably individuals were able to cope with the
fear quite efficiently. Walter Fenz qualified the findings
in showing that good parachutists and experts
show approach reactions earlier before their jump.
However, over the years, results from studies on
humans and animals were sometimes quite inconsistent
with this theory, because for some individuals
approach gradients were steeper, and thus qualifications
were needed.
Jens Förster and colleagues addressed why the goal
should loom larger in greater detail. They reasoned that
while working toward a goal, each step that makes goal
attainment more likely is a success. The value of a success
increases as its contribution to goal attainment

increases. The contribution of a success to goal attainment
depends on the magnitude of the remaining discrepancy
to the goal that it reduces. If there are equal
steps taken while working toward the goal, each step
reduces a higher proportion of the remaining discrepancy.
If the goal is to solve each of 10 anagrams, for
example, solving the first reduces 10% of the remaining
discrepancy, whereas solving the last reduces 100%
of the remaining discrepancy. Thus, the value of a success
increases as one is closer to the goal. The greater
the value is of succeeding, the stronger the motivation
is to succeed. And the stronger the motivation is to succeed,
the stronger the strategic motivations are that
yield success.
Moreover, the goal looms larger effect may differ
based on one’s chronic or situational regulatory focus.
According to regulatory focus theory by Tory Higgins,
goal-directed behavior is regulated by two distinct
motivational systems. These two systems, termed promotion
and prevention, each serve different survivalrelevant
concerns. The promotion system is conceived
of as orienting the individual toward obtaining nurturance
and is thought to underlie higher-level concerns
with accomplishment and achievement. In contrast, the
prevention system is considered to orient the individual
toward obtaining safety and is thought to underlie
higher-level concerns with self-protection and fulfillment
of responsibilities. Critically, activation of these
motivational systems is posited to engender distinct
strategic inclinations, with promotion leading to
greater approach motivation in service of maximizing
gains and prevention leading to greater avoidance motivation
in service of minimizing losses. Consistently,
Förster and colleagues showed that the steep avoidance
gradient can be found only in individuals with chronically
or situationally induced prevention foci, whereas
for individuals with chronically or situationally
induced promotion foci, approach motivation, but not
avoidance motivation, increased the closer individuals
were to their specific goal.
Jens Förster
See also Achievement Motivation; Bad Is Stronger Than
Good; Conflict Resolution; Regulatory Focus Theory
Further Readings
Förster, J., Higgins, E. T., & Idson, L. C. (1998). Approach
and avoidance strength during goal attainment:
Regulatory focus and the “goal looms larger” effect.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75,
1115–1131.
Weiner, B. (1980). Human motivation. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
AROUSAL
Definition
Arousal generally refers to the experience of increased
physiological (inside-the-body) activity. This can
include an increased (faster) heart rate, perspiration,
and rapid breathing. In some cases, the term arousal is
used to specifically refer to sexual feelings (and the
resulting bodily changes). In essence, arousal is the
bodily sensation of feeling energized. A person experiencing
high arousal is active, animated, and/or alert,
while a person who experiences low arousal is slow,
sluggish, and/or sleepy.
Although many emotions (such as love and anger)
include high arousal, it is possible to have arousal
more or less by itself. Such a state is created by getting
a dose of adrenaline (such as from an injection).
Many people get this effect from a strong dose of caffeine.
Being nervous, as before an athletic or musical
performance, is much the same: The body is cranking
up its energy level.
Context and Importance
Because arousal affects much of the body all at once, it
has the ability to influence numerous aspects of people’
everyday experience. Within the context of social psychology,
the experience of arousal has implications in a
number of areas, including the experience of emotion,
attitudes, lie detection, aggression, attraction, and love.
Experience of Emotion
Arousal———49
The ability to experience emotion is one of the characteristics
that distinguish humans from other animals.
There are several theories that try to explain emotions.
However, one theory focuses on how arousal, combined
with the social environment, determines emotions. The
two-factor theory of emotion, proposed by Stanley
Schachter and Jerome Singer, states that when people
are physiologically aroused, their emotional experience

50———Arousal
is determined by how they think about the arousal; in
addition, other people are able to influence a person’s
thoughts. For example, when graduating from high
school, a person is likely to experience a heightened
level of arousal. However, this arousal may be labeled as
excitement when around friends or as anxiety/despair
when around parents or former teachers. In both cases,
the same bodily arousal becomes labeled as two different
emotions depending on the social context.
Attitudes
Perhaps due to its links with emotion, arousal is
also an indication of how strongly a person holds an
attitude. For example, if you wanted to know how
strongly a person felt about a political candidate, you
could measure that person’s heart rate, perspiration,
and so on. The candidate that elicits the most arousal
is the one felt most strongly about. However, measuring
arousal in this fashion cannot tell you whether the
person likes or dislikes the candidate; just that they
feel strongly.
Attitudes also have the ability to create arousal. This
is likely when an attitude (e.g., “I love animals”) conflicts
with another attitude (e.g., “Animals should be
used for lab testing”), or with a behavior (e.g., “My fur
coat looks great on me”). Lack of consistency among
attitudes and/or behavior tends to produce feelings
of tension and uneasiness (i.e., physiological arousal).
According to Leon Festinger, people are motivated to
relieve their aroused state by adjusting their attitudes to
be more consistent.
Lie Detection
Arousal’s link to emotions, attitudes, and inconsistency
make the measurement of physiological arousal
a potentially useful tool for lie detection. A lie detector
test measures various physiological indicators or arousal
such as heart rate, breathing rate, and perspiration. The
assumption is that lying (which is an inconsistency
between what is true and what is reported to be true)
produces arousal that can be detected by the machine.
Unfortunately, as with the strength of attitudes, the
machine can only assess the level of arousal, and not
what may be causing it. For example, a person may be
aroused because they are lying, or they may experience
arousal because they are worried that they are accused
of committing a crime.
Aggression
Due to the energizing nature of arousal, it has a key
role in helping us understand why people become
aggressive. When people encounter any type of undesirable
experience, arousal levels and aggression tend
to increase. Unfortunately, a number of things have
been found to produce increased arousal. These include
high temperatures, crowding, pain, loud noises, violent
movies, bad odors, and cigarette smoke. In each case,
these factors produce heightened levels of arousal and
the likelihood of increased aggression.
One reason is that arousal produced from one experience
(e.g., being in a crowd) may be directed toward
another target. A good example of this would be a person
who gets stuck in traffic while driving home from
work. Upon returning home after an hour of sitting in
a hot car, listening to people honking their horns, a parent
may yell at his or her child for no apparent reason.
This link between arousal and aggression has important
implications for how people deal with anger.
A common misconception is that acting aggressive in
appropriate contexts (e.g., playing sports, playing video
games) is a good way to decrease aggression. However,
because these activities also increase arousal, they tend
to increase (not decrease) aggressive feelings.
Attraction
Just as arousal can transfer from one source to another
to produce aggression, arousal also has the ability to
produce positive feelings, such as attraction. In a famous
study, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron tested people
crossing two bridges. One bridge was extremely high
and shaky and heightened arousal. Another bridge was
lower and sturdier, resulting in lower levels of arousal.
To determine if arousal could produce attraction, they
tested men’s reactions to a woman they met while
crossing. The results indicated that men on the more
arousal-provoking high bridge were more attracted to
the woman.
Love
The bridge study relied on general experiences of
arousal. However, arousal can also be experienced in
a sexual sense. One theory of love distinguishes passionate
love (the type you feel toward a romantic partner)
from companionate love (the type you experience

toward a good friend). The key difference is that passionate
love involves the feeling of sexual arousal
(i.e., fluttering heart, feelings of anticipation, etc.) that
is associated with the romantic partner. This connection
is credited with the highly energized feelings that
are produced at the mere sight of the beloved.
Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr.
See also Aggression; Attraction; Emotion; Excitation-
Transfer Theory; Misattribution of Arousal
Further Readings
Foster, C. A., Witcher, B. S., Campbell, W. K., & Green, J. D.
(1998). Arousal and attraction: Evidence for automatic
and controlled processes. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 74, 86–101.
ASSIMILATION PROCESSES
Many psychological terms have meanings similar to
how those terms are used in everyday language. Such
is the case with assimilation, which a plain old English
dictionary defines as to absorb, digest, and integrate
(usually into a culture), making disparate people/items
similar. Its use in social psychology (across separate
content domains) is similar; assimilation means that
when a person observes and interprets other people,
groups of others, or even the self, a variety of things
are observed, and one of those observed items will draw
to it, or absorb, the others, thus shaping and molding the
meaning of the others.
The term was first used in social psychology by Fritz
Heider in 1944 when describing interpersonal perception.
When judging a person’s behavior (trying to interpret
what one has observed the person do), knowledge
of that person’s personality matters greatly. The personality
colors one’s interpretation of that person’s behavior
(so that it is absorbed by it). For example, when you
observe a person cut ahead in a line, you may describe
that behavior as “rude” if you know the person to be a
rude type, but as “efficient” if you know that person to
be a perpetually late type. The same exact act has two
different meanings when assimilated by two different
personality traits. Similarly, assimilation can happen
in the reverse direction, when trying to infer what a
Assimilation Processes———51
person’s personality is like based on a behavior one has
observed. The behavior strongly guides one’s inference
about what the person is like. A cruel act will assimilate
toward it the inference that the person is cruel as well.
One’s impressions of people are assimilated toward
their action.
Research over the past 30 years has shown that it is
not only a known personality trait that can assimilate.
Indeed, any trait that one has recently been exposed to
can shape how he or she sees a person. Witnessing a
person acting mean toward a dog while on your way
to the store may momentarily trigger or prime the concept
“mean” in your mind without your even realizing
it consciously. Once triggered, it now has the power to
assimilate toward it any relevant new behavior you
observe. Thus, once entering the store, the next person
you encounter may be seen by you as mean if he or
she acts in a way that is even moderately unfriendly.
What is important about the act of assimilation here is
that (a) you would never have inferred the person to be
unfriendly if “mean” had not been triggered before,
and (b) it occurs without your realizing it has an
impact or that you were even thinking about the quality
“mean.” Importantly, this is how stereotypes operate.
Detecting a person’s group membership (such as
“woman”) will trigger stereotypes (such as women are
emotional), even without your knowing it. This can
then lead you to assimilate that person’s behavior
toward this trait so that the woman is actually seen by
you as emotional even if she has provided no real evidence.
Assimilation provides for people the evidence
by absorbing the behavior and coloring how it is seen.
The term assimilation has similar uses outside person
perception. In the attitude literature, it describes a
process whereby people use their own existing attitudes
as a standard against which new information is
judged. If the new information seems close enough to
the attitudinal standard (i.e., it falls within what is
called a latitude of acceptance), then the new object
receives the evaluation linked to the attitude (the evaluation
of the new item is assimilated toward the evaluation
already existing for the standard). For example,
if you have a favorable attitude toward recycling (the
standard) and then hear a news report about recycling
that you see as close enough to your own view (i.e., it
is not antirecycling), you will come to see that report
as promoting views similar to your own, and you will
like it. Importantly, if you did not have initial views
(a standard) that provided a strong evaluation about

52———Associative Networks
recycling, then the same message would not be as persuasive
or be interpreted as favorably. The new message
is colored by the existing attitude.
Assimilation is also shown to occur in determining
one’s sense of self. Identity is partly determined by the
qualities of the groups to which one belongs, with
identity being drawn toward those features identified
with desired ingroups. According to Marilyn Brewer’s
optimal distinctiveness theory, identity is constantly
trying to balance two needs of the person—the need to
assimilate identity toward desired others (and to be as
much like the valued members of the groups one
belongs to) and the need to differentiate and have a distinct
sense of self. Thus identity is, in part, a process of
assimilating the sense of self toward desired and valued
others.
Gordon B. Moskowitz
See also Accessibility; Attitudes; Contrast Effects; Identity
Status; Impression Management; Interpersonal Cognition;
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory; Priming; Stereotypes and
Stereotyping
Further Readings
Bargh, J. A. (1992). Does subliminality matter to social
psychology? Awareness of the stimulus versus awareness
of its influence. In R. F. Bornstein & T. S. Pittman (Eds.),
Perception without awareness. New York: Guilford Press.
Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their
automatic and controlled components. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 5–18.
Herr, P. M., Sherman, S. J., & Fazio, R. H. (1983). On the
consequences of priming: Assimilation and contrast effects.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 323–340.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). Knowledge adtivation: Accessibility,
applicability, and salience. In E. T. Higgins & A. W.
Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic
principles (pp. 133–168). New York: Guilford Press.
ASSOCIATIVE NETWORKS
Definition
Associative networks are cognitive models that incorporate
long-known principles of association to represent
key features of human memory. When two things
(e.g., “bacon” and “eggs”) are thought about simultaneously,
they may become linked in memory. Subsequently,
when one thinks about bacon, eggs are likely
to come to mind as well. Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle
described some of the principles governing the role of
such associations in memory. Similar principles were
elaborated by British philosophers in the 1700s, and
contributed to a variety of psychological theories,
including those developed by contemporary cognitive
psychologists to model memory.
Basic Models
In associative network models, memory is construed
as a metaphorical network of cognitive concepts (e.g.,
objects, events and ideas) interconnected by links (or
pathways) reflecting the strength of association
between pairs of concepts. Such models commonly
incorporate ideas about “spreading activation” to represent
the processes of memory retrieval. According
to such models, concepts that are currently being
thought about are said to be “activated,” and “excitation”
spreads from these down connecting pathways
to associated concepts. Associations that have been
encountered more frequently in the past are likely to
be stronger and are represented in associative network
models by pathways through which excitation can
spread more quickly. Once sufficient excitation has
passed from previously activated concepts to a new
concept, so that its level of accumulated excitation
surpasses some threshold, that new concept will also
be brought to mind.
Model Details
Serial search models assume that excitation traverses
one pathway after another until needed concepts are
discovered and retrieved from memory. More common
are parallel processing models, which view excitation
as simultaneously traversing all connecting pathways,
converging most quickly at concepts that have multiple
connections to those already activated. Consequently,
thinking about “bacon,” “eggs,” and “juice” is more
likely to activate “breakfast” than might any of those
concepts alone.
Once activated, a concept retains excitation as long
as it receives attention, after which activation declines
as excitation flows away. Because this decay in activation
takes time, however, a concept may retain an

elevated level of residual excitation, even after passing
from thought. Consequently, concepts that have been
thought about recently may be primed, and require relatively
little excitation to achieve activation. Inhibitory
processes are also sometimes posited, to further control
the number and relevance of concepts activated at
one time. As they have been refined, associative network
models have become increasingly complex, mathematical,
and tied to neurological mechanisms involved
in learning and memory.
See also Accessibility; Memory; Priming
Further Readings
Donal E. Carlston
Hastie, R. (1988). A computer simulation model of person
memory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
24, 423–447.
Shiffrin, R. M., & Raaijmakers, J. (1992). The SAM retrieval
model: A retrospective and prospective. In A. F. Healy,
S. M. Kosslyn, & R. M. Shiffrin (Eds.), Essays in honor
of William K. Estes: Vol. 2. From learning processes to
cognitive processes (pp. 69–86). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
ATTACHMENT STYLES
The concept of attachment was introduced into psychiatry
and psychology by John Bowlby, a British
psychoanalyst whose major books appeared between
1969 and 1980. Like many psychoanalysts, beginning
with Sigmund Freud, Bowlby was interested in the
early childhood roots of later personality patterns,
including psychological disorders. But instead of
focusing on imagined instincts, such as eros (sex) and
thanatos (aggression), or sex and aggression, as Freud
did, Bowlby focused primarily on the natural dependence
of infants and children on their primary caregivers
for protection, care, comfort, and emotional
support. He noticed, as many informal observers have
noticed throughout history, that infants become emotionally
attached to their caregivers; look to them for
comfort and support in times of stress, threat, need, or
pain; and display greater curiosity, courage, and sociability
when safely in the presence of these attachment
figures. The tendency of human infants to become
Attachment Styles———53
emotionally attached to their caregivers, a phenomenon
that can also be observed in nonhuman primates
and many other animals, seemed to Bowlby to be the
result of an innate attachment behavioral system.
He was greatly aided in his theoretical work by a
talented North American research psychologist, Mary
Ainsworth, who did her graduate work on the topics
of childhood dependency and security. She concentrated
especially on the fact that a child’s confidence
and courageous exploration of the environment
depend on the degree of safety and security provided
by caregivers (this is called the secure base effect). An
important idea in Bowlby and Ainsworth’s attachment
theory is that effective caregivers provide a safe haven
and secure base from which the children in their care
can explore the world and acquire life skills.
Because Bowlby and Ainsworth were interested
not just in understanding emotional attachments (or
attachment bonds) but also in using insights from their
research to guide clinical assessments and treatment
of troubled children and adults; they were especially
interested in differences between secure and insecure
attachments. When an attachment figure is consistently
available and responsive to a child, the child becomes
confident that protection, support, and help with emotion
regulation will be forthcoming if needed or requested.
Under such conditions, a child benefits from what
attachment theorists call felt security. This feeling
that rock-solid support is available allows a child to
become more outwardly directed, self-confident, and
capable over time of dealing with challenges and
stresses autonomously. In contrast, if a child repeatedly
discovers that attachment figures are unreliable, selfpreoccupied
rather than emotionally available, intrusive,
punishing, or coolly distant, the child develops an
insecure attachment and suffers from a variety of observable
difficulties, including pervasive anxiety, unregulated
anger, sadness about separation, abandonment, or
neglect, and low self-esteem.
One of Ainsworth’s major contributions to attachment
theory was a laboratory assessment procedure,
the “strange situation,” which is used to assign a 12- to
18-month-old child to one of three major attachment
categories: secure, anxious, or avoidant. Secure infants
play comfortably in an unfamiliar strange situation,
when in the presence of their previously supportive
attachment figure (often mother). They are sociable
toward a stranger, and although they become distressed
and worried if their attachment figure leaves the room

54———Attachment Styles
unexpectedly, they quickly recover, show signs of
relief and affection, and play effectively with novel
toys following reunion. Researchers, beginning with
Ainsworth, have obtained massive evidence that this
pattern of behavior results from an attachment figure’s
reliable availability and responsiveness to the child’s
needs and bids for help.
Anxiously attached children, in contrast, are vigilant
concerning their attachment figure’s attentiveness
and responsiveness. They become extremely upset
about unexpected separations, and most characteristically,
continue to be upset and angry even when their
attachment figure returns to the room, a pattern of
behavior that interferes with normal exploration and
effective emotion regulation. Anxious attachment has
been found, in extensive home observations, to result
from attachment-figure unavailability, intrusiveness,
unpredictability, and periods of neglect.
Children classified as avoidant in the strange situation
tend not to pay attention to their attachment figure,
sometimes seem more favorable toward a friendly
stranger than to their own attachment figure, remain
quiet during unexpected separations, and are cool and
ignoring toward their attachment figure upon reunion.
This pattern of behavior, which is thought to involve
intentional deactivation and inhibition of natural behavioral
tendencies, is accompanied by a high heart rate,
indicating that the outward coolness is not matched, at
least in young children, by true lack of concern. The
avoidant pattern of behavior in childhood is predictable
from caregiver behavior that is also cool, distant, rejecting,
or punishing.
Years after Ainsworth identified these three patterns
of behavior, Mary Main and her colleagues found that
in more troubled samples there is often a fourth kind of
child behavior, which they called disorganized or disoriented.
In the strange situation, a disorganized child
approaches his or her mother oddly during reunion
episodes, for example, veering off at an angle and hiding
behind a chair or lying facedown on the floor rather
than seeking to be picked up. These unusual behaviors
seem to be related to the mother’s own unresolved
memories and feelings about attachment-related losses
or traumas. Mothers of disorganized children are more
likely than other mothers to have been abused, to be
drug abusers, or to be living under unstable conditions
(e.g., with boyfriends who come and go or are abusive
toward the mother or her child).
Between 1980 and the present, hundreds of studies
of childhood attachment have been conducted, and
together they indicate that early attachment experiences
cast a long shadow as a child grows older. The
effects can be seen in preschool interactions with both
teachers and peers; in later self-concept, emotions, and
attitudes; and in interpersonal relationships all through
life. Hence, many interventions have been proposed
and studied in an effort to inform parents about the
importance of emotional availability and responsiveness,
and the needs of children for a safe haven and
secure base as they work to develop their social skills,
cognitive capacities, and emotion-regulation abilities.
This research has provided a foundation for the
study of attachment patterns in subsequent adolescent
and adult relationships. In the late 1980s, Main and her
students developed the Adult Attachment Interview,
which can be used to classify adults’ attachment patterns.
Many studies have subsequently shown that these
patterns predict the attachment patterns of the interviewed
adult’s children and that the form of the influence
is “like fosters like”: Secure parents tend to rear
secure children, anxious parents to rear anxious
children, and avoidant parents to rear avoidant children.
Parents who are particularly troubled and have disorganized
mental representations of prior attachments and
losses tend to have children with disorganized attachment
patterns. Although one might suspect that the continuity
is attributable to shared genes rather than social
experiences, research so far suggests otherwise.
Also in the late 1980s, social psychologists, beginning
with Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver, developed
questionnaire measures of attachment style in adult relationships.
Since then, many other researchers, including
Mario Mikulincer, have conducted hundreds of studies
mapping the emotion-regulation strategies and relational
behaviors of people with different attachment
styles. This research is currently being extended to
studies involving physiological markers (e.g., the stress
hormone cortisol) and patterns of brain activation.
Moreover, what Bowlby called the attachment behavioral
system has been linked to the functioning of other
innate behavioral systems, such as caregiving, exploration,
and sex, with results that are being applied clinically
in individual and couples therapy. Today, Bowlby
and Ainsworth’s concept of attachment has become central
in all areas of psychology, and their theory’s influence
shows no sign of waning.
Phillip R. Shaver
Mario Mikulincer

See also Anxiety; Attitude Formation; Self-Concept
Further Readings
Bowlby, J. (1979). The making and breaking of affectional
bonds. London: Tavistock.
Cassidy, J., & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.). (1999). Handbook of
attachment: Theory, research, and clinical applications.
New York: Guilford Press.
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1987). Romantic love
conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 511–524.
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Patterns of
attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and
change. New York: Guilford Press.
ATTACHMENT THEORY
Definition
An attachment refers to the strong emotional bond
that exists between an infant and his or her caretaker.
The theory of attachment is designed to explain the
evolution of that bond, its development, and its implications
for human experience and relationships across
the life course. Although attachment theory has primarily
been a theory of child development, since the
1980s, the theory has had a large impact on social psychological
theories of close relationships, emotion
regulation, and personality.
History and Background
Attachment theory was originally developed by John
Bowlby, a British psychoanalyst who was attempting
to understand why infants experience intense distress
when separated from their parents. Bowlby noticed that
separated infants would go to extraordinary lengths
(e.g., crying, clinging, frantically searching) to either
prevent separation from their parents or to reestablish
contact with a missing parent. At the time, psychoanalytic
writers held that these behaviors were expressions
of immature defense mechanisms that were operating
to repress emotional pain, but Bowlby observed that
such expressions may serve an evolutionary function.
Drawing on evolutionary theory, Bowlby postulated
that behaviors such as crying and searching were adaptive
responses to separation from a primary attachment
Attachment Theory———55
figure—someone who provides support, protection,
and care. Because human infants, like other mammalian
infants, cannot feed or protect themselves, they
are dependent upon the care and protection of older
and stronger adults. Bowlby argued that, over the
course of human evolution, infants who were able to
maintain proximity to an attachment figure (i.e., by
looking cute or by expressing in attachment behaviors)
would be more likely to survive to a reproductive age.
According to Bowlby, a motivational-control system,
what he called the attachment behavioral system, was
gradually crafted by natural selection to help the child
regulate physical proximity to an attachment figure.
The attachment behavior system is an important
concept in attachment theory because it provides the
conceptual link between evolutionary models of human
development and modern theories on emotion regulation
and personality. According to Bowlby, the attachment
system essentially “asks” the following question:
Is the attachment figure nearby, accessible, and attentive?
If the child perceives the answer to this question
to be “yes,” he or she feels loved, secure, and confident,
and, behaviorally, is likely to explore his or her environment,
play with others, and be sociable. If, however, the
child perceives the answer to this question to be “no,”
the child experiences anxiety and, behaviorally, is
likely to exhibit attachment behaviors ranging from a
simple visual search for the parent to active following
and vocal signaling. These behaviors continue until
either the child is able to reestablish a desirable level of
physical or psychological proximity to the attachment
figure, or until the child “wears down,” as may happen
in the context of a prolonged separation or loss. In such
cases, Bowlby believed that the child may develop
symptoms of depression.
Individual Differences in Infant
Attachment Patterns
Although Bowlby believed that his theory captured the
way attachment operates in most children, he recognized
that there are individual differences. Some
children, for example, may be more likely to view their
parents as inaccessible or distant, perhaps because their
parents have not been consistently available in the past.
However, it was not until Bowlby’s colleague, Mary
Ainsworth, began to study infant–parent separations
that individual differences in attachment were incorporated
formally into attachment theory. Ainsworth and
her students developed a technique called the “strange

56———Attachment Theory
situation”—a laboratory paradigm for studying
infant–parent attachment. In the strange situation, 12month-old
infants and their parents are brought to the
laboratory and are separated from one another and then
reunited. In the strange situation, most children (i.e.,
about 60%) behave in the way implied by Bowlby’s
“normative” understanding of attachment. Specifically,
they become upset when the parent leaves the room, but
when he or she returns, they actively seek the parent and
are easily comforted by him or her. Children who exhibit
this pattern of behavior are often called “secure.” Other
children (about 20% or less) are ill-at-ease initially and,
upon separation, become extremely distressed. Importantly,
when reunited with their parents, these children
have a difficult time being soothed and often exhibit
conflicting behaviors that suggest they want to be comforted
but that they also want to “punish” the parent
for leaving. These children are often called “anxiousresistant.”
The third pattern of attachment that Ainsworth
and her colleagues documented is called “avoidant.”
Avoidant children (about 20%) don’t appear too distressed
by the separation and, upon reunion, actively
avoid seeking contact with their parent, sometimes turning
their attention to play objects on the laboratory floor.
Ainsworth’s work was important for at least three
reasons. First, she provided one of the first empirical
demonstrations of how attachment behavior is patterned
in both safe and frightening contexts. Second,
she provided the first empirical taxonomy of individual
differences in infant attachment patterns. According to
her research, at least three types of children exist: those
who are secure in their relationship with their parents,
those who are anxious-resistant, and those who are
anxious-avoidant. Finally, she demonstrated that these
individual differences were correlated with infant–
parent interactions in the home during the first year of
life. Children who appear secure in the strange situation,
for example, tend to have parents who are responsive
to their needs. Children who appear insecure in
the strange situation (i.e., anxious-resistant or anxiousavoidant)
often have parents who are insensitive to
their needs, or inconsistent or rejecting in the care they
provide.
Attachment in Adult
Romantic Relationships
Although Bowlby was primarily focused on understanding
the nature of the infant–caregiver relationship,
he believed that attachment played a role in
human experience across the life course. It was not
until the mid-1980s, however, that psychologists
began to take seriously the possibility that attachment
may play a role in adulthood. Cindy Hazan and Phil
Shaver were two of the first researchers to explore
Bowlby’s ideas in the context of romantic relationships.
According to Hazan and Shaver, the emotional
bond that develops between adult romantic partners is
partly a function of the same motivational system—
the attachment behavioral system—that gives rise to
the emotional bond between infants and their caregivers.
Hazan and Shaver noted that infants and caregivers
and adult romantic partners share the following
features:
• Both feel safe when the other is nearby and responsive.
• Both engage in close, intimate, bodily contact.
• Both feel insecure when the other is inaccessible.
• Both share discoveries with one another.
• Both play with one another’s facial features and
exhibit a mutual fascination and preoccupation with
one another.
• Both engage in “baby talk” or “motherese” (i.e., a
high-pitched, idiosyncratic language that involves
“made up” words that only the couple understands).
On the basis of these parallels, Hazan and Shaver
argued that adult romantic relationships, like infant–
caregiver relationships, are attachments, and that romantic
love is a property of the attachment behavioral system,
as well as the motivational systems that give rise to
caregiving and sexuality.
Three Implications of Adult
Attachment Theory
The idea that romantic relationships may be attachment
relationships has had a profound influence on modern
research on close relationships. There are at least three
critical implications of this idea. First, if adult romantic
relationships are attachment relationships, then we
should observe the same kinds of individual differences
in adult relationships that Ainsworth observed in
infant–caregiver relationships. Second, if adult romantic
relationships are attachment relationships, then the
way adult relationships “work” should be similar to
the way infant–caregiver relationships work. Third,
whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her adult
relationships may be a partial reflection of his or her
attachment experiences in early childhood.

Do We Observe the Same Kinds of
Attachment Patterns Among Adults
That We Observe Among Children?
If adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships,
then the same kinds of individual differences
that Ainsworth observed in infant–caregiver
relationships should be observed in adult relationships.
Some adults, for example, may be expected to
be secure in their close relationships—feeling confident
that their partners will be there for them when
needed and being open to depending on others and
having others depend on them. Other adults, in contrast,
will be expected to be insecure in their relationships.
For example, some insecure adults may be
anxious-resistant: They worry that others may not
love them completely, and they may be easily frustrated
or angered when their attachment needs go
unmet. Others may be avoidant: They may appear not
to care too much about close relationships and may
prefer not to be too dependent upon other people or to
have others be too dependent upon them.
The earliest research on adult attachment involved
studying the association between individual differences
in adult attachment and the way people think
about their relationships and their memories for what
their relationships with their parents are like. In 1987,
Hazan and Shaver developed a simple questionnaire
to measure these individual differences. (These individual
differences are often referred to as “attachment
styles,” “attachment patterns,” “attachment orientations,”
or “differences in the organization of the attachment
system.”) In short, Hazan and Shaver asked research
subjects to read three paragraphs and indicate which
paragraph best characterized the way they think, feel,
and behave in close relationships. Paragraph A
described discomfort and nervousness in being close
to others, as well as difficulty with trust and intimacy;
paragraph B depicted relative ease with closeness to
and mutual dependence with others; and paragraph C
indicated a perception that others are hesitant to get
close as desired and that a partner doesn’t love them
or likely won’t want to stay with them.
Hazan and Shaver found that the number of people
endorsing each of these descriptions was similar to the
number of children classified as secure, anxious, or
avoidant in infancy. In other words, about 60% of
adults classified themselves as secure (paragraph B),
about 20% described themselves as avoidant (paragraph
A), and about 20% described themselves as
anxious-resistant (paragraph C).
Do Adult Romantic Relationships “Work”
in the Same Way That Infant–Caregiver
Relationships Work?
If adult romantic relationships are attachment relationships,
then the way adult relationships “work”
should be similar to the way infant–caregiver relationships
work. For the most part, research suggests that
adult romantic relationships function in ways that are
similar to infant–caregiver relationships. Naturalistic
research on adults separating from their partners at an
airport demonstrated that behaviors indicative of
attachment, such as crying and clinging, were evident
and that the way people expressed those behaviors
was related to their attachment style. For example,
while separating couples generally showed more
attachment behavior than nonseparating couples,
people with avoidant attachment styles showed much
less attachment behavior.
There is also research that suggests that the same
kinds of features that mothers desire in their babies are
also desired by adults seeking a romantic partner.
Studies conducted in numerous cultures suggest that
the secure pattern of attachment in infancy is universally
considered the most desirable pattern by mothers.
Adults seeking long-term relationships identify
responsive caregiving qualities, such as attentiveness,
warmth, and sensitivity, as most attractive in potential
dating partners. Despite the attractiveness of secure
qualities, however, not all adults are paired with secure
partners. Some evidence suggests that people end up in
relationships with partners who confirm their existing
beliefs about attachment relationships, even if those
beliefs are negative.
Are Attachment Patterns Stable
From Infancy to Adulthood?
Attachment Theory———57
An important implication of attachment theory is
that whether an adult is secure or insecure in his or her
adult relationships may be a partial reflection of his
or her attachment experiences in early childhood.
Bowlby believed that the mental representations or
working models (i.e., expectations, beliefs, “rules,” or
“scripts” for behaving and thinking) that a child holds
regarding relationships are a function of his or her
caregiving experiences. For example, a secure child
tends to believe that others will be there for him or her
because previous experiences have led him or her
to this conclusion. Once a child has developed such
expectations, he or she will tend to seek out relational

58———Attention
experiences that are consistent with those expectations
and perceive others in a way that is colored by
those beliefs. According to Bowlby, this kind of
process should promote continuity in attachment patterns
over the life course, although it is possible that
a person’s attachment pattern will change if his or her
relational experiences are inconsistent with his or her
expectations. In short, if we assume that adult relationships
are attachment relationships, it is possible
that children who are secure as children will grow up
to be secure in their romantic relationships.
Research shows that there is a modest degree of
overlap between how secure people feel with their
mothers, for example, and how secure they feel with
their romantic partners. For example, among people
who are securely attached to their mothers, over 65%
of them are likely to feel secure with their romantic
partners too. There is also evidence suggesting that
people who are secure as children are more likely to
grow up to become secure adults. Of secure adults,
approximately 70% of them were classified as secure
when they were 12 months of age in the strange situation.
Taken together, these data suggest that there is
a moderate degree of stability in attachment styles
from infancy to adulthood, but that there is also plenty
of room for people’s ongoing experiences to shape
their security.
R. Chris Fraley
See also Attachment Styles; Close Relationships;
Companionate Love; Ethology; Evolutionary Psychology;
Love
Further Readings
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1994). Attachment as an
organizational framework for research on close
relationships. Psychological Inquiry, 5, 1–22.
ATTENTION
Definition
Attention refers to a wide variety of phenomena, including
arousal, alertness, consciousness, and awareness. In
general, however, attention is defined as both a process
of concentration, such as trying to remember, understand,
or search for information, and a mental resource
that has limited capacity. Attention is selective in that it
involves focusing on a certain stimulus to the exclusion
of others.
Focus of Attention
The focus of attention may be an external stimulus
(e.g., a telephone, another person, or traffic) or an
internal mental event (e.g., thinking about your day or
trying to recall a name or past event). Stimuli that
stand out, that is, are more salient, tend to capture a
person’s attention. The salience of a stimulus depends
on the larger social context. Stimuli that are unusual
(e.g., a woman in a group of men), personally significant
(e.g., hearing your name), or that dominate the
visual (e.g., standing in front of you) or auditory field
(e.g., a loud voice) are generally more salient.
Types of Attention
Attention processes differ in the degree to which they
are automatic or controlled. Input attention processes,
which are the processes that involve getting information
from the environment into our cognitive systems,
tend to be reflexive, quick, and automatic. Such
processes include alertness and arousal, the orienting
response, and spotlight attention. Alertness and arousal
are the most basic processes; they involve being awake
and able to respond to information. The orienting
response is the reflexive turning of your head and eyes
toward a stimulus that is unexpected. Spotlight attention
involves shifting your attention mentally (rather
than physically shifting your head and eyes) in an
effort to focus on stimuli.
Controlled attention involves deliberate, voluntary
efforts to think and perform tasks. During controlled
attention processes, we are consciously aware of our
efforts to pay attention to certain stimuli. Controlled
attention processes are thus slower than automatic attention
processes. For example, when you learn to drive a
car, you must pay close attention to each step of the driving
process. Controlled attention processes consume
mental resources. It is thus difficult to engage in several
controlled processes at the same time, for example, to
talk on the telephone while learning to drive a car.
Automatic attention processes occur more quickly
and with less effort. They are often unintentional and
require few cognitive resources. For example, after
learning to drive a car, you perform many of the
actions necessary to drive without being consciously
aware of each one. A similar kind of automatic attention
may occur when one encounters a member of an

ethnic minority group and the stereotype of the group
seems to come to mind automatically. In other words,
the stereotype comes to mind quickly, unintentionally,
and without effort.
Social judgments and behaviors usually vary in
the degree to which they involve controlled or automatic
attention. For example, the stereotype of a group
may seem to come to mind automatically when one
encounters a member of the group. However, stereotypes
appear to come to mind only when one has
enough mental resources to attend to them. Bringing
to mind the stereotype of a group may also lead one to
pay attention in a more deliberate and controlled way
to other information about the appropriateness of the
stereotype.
Causes and Consequences of
Automatic and Controlled Attention
With a great deal of practice, many mental processes
may become automatic. For example, typing, riding a
bike, driving a car, and identifying the meaning of
words all require attention at first. However, repeated
exposure or practice may reduce the amount of attention
needed to perform these tasks. Ultimately, highly
practiced tasks may become automatic. That is, they
can be performed with little conscious awareness and
with few or no cognitive resources.
Being able to think and do things automatically
seems highly desirable, because fewer cognitive
resources are used, and thus people can pay greater
attention to other stimuli. However, automaticity can
sometimes be problematic. Automatic processes are
hard to unlearn; undesirable mental processes or behavioral
patterns may thus be difficult to change. For
example, prejudice may occur relatively automatically,
because people have come to associate negative characteristics
with a certain ethnic group. Another undesirable
consequence of automaticity is that the lack of
conscious processing may result in errors. For example,
people may go through the motions of driving a car
without paying full attention and thus fail to notice a
red light.
Implications
Researchers can determine the extent to which social
judgment processes, such as stereotyping, are automatic
or controlled by examining whether the process is disrupted
as a result of increased demands on attention.
Research participants may be asked to perform a social
judgment task under high cognitive load, for example,
while trying to keep in mind a long series of numbers.
If the judgment process is disrupted (the judgment is
more difficult to make) when cognitive demands are
increased, then the process is considered to be controlled.
If the social judgment process is not disrupted,
even when other cognitive demands are high, then the
process is considered to be automatic. For example,
stereotypes are less likely to come to mind when cognitive
demands are high, indicating that stereotypes do not
come to mind in a completely automatic way. However,
after stereotypes come to mind, people who are under
high cognitive load are more likely to use them, indicating
that stereotype use is a controlled process.
Carey S. Ryan
Koichi Kurebayashi
See also Automatic Processes; Controlled Processes
Further Readings
Attitude–Behavior Consistency———59
Ashcraft, M. H. (2002). Cognition. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bargh, J. A. (1982). Attention and automaticity in the
processing of self-relevant information. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 425–436.
Gilbert, D. T., & Hixon, J. G. (1991). The trouble of
thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60,
509–517.
Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
ATTITUDE–BEHAVIOR CONSISTENCY
Definition
The study of attitude–behavior consistency concerns
the degree to which people’s attitudes (opinions) predict
their behavior (actions). Attitude–behavior consistency
exists when there is a strong relation between
opinions and actions. For example, a person with a positive
attitude toward protecting the environment who
recycles paper and bottles shows high attitude–behavior
consistency. The study of attitude–behavior consistency
is important because much of the usefulness of the attitude
concept is derived from the idea that people’s opinions
help guide their actions.

60———Attitude–Behavior Consistency
Background
Common sense would dictate that attitudes should
predict behavior. It seems sensible to predict that a
student who strongly supports saving endangered animals
will make an annual donation to the World
Wildlife Fund. However, is the link between attitudes
and behavior this simple?
To answer this question, it is helpful to consider
some early research on this topic. Initial research on
attitude–behavior consistency was conducted in the
early 1930s. At this time, a college professor named
Richard LaPiere was traveling across America with a
young Chinese couple. At the time, there was widespread
anti-Asian prejudice in America. As a result of
this prejudice, LaPiere was concerned whether he and
his traveling companions would be refused service in
hotels and restaurants. Much to his surprise, only once
(in over 250 establishments) were they not served.
A few months after the completion of the journey,
LaPiere sent a letter to each of the visited establishments
and asked whether they would serve Chinese
visitors. Of the establishments that replied, only one
indicated that it would serve such a customer. While
there are a number of problems with LaPiere’s study
(for instance, there is no guarantee that the person
who answered the letter was the same person who
served LaPiere and his friends), the study was taken as
evidence that that people’s behavior might not necessarily
follow from their attitudes.
By the late 1960s, a number of experiments had
examined the relation between attitudes and behavior.
In 1969, Allan Wicker reviewed the findings of these
studies. He reached a rather sobering conclusion:
Attitudes were a relatively poor predictor of behavior.
Wicker’s conclusion contributed to a “crisis of confidence”
in social psychology and led a number of
researchers to question the usefulness of the attitude
concept. It was argued that, if attitudes do not guide
actions, then the construct is of limited value.
When Do Attitudes
Influence Behavior?
Attitude researchers responded to this criticism by
devoting greater attention to the study of when attitudes
predict behavior. In the past 30 years, research
findings have led to a more optimistic conclusion:
Attitudes do predict behavior, under certain conditions.
What are some of these conditions?
First, attitudes do a better job of predicting behavior
when both concepts are measured in a similar way.
Returning to LaPiere’s study, his measure of attitude
asked establishments to indicate whether they would
serve someone of the Chinese race. This measure of
attitude is quite broad in comparison to the measure of
behavior, which involved service being offered to a
highly educated, well-dressed Chinese couple accompanied
by an American college professor. Had
LaPiere’s attitude measure been more specific (e.g., if
it had read, “Would you serve a highly educated, welldressed
Chinese couple accompanied by an American
college professor?”), there would have been greater
consistency between attitudes and behavior.
Second, attitude–behavior consistency varies
depending upon the topic being studied. In some areas,
attitudes do an excellent job of predicting behavior,
whereas in other areas they do not. At one extreme, a
person’s attitude toward a particular political candidate
does a very good job of predicting whether or not they
vote for the candidate. Not surprisingly, people tend to
vote for politicians they like. At the other extreme,
researchers have found a low degree of consistency
between a person’s attitude toward blood donation and
the behavior of donating blood. Perhaps it is not surprising
that this is a domain where there is a low relation
between attitudes and behavior. It may be that a
low relation arises because of other factors that people
see as more important than their positive attitude (they
may be extremely squeamish about needles), or
because the behavior of donating blood may be much
more difficult to enact than the simple expression of
one’s attitude through a behavior like voting.
Third, the consistency between attitudes and
behavior depends upon the “strength” of the attitude.
As noted elsewhere in this encyclopedia, attitudes
differ in their strength. Some of people’s attitudes
are very important to them, whereas others are not.
A number of studies have demonstrated that strong
attitudes are more likely to predict behavior than are
weak attitudes. For instance, Rob Holland and colleagues
conducted a study in which they asked participants
to indicate the favorability and strength of their
attitude toward the organization Greenpeace. One
week later, as part of a different experiment, these
same people were given the opportunity to donate
money to Greenpeace. Holland and colleagues found
that when participants held strong opinions about
Greenpeace, the favorability of their attitude predicted
the amount of money they donated one week later.

Among people with weak attitudes toward Greenpeace,
how much they liked the organization did not predict
their later behavior.
Fourth, the consistency between attitudes and
behavior is affected by differences across people. For
example, research on the personality factor called
“self-monitoring” (which reflects differences across
people in how they vary their behavior across social
situations) has found that the relation between attitudes
and behavior is stronger for low self-monitors than
high self-monitors. Further, the likelihood of a person’s
attitudes influencing their behavior is affected by
their age. A number of studies have found that university
students show lower attitude–behavior relations
compared to adults. This difference is thought to occur
because university students tend to have less-clear attitudes
compared to older individuals.
How Do Attitudes
Influence Behavior?
In addition to understanding when attitudes predict
behavior, social psychologists have developed a number
of models to explain how attitudes predict behavior.
Two important models are the theory of planned
behavior and the MODE model.
The Theory of Planned Behavior
The theory of planned behavior was developed by
Icek Azjen. As its name suggests, the theory of planned
behavior was developed to predict deliberative and
thoughtful behavior. According to this model, the most
immediate predictor (or determinant) of a person’s
behavior is his or her intention. Put simply, if you
intend to recycle glass bottles, you are likely to engage
in this behavior. Within the theory of planned behavior,
a person’s intentions are determined by three factors:
attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral
control. The attitude component refers to the individual’s
attitude toward the behavior—whether the person
thinks that performing the behavior is good or bad.
If you think that recycling glass is good, you should
have a positive intention to carry out this behavior.
Subjective norms refer to people’s beliefs about how
other people who are important to them view the relevant
behavior. If your family and close friends believe
that recycling glass is good, and you are motivated to
comply with their expectations, you should have a positive
intention to carry out this behavior.
Of course, people’s behavior is also influenced by
whether they feel they can perform the behavior. For
example, if an individual wanted to eat a healthier
diet, a positive attitude and positive subjective norms
are unlikely to produce the desired behavior change if
the person is unable to restrain him- or herself from
eating French fries and chocolates. As a result, the
Theory of Planned Behavior includes the idea that
behavior is affected by whether people believe that
they can perform the relevant behavior. This is captured
by the concept of perceived behavioral control.
The MODE Model
Not all behavior is planned and deliberative. Quite
often we act spontaneously, without consciously thinking
of what we intend to do. When our behavior is
spontaneous, the theory of planned behavior may not
reflect how we decide to act. To help understand how
attitudes influence spontaneous behavior, Russell Fazio
developed the MODE model of attitude–behavior relations.
MODE refers to Motivation and Opportunity as
DEterminants of behavior. The MODE model suggests
that if people are motivated and have the opportunity,
they can base their behavior on a planned and deliberative
consideration of available information. However,
when either the motivation or the opportunity to make
a reasoned decision is low, only strong attitudes will
predict behavior.
See also Attitudes; Attitude Strength
Further Readings
Geoffrey Haddock
Gregory R. Maio
Haddock, G., & Maio, G. R. (Eds.). (2004). Contemporary
perspectives on the psychology of attitudes. New York:
Psychology Press.
ATTITUDE CHANGE
Attitude Change———61
Definition
Attitudes are general evaluations of objects, ideas, and
people one encounters throughout one’s life (e.g.,
“capital punishment is bad”). Attitudes are important

62———Attitude Change
because they can guide thought, behavior, and feelings.
Attitude change occurs anytime an attitude is modified.
Thus, change occurs when a person goes from being
positive to negative, from slightly positive to very positive,
or from having no attitude to having one. Because
of the functional value of attitudes, the processes that
change them have been a major focus throughout the
history of social psychology.
Dual Process Approach
According to dual process models of attitude change,
research on this topic can be organized according to
two general types of processes: (1) those that occur
when one puts forth relatively little cognitive effort,
and (2) those that occur with relatively high cognitive
effort. The amount of thought and effort used in any
given situation is determined by many variables, all
of which affect one’s motivation or ability to think.
Some examples include one’s personal preference for
engaging in complex thought, the personal relevance
of the attitude object, and the amount of distraction
present while attempting to think. Furthermore, both
high- and low-effort processes can operate whether or
not a persuasive message is presented.
Low-Effort Processes
When factors keep one’s motivation and/or ability
to think low (such as when the issue is not personally
relevant or there are many distractions present), attitude
change can be produced by a variety of low-effort
processes. These include some largely automatic associative
processes as well as simple inferential processes.
Associative Processes
Classical Conditioning. One way to produce attitude
change in the absence of effortful thought is to repeatedly
associate an initially neutral attitude object with
another stimulus that already possesses a positive or
negative meaning. For example, imagine that every
time you saw your uncle as a child he took you to the
zoo. Assuming you enjoy going to the zoo, you will
likely start to feel more positively toward your uncle.
If, instead, every time you saw him he took you to the
doctor to get your immunization shots, the opposite
result is more likely. Although research on this
process has demonstrated that it is most effective for
previously neutral stimuli (such as novel words or
objects), significant attitude change has also been
found for positive and negative attitude objects as
well. One series of studies found that repeatedly pairing
words related to the self (e.g., I and me) with positive
stimuli caused significant increases in a later
measure of participants’ self-esteem. Thus, continually
associating an attitude object or message with
something you already like (e.g., an attractive source)
can lead to positive attitudes.
Affective Priming. Another process that involves the
association of two stimuli is called affective priming. In
this process a positive or negative stimulus (e.g., words
such as love or murder) is encountered just prior to a
novel attitude object (rather than following it, as occurs
in classical conditioning). When this happens, one’s
reaction to the positive or negative stimulus will come
to color the evaluation of the new object, producing
attitude change. Imagine, for instance, that you are at an
unfamiliar restaurant and are about to try a totally new
dish. If this meal is brought to you by a very attractive
waiter or waitress, your positive reaction toward this
server is likely to influence your initial attitude toward
the food. Although this attitude may change as you
interact with the attitude object (i.e., when you eat the
food), the initial positive evaluation will make it more
likely that your final attitude is also positive.
Mere Exposure. In both of the processes discussed so
far, an attitude is altered by the attitude object’s association
with a positive or negative stimulus. In contrast,
research on the mere exposure effect has found that
repeated exposure to an object in the absence of association
can also change attitudes. Quite simply, this
process requires only that one is repeatedly exposed
to an attitude object. When this occurs, the attitude
toward the object becomes more positive; possibly due
to the fact that the object has actually become associated
with the absence of anything negative. The
strongest mere exposure effects occur when the
repeated attitude object is low in meaning (e.g., novel)
or is presented outside of conscious awareness. One
intriguing implication of this phenomenon is that mere
exposure might help to account for the preference a
newborn infant shows for his or her mother’s voice. As
the child develops in the womb, one stimulus that is
repeated every day is the mother’s voice. Thus, mere
exposure to this stimulus should cause the child’s attitude
toward the voice (and subsequently its source) to
become positive, enhancing the mother–child bond.

Inferential Processes
Balance. One simple inferential process of attitude
change involves cognitive balance. Stated simply, balance
is achieved when people agree with those they
like and disagree with those they dislike. When this is
not the case, one experiences a state of unease, and
attitudes are likely to shift to bring the system into balance.
For instance, suppose you discover that you and
your worst enemy both love the same band. When this
occurs, you are likely to experience an uncomfortable
state of imbalance, and to rectify this inconsistency,
one of your attitudes will likely change. Thus, upon
learning the information, you may come to find your
previous enemy much less distasteful or, alternatively,
feel less positively toward the band.
Attribution. At its most general level, attribution concerns
the inferences that people make about themselves
and others after witnessing a behavior and the
situation in which it occurred. Although this topic is
highly studied in and of itself, its research has also outlined
a number of processes that can create low-effort
attitude change. One attributional process, which
occurs when people are not well attuned to their own
beliefs, is self-perception. In this process, people infer
their own attitudes from their behaviors, just as they
would for someone else. Thus, people can infer that if
they are eating a peach or watching a pro-peach advertisement,
they must like peaches, even if they hadn’t
considered this possibility before. When this inference
is made, it produces attitude change, making their attitude
toward peaches more positive.
In a related phenomenon, called the overjustification
effect, people come to infer that they dislike a
previously enjoyed activity when they are provided
with overly sufficient rewards for engaging in it.
Research has demonstrated this effect by providing
children with candy or other rewards for engaging in
an activity they had previously performed merely for
its own sake (e.g., coloring). When this happens, the
children infer that they were performing the activity
for the reward, not for its mere enjoyment, and their
attitude toward engaging in the behavior becomes less
positive.
Heuristics. One final process through which low-effort
attitude change can occur is through the use of heuristics,
or simple decision rules based on prior experiences
or observations. Although there are countless
heuristics, some examples are “experts are usually correct”
and “bigger is better.” When motivation and ability
to think are low, people can use simple rules like
these to form evaluations. For instance, in deciding
what new music is good, someone might simply walk
over to the bestseller section at the local music store
and survey the current top selections. By basing their
opinions on the rule that “the majority is usually right,”
they establish positive attitudes toward those artists
they discover in this section and avoid more effortful
(and costly) processes such as critically listening to
each performer’s music. Or, instead of thinking carefully
about all of the arguments in a persuasive message
about a new pain reliever, a person might simply
count the arguments and reason, “the more arguments,
the better.”
High-Effort Processes
Attitude Change———63
There are also attitude change processes that
require a greater use of mental resources. When a person
is motivated and able to invest high effort in making
a judgment about an issue or object, attitude
change can occur due to characteristics of his or her
thoughts (e.g., whether the thoughts are favorable or
unfavorable), his or her estimation that good or bad
outcomes will be tied to the attitude object, or the person’s
realization that he or she holds conflicting
beliefs about a set of attitude objects.
Cognitive Responses. When people’s attitudes change
through the use of high cognitive effort, some of the
most important aspects to consider are their actual
thoughts (cognitive responses) toward the attitude
object and any persuasive message that is received on
the topic. Although there are a number of different
aspects to consider, three components of thought have
proven especially important in producing change. The
first, and most obvious, is whether thoughts about the
attitude object or message are largely favorable or unfavorable.
By examining the ratio of positive to negative
thoughts, the likely amount of attitude change produced
can be approximated. If there is a greater proportion of
favorable than unfavorable thoughts, your attitude will
change in a positive direction. The opposite is true
if there is a greater proportion of negative thoughts.
A second important dimension concerns how much
thinking is done. For example, the more positive thoughts
one has about an attitude object, the more favorable the
attitudes will be. The third, and final, aspect of thought

64———Attitude Change
is related to confidence. When thinking about an attitude
object or persuasive message, people will have
varying confidence in each of their discrete thoughts.
To the extent that they are highly confident in a thought,
it will have a great impact on their final attitude. Those
thoughts that are associated with low confidence, however,
will play a relatively minor role in any attitude
change. Many things can affect one’s confidence in a
thought, such as how easily it comes to mind.
Although these three factors are easy to imagine
operating in traditional persuasion settings (e.g., when
you view an advertisement for some commercial product),
they also influence attitude change in the absence
of any persuasive message. One way in which this
occurs is when people role play, or imagine what
someone else would think about an issue. Imagine, for
instance, that you enjoy smoking cigarettes. Now, generate
as many reasons as you can to stop smoking.
Because of the cognitive responses you’ve created by
engaging in this process, you may change your own
attitudes toward smoking. As you can probably guess,
the more thought and effort you put into the role play,
the more likely it is that attitude change will occur. If
you did put a great deal of effort into the exercise, then
you’ve probably created a number of negative thoughts
about smoking tobacco. In this case, you might expect
that your attitude has become more negative toward
smoking. This may or may not be true, however,
depending on the confidence you have in the thoughts
that were produced. If you generated a large number of
antismoking thoughts but had low confidence in the
validity of each one, then they would have very little
impact on your attitude, especially if they were countered
by some very positive thoughts that were held
with high confidence.
Expectancy-Value Processes. According to the reasoned
action theory, attitudes are created through an
individual’s assessment of how likely it is that a given
attitude object will be associated with positive (or negative)
consequences or values. The more likely it is that
an attitude object (e.g., a car) is associated with a positive
consequence (being able to travel to work) or value
(staying safe), the more positive the attitude will be.
Although some researchers have argued that all attitudes
are determined in this manner, it is most likely
that this process only occurs when people put sufficient
effort into considering all of the possible consequences
and values that may be tied to a given attitude object.
Interestingly, when people engage in this process of
effortful consideration of an object or message, they
may actually change their own attitude. If, for instance,
you recently purchased a sport utility vehicle merely
for the image it provides, your attitude toward it may
become more negative if you are prompted to consider
all of the consequences (e.g., very expensive fuel bills)
and values (e.g., promoting U.S. independence from
foreign oil supplies) that are associated with it.
Dissonance Processes. According to cognitive dissonance
theory, people are motivated to hold consistent
attitudes. Because of this motivation for consistency,
people experience unpleasant physiological arousal
(an increase in heart rate, sweaty palms, etc.) when
they willingly engage in a behavior that is counter to
their beliefs or are made aware that they possess two or
more conflicting attitudes. This experience then motivates
them to change their attitudes so that the unpleasant
feelings can be eliminated. When people make a
choice from among alternatives, dissonance processes
will often produce attitude change. Research has
shown that once people make a choice, attitudes
toward each of the potential choices will change such
that the chosen alternative will be viewed more positively
and the nonchosen alternative(s) will be viewed
more negatively than prior to the choice. This reduces
the aversive dissonance experience that would have
occurred if they still felt very positively toward an unselected
option. If you’ve ever bought a product that
turned out to have flaws, then you’ve probably experienced
dissonance. When a situation like this occurs,
your behavior (purchasing the product) is not consistent
with your beliefs about the product (it is flawed),
and this causes dissonance. To resolve this dissonance,
you must change either your attitude toward the product
(and decide that it is actually good) or your behavior
(return it to the store).
Attitude Strength
One of the most important characteristics of an attitude
is its strength. Attitude strength is associated with an
attitude’s persistence, resistance to change, and ability
to predict behavior. The stronger an attitude, the more
it exhibits these characteristics. As you might expect,
attitudes produced by high-effort cognitive processes
are stronger than those produced by low-effort
processes. Because they are the result of greater cognitive
effort, these attitudes are often based on more consistent
information, are supported by a more developed
knowledge structure (e.g., related beliefs and values),
and are held with greater certainty than are attitudes

produced by a low-effort process. If, for instance, your
recent car purchase was based on months of research
and test-drives, then you are likely to have a whole
host of information that supports your positive attitude
toward the vehicle. This associated information will
then serve to buoy the attitude, allowing it to persist
over the life of the vehicle and resist change (e.g., following
negative experiences like breakdowns). If your
attitude was instead based on a low-effort process (e.g.,
a heuristic rule, “if it looks good, it is good”), then this
attitude may be easily changed when you experience
negative events and become motivated to think critically
about the attitude object.
Chris Loersch
Brandon Kopp
Richard E. Petty
See also Attribution Theory; Balance Theory; Cognitive
Dissonance Theory; Elaboration Likelihood Model;
Inference; Need for Cognition; Overjustification Effect;
Priming; Reasoned Action Theory; Self-Perception Theory
Further Readings
Petty, R. E., Wheeler, S. C., & Tormala, Z. L. (2003).
Persuasion and attitude change. In T. Millon & M. Lerner
(Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Personality and social
psychology (pp. 353–382). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
ATTITUDE FORMATION
Definition
An attitude is a general and lasting positive or negative
opinion or feeling about some person, object, or issue.
We form attitudes through either direct experience or
the persuasion of others or the media. Attitudes have
three foundations: affect or emotion, behavior, and
cognitions. In addition, evidence suggests that attitudes
may develop out of psychological needs (motivational
foundations), social interactions (social
foundations), and genetics (biological foundations),
although this last notion is new and controversial.
Emotional Foundations
A key part of an attitude is the affect or emotion associated
with the attitude. At a very basic level, we know
whether we like or dislike something or find an idea
pleasant or unpleasant. For instance, we may say that
we know something “in our heart” or have a “gut feeling.”
In such cases our attitudes have been formed
though our emotions rather than through logic or thinking.
This can happen through (a) sensory reactions,
(b) values, (c) operant/instrumental conditioning, (d) classical
conditioning, (e) semantic generalization, (f) evaluative
conditioning, or (g) mere exposure.
Sensory Reactions
Any direct experience with an object though seeing,
hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching will lead to an
immediate evaluative reaction. We are experts at knowing
whether we find a certain sensory experience pleasant
or unpleasant. For example, immediately upon
tasting a new type of candy bar, you know whether you
like it or not. This also applies to aesthetic experiences,
such as admiring the color or composition of an artwork.
We form attitudes about objects immediately
upon experiencing them.
Values
Some attitudes come from our larger belief system.
We may come to hold certain attitudes because they
validate our basic values. Many attitudes come from
religious or moral beliefs. For example, for many people
their attitudes about abortion, birth control, same-sex
marriage, and the death penalty follow from their moral
or religious beliefs and are highly emotional issues for
them.
Operant Conditioning
Operant or instrumental conditioning is when an
attitude forms because it has been reinforced through
reward or a pleasant experience or discouraged through
punishment or an unpleasant experience. For example,
a parent might praise a teenager for helping out at an
after-school program with little kids. As a result, the
teen may develop a positive attitude toward volunteer
work. Similarly, many people find that broccoli has a
terrible taste, and so they dislike broccoli because of its
punishing flavor.
Classical Conditioning
Attitude Formation———65
Classical or Pavlovian conditioning happens when
a new stimulus comes to elicit an emotional reaction

66———Attitude Formation
because of its association with a stimulus that already
elicits the emotional response. The Russian physiologist
Ivan Pavlov took dogs, which naturally salivate to
meat powder, and trained them to salivate at the sound
of a bell by continually ringing the bell as the meat
powder was presented. In humans, some of our attitudes
have become conditioned in much the same
way. For example, some people have a negative attitude
towards “dirty” words. Just the thought of a
taboo word will cause some people to blush. The
words themselves have come to elicit an emotional
reaction because their use is frowned upon in our culture
in most contexts.
Semantic Generalization
Not only can we become conditioned to a specific
stimulus, but this initial conditioning can generalize or
spread to similar stimuli. For example, a bell higher or
lower in pitch to the original conditioned sound may
elicit the same reaction. In humans, the initial conditioning
can spread even to words or concepts similar to
the original stimulus. As a result, we can form attitudes
about an object or idea without having direct contact
with it. When this kind of generalization occurs, the
process is called semantic generalization. For example,
human subjects who have been conditioned to the
sound of a bell may also show a response to the sight
of a bell or by the spoken word bell. Semantic generalization
can account for the formation of attitudes,
like prejudice, where people have formed an attitude
without having direct contact with the object of that
attitude.
Evaluative Conditioning
An object need not directly cause us to feel pleasant
or unpleasant for us to form an attitude. Evaluative
conditioning occurs when we form attitudes toward an
object or person because our exposure to them coincided
with a positive or negative emotion. For example,
a couple may come to feel positive toward a particular
song that was playing on the radio during their first
date. Their positive attitude to the song is a result of its
association with the happy experience of a date.
Mere Exposure
Finally, when we see the same object or person
over and over, we will generally form a positive attitude
toward that object or person. This is true for an
object or person we feel neutral or positive about, so
long as we are not overexposed to it. For example,
many popular styles of clothing seem bizarre at first,
but then as we see more of them we may come to
accept and even like them.
Behavioral Foundations
Sometimes we form attitudes from our actions. This
can happen if we do something before we have an attitude
(e.g., going to an art opening of an unknown
artist), when we are unsure of our attitudes (e.g.,
going with a friend to a political rally), or when we are
not thinking about what we are doing (mindlessly
singing along with a random station on the radio).
That is, there are times when just going through the
motions can cause us to form an attitude consistent
with those actions. In the previous examples, people
may come to hate the new artist, support free trade, or
like classical music because their actions have led
them to engage in these behaviors, which then led to
the formation of an attitude. There are at least four
lines of evidence that account for how attitudes may
form out of actions.
First, self-perception theory suggests that we look
to our behavior and figure out our attitude based on
what we have done or are doing. Second, cognitive
dissonance theory suggests that we strive for consistency
between our attitudes and our actions and when
the two do not match, we may form a new attitude to
coincide with our past actions.
Third, research evidence using the facial feedback
hypothesis finds that holding our facial muscles in the
pose of an emotion will cause us to experience that
emotion, which may then color our opinions. For
example, participants who viewed cartoons that were
not particularly funny while holding a pen across their
teeth—a pose which activates the same muscles
involved in smiling—rated the cartoons funnier than
subjects who posed with a pen in their mouths, which
activated the same muscles involved in frowning. As a
result, people may develop positive or negative attitudes
toward neutral objects after moving their facial
muscles into smiles or frowns, respectively.
Finally, role-playing, such as improvising persuasive
arguments, giving personal testimony, taking on
another person’s perspective, or even play-acting, are
all additional ways that people may come to form attitudes
based on their behaviors. For example, in an
early study, women who were heavy smokers participated
in an elaborately staged play where they played

the role of a woman dying of lung cancer. Two weeks
later, these women smoked less and held less positive
attitudes toward smoking than women who had not
been through this role-play procedure.
Cognitive Foundations
The cognitive foundation of attitudes, what might be
called beliefs, comes from direct experience with the
world or through thinking about the world. Thinking
about the world includes any kind of active information
processing, such as deliberating, wondering,
imagining, and reflecting, as well as through activities
such as reading, writing, listening, and talking.
If you believe that insects are dirty and disgusting,
then you will probably have the attitude that insects
are not food. However, if you read that locusts and
other insects are happily eaten in some cultures, then
you may come to believe that locusts may not be so
bad. Your attitude here comes from thinking about the
new facts you read.
Additionally, if the National Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) says that exposure to
ultraviolet light is the most important environmental
factor involved in the formation of skin cancers, and
you believe that the CDC is a trustworthy expert, then
you might logically reason that excessive sun exposure
is not a healthy thing. Here your attitude comes
from logically reasoning about the world.
Suppose you didn’t know how you felt about a
topic until you were forced to write an essay for a
writing class. This also would be an example of attitude
formation through cognition, in this case, organizing
your thoughts in preparation to write a coherent
essay.
Marianne Miserandino
See also Attitude Change; Cognitive Dissonance Theory;
Facial-Feedback Hypothesis; Genetic Influences on Social
Behavior; Mere Exposure Effect; Reference Group; Self-
Perception Theory; Social Learning
Further Readings
Bem, D. (1970). Beliefs, attitudes, and human affairs.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Eagly, A. H., & Chaiken, S. (1993). The psychology of
attitudes. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Elms, A. C. (1966). Influence of fantasy ability on attitude
change through role-playing. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 4, 36–43.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1981). Attitudes and
persuasion: Classic and contemporary approaches.
Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown.
Zanna, M. P., & Rempel, J. K. (1988). Attitudes: A new look
at an old concept. In D. Bar-Tal & A. W. Kruglanski
(Eds.), The social psychology of attitudes (pp. 315–334).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
ATTITUDES
Definition
Attitudes refer to our overall evaluations of people,
groups, and objects in our social world. Reporting an
attitude involves making a decision concerning liking
versus disliking or favoring versus disfavoring an attitude
object. Attitudes are important because they affect
both the way we perceive the world and how we behave.
Indeed, over 70 years ago, Gordon Allport asserted that
the attitude concept is the most indispensable concept in
social psychology. That statement remains equally valid
today; the study of attitudes remains at the forefront of
social psychological research and theory, as illustrated
by the number of relevant entries in this encyclopedia.
This entry concentrates on three key aspects of attitudes:
their content, structure, and function.
The Content of Attitudes
Attitudes———67
One of the most influential models of attitude content
has been the multicomponent model. According to this
perspective, attitudes are summary evaluations of an
object that have affective, cognitive, and behavioral
components. The affective component of attitudes
refers to feelings or emotions associated with an
object. Affective responses influence attitudes in a
number of ways. First, attitudes are influenced by the
emotions that are aroused in a person after exposure to
the attitude object. For instance, spiders make some
people feel scared, and this negative affective response
is likely to produce a negative attitude toward spiders.
In addition, feelings influence attitudes via processes
such as classical conditioning and mere exposure.
Here, the environment repeatedly pairs the object with
other stimuli that elicit particular emotions (classical
conditioning) or repeated exposure causes the object to
seem more familiar and positive over time.
The cognitive component of attitudes refers to
beliefs, thoughts, and attributes associated with an
object. Cognitions have an impact on many types of

68———Attitudes
attitudes. For example, someone buying a used car is
likely to devote considerable attention to its attributes,
such as its safety record, gas mileage, and past repair
costs. The person’s attitude toward the car is likely to
be influenced by its positive and negative characteristics.
Within the study of intergroup attitudes, stereotypes
are beliefs about the attributes possessed by a
particular social group. Many studies have revealed
that possessing negative stereotypes about a group of
people is associated with having a prejudicial attitude
toward the group.
Behavioral information is the mental representation
of current, past, and future behaviors regarding an
attitude object. For instance, research has demonstrated
that performing a behavior with evaluative
implications influences the favorability of attitudes. In
a study by Pablo Briñol and Richard Petty, participants
moved their heads in either an up-and-down
motion (nodding the head in agreement) or a side-toside
motion (shaking the head in disagreement) as
they listened to an editorial that was played over the
headphones. It was found that participants were more
likely to agree with the content of a highly persuasive
appeal when they moved their heads up-and-down, as
compared to side-to-side. While performing a behavior
can influence a person’s attitude, attitudes also
influence future behavior. As discussed elsewhere in
this encyclopedia, attitudes play an important role in
predicting how an individual will behave in a particular
situation.
Knowing the content of an attitude is important,
because attempts to change attitudes are more successful
when the persuasive appeal matches the content of
the attitude. For example, if a person dislikes a beverage
because it tastes bad, the person will be more convinced
by a strong demonstration of a new, pleasant
taste than by positive information about its health value.
The Structure of Attitudes
In addition to attitude content, another important issue
concerns how positive and negative evaluations are
structured in memory. It is sometimes assumed that
having positive feelings, beliefs, and behaviors prevents
the occurrence of negative feelings, beliefs,
and behaviors. In other words, according to this onedimensional
perspective, the positive and negative elements
of attitudes are stored at opposite ends of a
single dimension, and people tend to experience either
end of the dimension or somewhere in between.
This view is opposed by a two-dimensional view,
which suggests that positive and negative elements are
stored along two separate dimensions. One dimension
reflects whether the attitude has few or many positive
elements, and the other dimension reflects whether the
attitude has few or many negative elements. This view
proposes that people can possess any combination of
positivity or negativity in their attitudes. As a result, attitudes
may occasionally subsume both strong positive
and negative components, which is labeled as attitudinal
ambivalence. This ambivalence is an important determinant
of whether attitudes are strongly held and resistant
to change. For example, research has demonstrated that
ambivalent attitudes are less likely to predict behavior.
Further, individuals pay more careful attention to a persuasive
appeal when they have an ambivalent attitude.
The Function of Attitudes
Considerable attention has been devoted to understanding
the needs or functions that are fulfilled by
attitudes. Almost 50 years ago, M. Brewster Smith and
colleagues suggested that attitudes serve three primary
functions: object-appraisal, social-adjustment, and
externalization. Object-appraisal refers to the ability
of attitudes to summarize the positive and negative
attributes of objects. For example, attitudes can help
people to approach things that are beneficial for them
and avoid things that are harmful to them. Socialadjustment
is fulfilled by attitudes that help people to
identify with others whom they like and to dissociate
from people whom they dislike. For example, individuals
may buy a certain soft drink because it is endorsed
by their favorite singer. Externalization is fulfilled by
attitudes that defend the self against internal conflict.
For example, bad golfers might develop an intense dislike
for the game because their poor performance
threatens their self-esteem.
In his own program of research, Daniel Katz proposed
four attitude functions: knowledge, utility, egodefense,
and value-expression. The knowledge and
utilitarian functions are similar to Smith and colleagues’
object-appraisal function, while the ego-defensive
function is similar to Smith and colleagues’ externalization
function. Katz also proposed that attitudes
may serve a value-expressive function, such that an
attitude may express an individual’s self-concept and
central values. For example, a person might cycle to
work because he or she values health and wishes to
preserve the environment.

Among the functions, the object-appraisal function
is especially important because it is the capacity of attitudes
to serve as energy-saving devices that make judgments
easier and faster to perform. There is also an
important distinction between instrumental and valueexpressive
attitudes. Knowing the primary function of
an attitude is important, because attempts at attitude
change are more likely to be successful when the persuasive
appeal matches the function of the attitude.
Geoffrey Haddock
Gregory R. Maio
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Attitude Change
Further Readings
Haddock, G., & Maio, G. R. (Eds.). (2004). Contemporary
perspectives on the psychology of attitudes. New York:
Psychology Press.
ATTITUDE STRENGTH
Definition
Some attitudes exert a powerful impact on thinking
and on behavior, whereas others are largely inconsequential.
Similarly, some attitudes are very firm, resistant
to even the strongest challenges and persistent
over long spans of time, but others are highly malleable,
yielding to the slightest provocation and fluctuation
over time. The term attitude strength is used to
capture this distinction. Specifically, strong attitudes
are those that (a) resist change, (b) persist over time,
(c) guide information processing, and (d) motivate
and direct behavior.
Background
A great deal of evidence attests to the impact of attitudes
on a wide array of outcomes. There is evidence,
for example, that attitudes can color one’s interpretation
of ambiguous stimuli, causing one to perceive the stimuli
in attitude-congruent ways. This explains why supporters
of two competing political candidates can watch
the same political debate and come away equally convinced
that their own preferred candidate prevailed. In
addition, attitudes can shape people’s perceptions of
Attitude Strength———69
other people’s attitudes, causing them to overestimate
the prevalence of their views. There is also a wealth of
evidence that attitudes motivate and guide behavior.
For example, people’s attitudes toward recycling are
strongly predictive of whether they actually participate
in recycling programs, and attitudes toward political
candidates are excellent predictors of voting behavior.
In these and countless other ways, thoughts and actions
are profoundly shaped by attitudes.
Attitudes do not always exert such powerful
effects, however. In fact, in addition to the impressive
findings about the power of attitudes, the attitude literature
is also full of an equally impressive set of failures
to find any effect of attitudes on thought or
behavior. In fact, by the late 1960s, the literature was
so inconsistent that some prominent scholars questioned
the very existence of attitudes, sending the field
into a period of crisis.
Since then, social psychologists have made great
progress toward identifying the conditions under
which attitudes influence thoughts and behavior. It is
now clear, for example, that attitudes are consequential
for some types of people more than others, and in
some situations more than others. More recently, social
psychologists have also come to recognize that some
attitudes are inherently more powerful than others.
That is, across people and situations, some attitudes
exert a strong impact on thinking and on behavior,
whereas others have little or no impact.
Determinants of Attitude Strength
What makes an attitude strong? Over the past few
decades, researchers have identified roughly a dozen
distinct features of attitudes that are associated with
their strength. These include knowledge, the amount of
information people have stored in memory about the
attitude object; importance, the degree to which people
care about and attach psychological significance to an
attitude object; certainty, the degree to which people
are sure that their attitudes are valid and correct; elaboration,
the amount of thought that has been devoted
to the attitude object; extremity, how far from the midpoint
the attitude is on a negative–positive continuum;
accessibility, how quickly and easily the attitude
comes to mind when the attitude object is encountered;
ambivalence, the degree to which people simultaneously
experience both positive and negative reactions
to an attitude object; and a handful of other features. In
separate programs of research, each of these attitude

70———Attraction
features has been shown to relate to one or more of the
four defining properties of strong attitudes.
For example, attitudes that a person considers personally
important predict his or her behavior much
more accurately than do less-important attitudes.
Important attitudes are also more resistant to change
when a person is confronted by a counterattitudinal
persuasive message, and they are more stable over
long periods of time. In addition, important attitudes
influence information processing in ways that unimportant
attitudes do not: They influence how much
people like other people, how they evaluate political
candidates, and many other cognitive processes.
Relations Among Strength-Related
Attitude Features
Because attitude features relate in similar ways to the
strength and durability of an attitude, researchers once
assumed that they were interchangeable. To assess the
strength of an attitude, a researcher might measure the
importance people attach to the attitude or the amount
of knowledge they possess about it or the certainty
with which they held the attitude, or any one of the
other strength-related features. Sometimes researchers
would measure several of the strength-related features
and combine them together into a single index of attitude
strength.
More recently, however, researchers have come
to appreciate the rather sharp differences between the
various strength-related attitude features. For example,
attaching importance to an attitude involves caring
deeply and being passionately concerned about it,
whereas being knowledgeable simply involves accumulating
a large number of facts about the object.
Differences of this sort raise the possibility that the
various strength-related attitude features may operate
differently, with unique consequences for thought and
behavior. Indeed, a growing body of evidence supports
this view. There is evidence, for example, that some
attitudes are strong because people attach a great deal
of importance to them, which has a particular set of
consequences for thinking and action. Other attitudes
are strong because they are based on a great deal of
information, which sets into motion a somewhat different
set of cognitive and behavioral consequences.
None of this evidence challenges the general
notion that some attitudes are strong and others are
weak. It reveals, however, that not all strong attitudes
are alike. To the contrary, attitude strength is a multidimensional
construct with a diverse set of consequences
for thought and behavior.
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Attitudes;
Persuasion
Further Readings
Penny S. Visser
Petty, R. E., & Krosnick, J. A. (1995). Attitude strength:
Antecedents and consequences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Visser, P. S., Bizer, G., & Krosnick, J. A. (2006). Exploring
the latent structure of strength-related attitude attributes.
In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 38, pp. 1–67). San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
ATTRACTION
Definition
Attraction, to a social psychologist, is any force that
draws people together. Social psychologists have traditionally
used the term attraction to refer to the affinity
that draws together friends and romantic partners.
However, many current researchers believe there are
important qualitative differences among the forces
that draw people into different types of relationships.
History
Perhaps the most influential model of interpersonal
attraction was the reinforcement-affect model. According
to this model, attraction between people follows
simple principles of classical conditioning, or associative
learning. A person will come to like anyone associated
with positive feelings (e.g., the waitress in a
favorite restaurant) and dislike anyone associated with
negative feelings (the traffic cop who writes the person
a ticket for taking an illegal left turn). A corollary of
this model is that the higher the ratio of positive to
negative associations one has in a relationship with
another person, the more he or she will like that person.
In other words, a person will like the person who
has provided him or her with three rewards and one

punishment (for a ratio of .75 rewards) more than the
person who provides him or her with six rewards and
four punishments (yielding a lower overall ratio of .60,
despite the higher total number of rewards). This
corollary was studied by exposing research participants
to other people who varied in their attitudinal
similarity (on the assumption that meeting others who
agree with them is rewarding).
Later research suggested a slight problem with this
model, in that people generally tend to assume other
people agree with them. Hence, the reward value of
similarity is less than the punishment value of dissimilarity.
Indeed, discovering that another person disagrees
with one’s important values does seem to be
particularly unpleasant, and people tend to dislike
those who disagree with them (particularly when
those disagreeing people are members of their own
groups, who they are particularly likely to expect to be
similar).
The reinforcement-affect theory is an example of a
domain-general model of behavior. Domain-general
models attempt to explain a wide range of behavior
using one simple principle. In this case, the simple and
general principle is this: People, like other animals, will
repeat behaviors that are rewarding and will not repeat
behaviors that are not rewarding. Another domaingeneral
model attempts to explain attraction by referencing
broad principles of social exchange. Social
exchange theories presume that people are implicitly
driven by economic principles: People choose behaviors
that they expect to maximize their future benefits
and minimize their future costs. This model differs from
a reinforcement-affect model in presuming that people
do not simply respond passively to past rewards and
punishments, but instead make mental calculations,
including estimations of who is likely to be a good bargain
in a future relationship. For example, you might
pursue a relationship with someone who has never
rewarded you in the past, and in fact you might even be
willing to pay some initial costs to meet that person, if
you have knowledge that they might make a good
friend or mate. On the other side, you might pass on a
potential mate who has been very pleasant to you if you
estimate that you could get a better deal with someone
else. Some variants of social exchange models presume
that people are uncomfortable with any relationship
that is an unfair bargain, whether they are underbenefitted
(getting less than they deserve) or overbenefitted
(getting more than they deserve).
Attraction———71
Problems With Traditional
Domain-General Models
Domain-general models tend not to be specific
enough to predict which features or behaviors of
another person will be attractive. What constitutes a
general reward or punishment, or a general benefit or
cost, for example? It turns out that, without further
information, this is a difficult question to answer.
Whether a kiss is a reward or a punishment depends
on who is kissing whom (e.g., think about a person
you find attractive as compared to an overly friendly
but unattractive stranger at a bar). Furthermore, you
may like someone quite well even when your relationship
is very inequitable (a mother may tell you that
she has never felt as positively toward anyone as her
young baby, despite the fact that the baby tends to
wake her with loud demands in the middle of the night
and never even say “thank you”).
Domain-specific theories of attraction make more
particular predictions about what will and will not be
attractive, depending on the particular category of relationship
between two people and on their particular
goals at the time. Social psychologists have suggested
several ways to functionally divide types of relationships.
One evolution-inspired view presumes that there
are a limited number of recurrent problems of social
living that all human beings need to solve in their relationships
with others. These include affiliation (maintaining
a small group of close friends to share various
tasks and rewards), status (getting respect from and
power over other members of one’s group), selfprotection
(avoiding exploitation and harm from
potential enemies), mate-search (choosing a desirable
partner), mate-retention (holding onto a desirable partner),
and kin-care (taking care of offspring and other
close relatives). The rules of social exchange, and the
particular content of rewards and punishments, are presumed
to differ in important ways for people involved
in these different kinds of interactions. For example,
although you may keep close track of which friends do
and do not pay their share of the restaurant bill, this
type of accounting is much less likely to occur between
children and their parents. For a man and a woman
who have just begun dating seriously, on the other
hand, it may be that the man desires to pay the bill to
demonstrate his possession of resources and that the
woman is content to allow him to pay so as to get
a sense of his commitment and ability to provide

72———Attributional Ambiguity
resources. For most couples at the early phases of dating,
the man is more likely than the woman to request
initial sexual behavior and to regard it as a benefit
obtained from the relationship.
Remaining Questions
Social psychologists have only begun to study the
implications of domain specificity for attraction. As
yet, there is more theory than data on the questions of
(a) what it is people find rewarding and punishing
in friends versus lovers versus family members, and
(b) how people’s mental accounting differs for people
involved in different types of relationships. Many
social psychologists believe that the understanding of
such processes will be enhanced by placing human
attraction in the context of broad evolutionary principles
derived from comparative studies of other animal
species. Several such principles discussed elsewhere
in this encyclopedia include differential parental
investment (linked to the general tendency for offspring
to be more costly for females than for males)
and inclusive fitness (linked to an animal’s success at
assisting its genes into future generations via reproduction
and assisting its genetic relatives).
Douglas T. Kenrick
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Social Exchange Theory;
Social Learning
Further Readings
Chen, F., & Kenrick, D. T. (2002). Repulsion or attraction:
Group membership and assumed attitude similarity.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
83, 111–125.
Kenrick, D. T. (2006). A dynamical evolutionary view of
love. In R. J. Sternberg & K. Weis (Eds.), The new
psychology of love (pp. 15–34). New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
ATTRIBUTIONAL AMBIGUITY
Definition
Attributional ambiguity is a psychological state of
uncertainty about the cause of a person’s outcomes or
treatment. It can be experienced with regard to one’s
own outcomes or treatment or those of another person,
and with regard to positive as well as negative outcomes
or treatment. It occurs whenever there is more
than one plausible reason for why a person was treated
in a certain way or received the outcomes that he or she
received.
Antecedents of
Attributional Ambiguity
A variety of factors may contribute to attributional
ambiguity. Most research on this topic has examined a
particular form of attributional ambiguity: that which
arises in social interactions between people who differ
in their social identities or group memberships and in
which there is uncertainty about whether an individual’s
treatment is based on his or her personal deservingness
(such as abilities, efforts, personality, or qualifications)
versus on aspects of his or her social identity (such as
family wealth, appearance, ethnicity, gender).
Attributional ambiguity arises in such interactions
when a particular social identity or group membership
is associated with a set of stereotypes or beliefs that are
valenced, that is, that make a person more or less valued
in society. Simple differences among people are
not sufficient. Thus, for example, it is unlikely that a
student majoring in art would experience attributional
ambiguity in his or her interactions with students
majoring in psychology unless he or she believed that
psychology majors held positive or negative stereotypes
about art majors. For individuals to experience
attributional ambiguity in their interactions with others,
they must suspect that others have some ulterior
motive for responding in a particular way. This is more
likely to occur when they believe that others are aware
of their social identity, are aware of others’ stereotypes
about their social identity, and have some knowledge
of the content or valence of these stereotypes.
People who have a stigmatized social identity
(such as members of devalued ethnic groups and the
overweight) experience more attributional ambiguity
in their everyday encounters than do those who are not
stigmatized. Those who stigmatized are aware that
others hold negative stereotypes about, and prejudicial
attitudes against, their social identity. For some individuals,
their stigmatized identity plays a central role
in how they see themselves and in how they interpret
others’ reactions to them. Hence, when they are
treated negatively by someone who is aware of their

social identity, they may be unsure whether it is due to
something about them personally or due to prejudice
against their social identity.
Positive outcomes also can be attributionally
ambiguous for the stigmatized. When there are strong
social sanctions against expressing prejudice, those
who are stigmatized may become suspicious of positive
feedback. They may wonder, for example, whether
an evaluator’s positive feedback on their essay accurately
reflects the quality of their work or reflects the
evaluator’s desire not to appear prejudiced. Social programs
designed to remediate past injustices, such as
affirmative action programs, can introduce attributional
ambiguity when they are seen as providing an explanation
for positive outcomes based on social identity.
When such programs make it clear that advancement is
based on merit as well as social identity, such ambiguity
diminishes. Those who are stigmatized may also
find unsolicited kindnesses or offers of help attributionally
ambiguous. They may wonder whether these
responses reflect genuine caring for them as individuals
or feelings of sympathy or pity because of their
stigma.
Individuals who possess a statistically deviant but
culturally valued social identity (such as extreme
wealth, beauty, or fame) also may experience attributional
ambiguity, particularly in response to positive
treatment or outcomes. Like stigmas, culturally valued
attributes are associated with valenced stereotypes, in
this case generally positive stereotypes. These individuals
may be uncertain whether others’ favorable reactions
to them are genuine or reflect ulterior motives.
Similarly, they may be unsure whether they have earned
their positive outcomes through their personal efforts
or talents or were accorded them because of their culturally
valued mark. In sum, attributional ambiguity is
more likely to be experienced when one believes others
hold negative or positive attitudes toward one’s
social identity and when one believes there are strong
social norms against individuals expressing their true
attitudes.
Consequences of
Attributional Ambiguity
Attributional ambiguity has important affective, selfevaluative,
interpersonal, and motivational implications.
Uncertainty about the cause of one’s social
outcomes threatens a sense of predictability and control
Attributional Ambiguity———73
and is affectively distressing. Uncertainty about the
cause of positive outcomes can undermine self-esteem
by preventing a person from taking credit for his or her
successes or internalizing positive feedback. Uncertainty
about the cause of negative outcomes also can undermine
self-esteem. When negative outcomes are, in fact,
due to prejudice, ambiguity can mask this fact and lead
people wrongly to doubt their ability. People who are
rejected report higher self-esteem and less stress when
they know for sure that the rejection was due to discrimination
than when they are unsure of its cause.
However, attributional ambiguity can also provide an
opportunity for self-esteem protection. When alternative
causes for an event are present (such as another’s
bias), the contribution of other causes (such as one’s
own ability) is discounted. Thus, attributional ambiguity
may buffer self-esteem from negative outcomes if it
enables individuals to discount internal, stable aspects
of themselves as causes of those outcomes. Indeed,
research shows that among individuals who experience
negative feedback, the more they blame the feedback
on prejudice rather than on themselves, the higher their
self-esteem.
Attributional ambiguity can have negative implications
for self-knowledge. When alternative attributions
for both negative outcomes and positive outcomes are
present, individuals may come to regard feedback as
not particularly diagnostic of their true ability. Consequently,
people who chronically experience attributional
ambiguity and who feel vulnerable to being treated on
the basis of their stigma find it more difficult to accurately
assess their abilities, gauge their potential, and
select tasks of a difficulty level that is appropriate to
their ability.
Attributional ambiguity can interfere with cognitive
performance when it leads people to devote cognitive
resources to trying to figure out why they were
treated in a particular way rather than focusing on the
task at hand. Attributional ambiguity can undermine
motivation when it leads people to question the extent
to which their outcomes are under their personal control
(such as their own effort) as opposed to outside
of their control. Attributional ambiguity can damage
relationships by undermining trust and engendering
suspicion. Finally, attributional ambiguity may lead to
physiological changes in the body, such as increased
blood pressure and decreased production of antibodies,
which have negative implications for health.
Brenda Major

74———Attributions
See also Prejudice; Stereotypes and Stereotyping; Stigma
Further Readings
Aronson, J., & Inzlicht, M. (2004). The ups and downs of
attributional ambiguity. Psychological Science, 15, 829–836.
Crocker, J., Voelkl, K., Testa, M., & Major, B. (1991). Social
stigma: The affective consequences of attributional
ambiguity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
60, 218–228.
Major, B., & Crocker, J. (1993). Social stigma: The
consequences of attributional ambiguity. In D. M. Mackie
& D. L. Hamilton (Eds.), Affect, cognition and
stereotyping: Interactive processes in group perception
(pp. 345–370). Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Major, B., McCoy, S. K., & Quinton, W. J. (2002). Antecedents
and consequences of attributions to discrimination:
Theoretical and empirical advances. In M. Zanna (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 34,
pp. 251–329). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
ATTRIBUTION CUBE
See KELLEY’S COVARIATION MODEL
ATTRIBUTIONS
Definition
The term attribution has several distinct meanings. In
the 1920s, Austrian philosopher and psychologist Fritz
Heider originally referred to attribution as a central
process in human perception that helped solve a philosophical
puzzle of the time. According to this puzzle,
the mind perceives objects that exist in the world, but
the perception itself exists in the mind; how, then, can
people experience objects as “out there” rather than “in
here,” in their own minds? Heider argued that humans
engage in a psychological process of attributing their
subjective experiences to objects in the world. That is,
the objects are cognitively reconstructed to be the causal
sources of perceptual experiences. By contrast, when
people try to imagine (rather than perceive) an object,
they attribute this experience to their own minds.
The second meaning is also based on Heider’s theorizing.
In the 1940s, Heider became interested in social
cognition, the processes by which people perceive and
make judgments about other people. Here attributions
are also causal judgments, but judgments about the
causes of people’s behavior. Heider distinguished
between two types of causal attributions. Attributions
to personal causes refer to beliefs, desires, and intentions
that bring about purposeful human behavior (e.g.,
writing a letter with the desire of impressing a potential
employer); attributions to impersonal causes refer to
forces that don’t involve intention or purpose (e.g., the
wind drying out a person’s eyes). Thus, in the domain
of social perception, social psychologists speak of causal
attributions for behavior, that is, people’s attempts to
explain why a behavior occurred.
A third kind of attribution is dispositional attribution.
Beginning with Edward E. Jones in 1965,
researchers became interested in a particular judgment
people sometimes make when they observer another
person’s behavior: inferences about the person’s more
stable dispositions such as traits, attitudes, and values.
For example, Dale sees Audrey flutter her eyelashes
and concludes she is flirtatious. Sometimes people are
too eager to make such dispositional attributions even
when the behavior in the particular context does not
warrant the inference; in that case, people are said to
display the correspondence bias or fundamental attribution
error.
Finally, social psychologists speak of responsibility
attributions and blame attributions, which are judgments
of a moral nature. When a negative outcome
occurs (e.g., a window is shattered), people try to find
out who is responsible for the outcome, who is to
blame. Often such responsibility attributions rely
directly on causal attributions (e.g., whoever shattered
the window is responsible and is to blame), but sometimes
they are more complex. When the window is
shattered because the neighbor’s dog tried to chase a
cat teasing him behind the window, the neighbor will
be responsible, and if a strong wind causes the damage,
the insurance will be responsible. Responsibility
attributions, then, are based both on causality (who
brought about what) and on people’s obligations (who
ought to do what).
Attributions are thus judgments in which an experience,
behavior, or event is connected to its source:
the underlying object, cause, disposition, or responsible
agent.
Bertram F. Malle

See also Actor–Observer Asymmetries; Attribution Theory;
Correspondent Inference Theory; Kelley’s Covariation
Model
Further Readings
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations.
New York: Wiley.
Weiner, B. (1995). Judgments of responsibility: A foundation
for a theory of social conduct. New York: Guilford Press.
ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Definition
Attribution theory—or rather, a family of attribution
theories—is concerned with the question of how ordinary
people explain human behavior. One type of
attribution theory emphasizes people’s use of folk psychology
to detect and understand internal states such
as goals, desires, or intentions. People then use these
inferred states to explain the behavior they observe.
Another type of attribution theory assumes that people
observe regularities and differences in behavior to learn
about dispositions (e.g., personality traits, attitudes) that
are characteristic of themselves or others. Attribution
theories pose a challenge to academic efforts to account
for behavior that either fail to explain the individual
behaviors of individual people or that deny the usefulness
of folk psychological (or mentalistic) concepts.
Attribution theories are complemented by what is sometimes
called attributional theories. These theories
address the consequences of particular attributions
for emotions (e.g., anger vs. pity), judgments (e.g., of
guilt vs. innocence), and behavior (e.g., aggression vs.
assistance).
Attribution as Perception
In 1958, Fritz Heider introduced an early version of
attribution theory at a time when behaviorist theories
of learning and memory and psychoanalytic theories
of unconscious motivation dominated academic psychology.
These theories had little use for naive explanations
of behavior. In contrast, Heider stressed the
importance of studying everyday attributions because
they influence how people feel and what they do.
Attribution Theory———75
Heider made two important distinctions. The first
distinction was whether a behavior is seen as intentional
or unintentional; the second distinction was
whether a behavior is seen as caused by something
about the person or by something about the situation.
These two distinctions are related because intentional
behaviors say more about the person than about the
situation. Heider anticipated that people regard personal
attributions as most important. Individualist cultures,
in particular, foster a tendency to see humans as
autonomous agents who have some control over their
own behavior. Once they have made a personal attribution,
people can predict a person’s future behavior
more confidently. Suppose Ringo repays a loan from
Paul on time. If Paul concludes that Ringo is trustworthy,
he may help him again when the need arises, or
feel comfortable to trust Ringo in other ways, as when
confiding a piece of gossip about George.
The repayment of a loan is likely seen as an intentional
act, especially when there are no signs that the
person was coerced. Heider suggested that an attribution
of intentionality can be made with little thought, much
like the visual perception of objects is largely automatic.
In social perception, the person and the behavior form a
perceptual unit, and thereby suggest a causal connection.
Experiments have shown that the observation of a
behavior that implies a certain personality trait (such as
the timely repayment of a loan suggests trustworthiness)
makes that trait mentally accessible. If, for example,
people read about a repaid loan and a host of other
behaviors, seeing the word trustworthy at a later time
helps them recall the specific behavior that suggested it.
Whereas the person–behavior unit is figural in
social perception, the situation is usually the background.
Compared with a person, a situation is typically
not well organized perceptually. It can comprise
the presence of other people, current moods, the
weather, or the time of day. Only when a particular
aspect of a situation commands attention, such as the
threat of penalties in the loan example, can situational
attributions become more prominent.
The attribution of an intentional, and thus personal,
causation is furthered if the actor exerts effort. If we
learn that Ringo recently took a second job, we feel
more confident about his intention to repay the loan. I
n general, if a person appears to go the extra mile to
produce a desired effect, people attribute the behavior
to a conscious goal. The third, and perhaps the
strongest cue toward intentionality is what Heider called

76———Attribution Theory
equifinality. Equifinality can only be revealed by several
behaviors that lead to the same end result. Courting
behavior is an example. A suitor who sends flowers,
cards, and chocolates, and who also serenades the object
of his desire really seems to mean it. Note that these
cues are not independent. He who seeks many means
to achieve the same end can often only do so by exerting
more effort than he who is more nonchalant.
Attribution as Inference
In 1965, Edward Jones and Keith Davis proposed the
more formal theory of correspondent inferences. They
stressed that attributions of intentionality depend on
the impression that the actor freely chose what to do.
There had to be alternative options as well as a lack
of situational pressures, such as coercion by others.
A chosen option is most informative if its alternatives
differ in their consequences, and if the person was
able to foresee these consequences. For example, we
can learn about Ringo’s intentions from what he did
with the money he borrowed. Suppose he had the
options of buying a lawn mower, a new computer, or
a cruise for his wife. Choosing the last option is most
informative because it has the unique consequence of
affirming an important personal relationship.
The question of free choice became a watershed
issue for all attribution theories because it most clearly
separates personal from situational causes. Originally,
Jones and his colleagues believed that people would
discount personal explanations if a behavior was externally
constrained. In a famous experiment in 1967,
Jones and Victor Harris found, however, that people
thought a person who, in compliance with an experimenter’s
request, had written an essay in praise of Fidel
Castro, privately held pro-Castro attitudes. The tendency
to make inferences about the person even when
the situation could fully explain the behavior, was
henceforth called the correspondence bias, or more
evocatively, the fundamental attribution error. In short,
the theory of correspondent inferences assumed that the
road from behaviors to dispositional attributions is a
rocky one because of the multiplicity of considerations
that is presumably necessary. In contrast, the evidence
for quick and potentially biased inferences suggests that
people make use of perceptual shortcuts, just as Heider
had suspected.
Some of these shortcuts are self-serving. People
readily attribute successes and other positive events to
their own efforts or enduring qualities, while attributing
failures or other setbacks to chance or to features of the
situation (e.g., “The test was unfair!”). Although selfserving
biases are suspect from a normative point of
view, they have adaptive benefits. People who attribute
successes to their own ability and their failures to bad
luck are less likely to be depressed and more likely to
persevere after setbacks. These biases are truly selfserving
only if they are unique to the self-perspective,
that is, if the favorable explanatory pattern does not
affect explanations of the behaviors or outcomes of
others.
A more general bias is the actor–observer effect,
which refers to the tendency to make fewer dispositional
or more situational attributions for one’s own
behavior than for the behavior of others. This effect
turns out to be rather weak. Bertram Malle has suggested
that the main difference between the self- and
the observer’s perspective is that the former heavily
relies on reasons as explanations, whereas the latter
relies on causes. Reasons are derived from intentions,
which people find available in their own minds but can
only infer from the behavior or others; causes include
all situational sources of behavior as well as personal
dispositions that lie outside the realm of intentional
action (e.g., habits, compulsions, automatisms).
Attribution as Induction
Perceptions and inferences regarding intentionality
and causality can involve a fair amount of guesswork.
Their quality depends on the perceiver’s ability to
make reasonable assumptions to make up for missing
information. Harold Kelley suggested that attributions
are a certain kind of inductive inference. That is,
people induce a probable cause from available information.
Following the British empiricists, and particularly
John Stuart Mill’s joint method of agreement
and difference, Kelley proposed that an event (e.g., a
behavior) is attributed to whichever potential cause is
present when the event is present and that is absent
when the event is absent.
In Kelley’s scheme, there are three sources of variability.
Variability over actors is called consensus.
Consensus is low if only Ringo, but no one else, repays
his loan. It suggests that Ringo, but not Paul, should
be credited as the source of Ringo’s behavior. Variability
over stimuli is called distinctiveness. Distinctiveness
is high if Ringo only repays Paul but not

George, suggesting that Paul has some control over
Ringo’s behavior. Finally, variability over time is
called consistency. Consistency is high if the behavior
occurs repeatedly, as when, for example, Ringo always
repays his loans. By itself, consistent behavior does
not reveal much about its likely cause. If, however,
consensus or distinctiveness information already suggests
a particular attribution, high consistency makes
this attribution more certain.
A full suite of information concerning consensus,
distinctiveness, and consistency is called a configuration.
On the basis of such a configuration, a social perceiver
can decide whether to attribute a behavior to the
person, to the stimulus, to the particular relationship
between the two, or to the circumstances prevailing at
the time. With each of the three types of information
being either high or low, eight different configurations
are possible. The configuration of low consensus,
low distinctiveness, and high consistency affords
the strongest person attribution; the configuration of
high consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consistency
affords the strongest stimulus attribution. Over
the years, numerous refinements to Kelley’s model
have been introduced. The goal of these efforts has
been to identify unique predictions for each possible
configuration, and to validate these predictions with
empirical data about how social perceivers actually
make attributions.
Patricia Cheng’s and Laura Novick’s probabilistic
contrast model advances these ideas by recognizing
the uncertainty of many causal attributions. In their
model, an aspect of the world (e.g., a person or a situation)
is perceived as a cause if the event (e.g., a
behavior) is more likely to occur when this aspect is
present than when it is absent. That is, causality is
inferred from a difference between probabilities. This
theory can account for a complex interplay of causes.
Suppose that the probability of Ringo repaying a loan
is greater if Paul is the lender than if George is the
lender, whereas the probability of John repaying the
loan is low regardless of lender. Statistically, this pattern
is an interaction; it reveals the unique relationship
between Ringo and Paul as the most probable cause.
Yet, Kelley’s theory leads to the same conclusion,
because the pattern of covariation is coded as one with
low consensus, high distinctiveness, and high consistency.
So what has been gained? Note that Kelley’s
model ignores the probability of another actor (John)
repaying another lender (George). If this probability
Attribution Theory———77
were high, Ringo’s behavior would no longer be
unusual, and hence, the attribution of his behavior to
his relationship with Paul would also be weakened.
Attribution as Construction
The probabilistic contrast model is conceptually elegant,
mathematically rigorous, and empirically well
supported. However, the price for the model’s precision
is a lack of realism. The Cheng and Novick model, as
well as other theories of inductive inference, faces several
critical issues, which set the agenda for current and
future refinements of attribution theory.
The first issue is that ordinary social perceivers
rarely have enough information to evaluate configurations
of evidence. To make attributions, they must
exploit direct perceptual inferences, inferences based
on partial cues, or common social background knowledge.
Recent integrative models address this problem
by combining aspects of the folk psychology approach
with the statistical-reasoning approach.
The second issue is that sources of information are
rarely independent. Behavior low in distinctiveness
also tends to be highly consistent because people enter
different situations sequentially. To untangle distinctiveness
from consistency, they must figure out which
situations they can treat as identical and how they can
mentally correct the conflation of different situations
with different times. Formal statistical tools can do
this with numerical data, but ordinary intuition is not
equipped to handle this task.
The third issue is that trait attributions, once made,
do not contribute much to the causal explanation of
behavior. Once we believe that Ringo is trustworthy,
this characteristic of his becomes a mere enabling
condition because it is always there. As a trait, trustworthiness
is, by definition, a constant feature and
therefore cannot vary. To explain a particular trustworthy
act, some additional cause must be invoked.
When the additional cause is an aspect of the situation,
a peculiar shortcoming of standard attribution
theory emerges. Since the days of Heider’s theory,
personal and situational causes have been treated as
competitive. Kelley’s famous discounting principle
states that the stronger the situational cause is, the
weaker the personal cause must be. The assumption of
a hydraulic relationship between personal and situational
causes may not be realistic. People who react
aggressively to provocation, for example, are seen as

78———Attribution Theory
having aggressive personalities, whereas people who
aggress without provocation are more likely seen as
disturbed. Contrary to the classic logic, a situational
stimulus can enable a dispositional attribution, rather
than inhibit it.
The final and most fundamental issue is that patterns
of covariation never prove causation. One can
show that a given covariation is not causal, but one
cannot prove that a covariation is not not causal.
Educated people do not believe that the crowing of a
rooster calls forth the dawn of a new day even if it consistently
precedes it. There is no known mechanism
that links the two. In contrast, if a comedian’s cracks
are always followed by riotous laughter, one can examine
the specific properties of the jokes as mediating
variables and note the fact that the intervals between
jokes can be varied at will.
When there is a plausible process, or mediator, variable
that can link an effect to a putative cause, the case
for causation becomes stronger, but it still is not proven.
The problem reduces again to covariation, that is, to the
statistical relationships between the presumed cause
and the mediator variable, and between the mediator
variable and the effect. That there is no end to this, no
matter how many mediator variables are inserted, reinforces
philosopher David Hume’s skepticism regarding
causation. Covariations can be accepted as causal only
with the aid of perceptions, inferences, or beliefs that
lie outside of the field of observable data.
Whereas attribution theories call on the concepts of
folk psychology to support causal claims, the same
concepts remain suspect as prescientific from an academic
perspective. This leads to the ironic conclusion
that ordinary people often have a greater facility in
explaining individual behaviors than some formal theories
do. Moreover, theories that reject intentions, or
conscious will more generally, as a cause of behavior
imply that the ordinary person’s interest in them must
be mistaken. The counterargument is that intentions
are no different from other mental phenomena, such
as attention, learning, or memory, that many reductionist
theories invest with explanatory power. If so,
insights gained from folk psychology and formalized
by attribution theories can enrich academic theories of
human behavior, just as Heider hoped they would.
Most scientific theories rely on experimentation to
determine the causes of behavior. If experimentation
were the royal road to understanding causation, one
might demand ordinary people to conduct experiments
before making attributions. They usually do not, and
they should not be blamed, because experimentation is
difficult and costly (note that such blaming would be
an act of attribution). Experimentation has its own limitations.
One is that experiments are better suited for
the detection of behavioral trends in groups of people
than for finding out why a certain person performed a
specific act. Another limitation is that personal characteristics
such as traits are, by definition, stable and thus
not amenable to experimental variation.
The most important limitation, however, is the general
force of Hume’s critique. Causality cannot be
established by observation alone; instead, it requires a
psychological contribution that goes beyond the data
given. This is true in scientific experimentation as it is
in ordinary social perception. Experiments only yield
patterns of covariation. The extra knowledge that scientists
use to go beyond covariation is their belief that
they can replicate experimental results at will. In other
words, their own intentions and sense of agency play
a crucial role in their conviction that covariations
observed in experimental data can keep Hume’s specter
at bay. By explaining the causal beliefs of behavioral
scientists, attribution theory comes full circle.
Joachim I. Krueger
See also Actor–Observer Asymmetries; Attributions;
Correspondence Bias; Fundamental Attribution Error;
Kelley’s Covariation Model; Self-Serving Bias; Social
Projection
Further Readings
Cheng, P. W., & Novick, L. R. (1992). Covariation in natural
causal induction. Psychological Review, 99, 365–382.
Gilbert, D. T. (1998). Ordinary personology. In D. T. Gilbert,
S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 89–150). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Malle, B. F. (2004). How the mind explains behavior: Folk
explanations, meaning, and social interaction.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Rudolph, U., Roesch, S. C., & Greitemeyer, T., & Weiner, B.
(2004). A meta-analytic review of help giving and
aggression from an attributional perspective:
Contributions to a general theory of motivation. Cognition
and Emotion, 18, 815–848.
Sutton, R. M., & McClure, J. (2001). Covariational
influences on goal-based explanation: An integrative
model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80,
222–236.

AUTHENTICITY
Authenticity generally reflects the extent to which an
individual’s core or true self is operative on a day-today
basis. Psychologists characterize authenticity as
multiple interrelated processes that have important
implications for psychological functioning and wellbeing.
Specifically, authenticity is expressed in the
dynamic operation of four components: awareness (i.e.,
self-understanding), unbiased processing (i.e., objective
self-evaluation), behavior (i.e., actions congruent
with core needs, values, preferences), and relational
orientation (i.e., sincerity within close relationships).
Research findings indicate that each of these components
relates to various aspects of healthy psychological
and interpersonal adjustment.
The importance of being authentic in one’s everyday
life is evident in phrases like “keep it real” and
“be true to yourself.” However, what does it mean to
be authentic? For example, does it mean, “be myself
at all costs?” Historically, examination of the nature of
authenticity and its costs and benefits exists in such
diverse sources as William Shakespeare’s Polonius,
Star Wars’ Luke Skywalker, and numerous hip-hop
gangstas, each portraying characters whose complex
challenges involve their knowing and accepting whom
they are, and acting accordingly.
A Multicomponent
Conceptualization
One definition of authenticity is that it reflects the
unobstructed operation of one’s true, or core, self in
one’s daily enterprise. From this perspective, the
essence of authenticity involves four interrelated but
separable components: (1) awareness, (2) unbiased
processing, (3) behavior, and (4) relational orientation.
The awareness component refers to being aware
of one’s motives, feelings, desires, values, strengths
and weaknesses, and trait characteristics. Moreover, it
involves being motivated to learn about these selfaspects
and their roles in one’s behavior. As one learns
about these self-aspects, one becomes more aware of
both the “figure” and “ground” in one’s personality
aspects. In other words, people are not exclusively
masculine or feminine, extraverted or introverted,
dominant or submissive, and so on. Rather, although
one aspect of these dimensions generally predominates
over the other, both aspects exist. As individuals
Authenticity———79
function with greater authenticity, they are aware that
they possess these multifaceted self-aspects, and they
use this awareness in their interchanges with others
and with their environments.
A second component of authenticity involves the
unbiased processing of self-relevant information.
Stated differently, this component involves objective
assessment and acceptance of both positive and negative
self-aspects and evaluative self-relevant information.
Conversely, it involves not selectively denying,
distorting, or ignoring positive and negative information
about oneself (e.g., one’s positive achievements or
poor performances). Some people, for instance, have
great difficulty acknowledging having limited skills at
a particular activity. Rather than accept their poor performance,
they may rationalize its implications, belittle
its importance, or completely fabricate a new and
better score. Others have difficulty acknowledging
positive aspects of themselves or their abilities, and
they interpret their success to be due exclusively to
luck. All of these people are exhibiting bias in processing
evaluative self-information that reflects the relative
absence of authentic self-evaluation.
A third component of authenticity involves behavior,
specifically whether an individual acts in accord
with his or her true self. Behaving authentically means
acting in accord with one’s values, preferences, and
needs as opposed to acting merely to please others,
comply with expectations, or conform to social norms.
Likewise, behavioral authenticity is limited when
people act falsely to attain external rewards or to avoid
punishments. The distinction between acting authentically
versus acting falsely can be complex. For
instance, situations exist in which the unadulterated
expression of one’s true self may result in severe punishments
(i.e., insults or exclusion). In such cases,
behavioral authenticity exists when a person is aware
of the potential adverse consequences of his or her
behaviors and chooses to act in ways that express his
or her true self. The important point is that authentic
behavior does not reflect a compulsion to be one’s
true self, but rather the choice to express one’s true
feelings, motives, and inclinations.
A fourth component of authenticity involves one’s
relational orientation toward close others, that is, the
extent to which one values and achieves openness and
truthfulness in one’s close relationships. Relational
authenticity also entails valuing close others seeing
the real you, both good and bad. Stated differently, an
authentic relational orientation reflects being able and

80———Authenticity
motivated to express one’s true self to intimates. Thus,
an authentic relational orientation involves engaging
in self-disclosures that foster the development of
mutual intimacy and trust. In contrast, an inauthentic
relationship orientation reflects deliberately falsifying
impressions made to one’s close others, or failing to
actively and openly express one’s true self to them
(e.g., avoiding expressing true feelings out of fear of
disapproval or rejection). In short, relational authenticity
means being genuine and not fake in one’s relationships
with close others.
Distinct yet Interrelated Components
While the multiple components of authenticity may
often play a collaborative role and be in harmony with
one another, instances exist where only some are
operative. For example, when people react to environmental
contingencies (i.e., rewards or punishments)
by behaving in accord with prevailing social norms
that are at odds with their true self, authenticity may
still be operative at the awareness and processing levels.
That is, while people may not be behaving authentically,
they may still be thinking and processing
self-evaluative information authentically. In other
instances, authenticity may not be operative at these
levels either, as when people rationalize their behavior
by distorting its implications (biased processing), or
mindlessly behave without consulting their true
desires (nonawareness). These considerations suggest
that, instead of focusing exclusively on whether
actions are authentic, it is useful to focus on the extent
to which processes associated with other authenticity
components (i.e., awareness, unbiased processing)
inform behavioral choices. Social psychologists have
yet to examine these complicated issues in research,
but this is likely to change in the near future. For now,
it is useful to note that although the awareness, unbiased
processing, behavior, and relational orientation
components of authenticity are interrelated, they are
distinct from one another.
Research
Considerable research supports the assertion that
authentic functioning relates to positive psychological
health and well-being, as well as to healthy interpersonal
relationships. For example, researchers have
found that authentic functioning relates to higher and
more secure self-esteem, less depression, and healthier
interpersonal relationships.
Awareness
Considerable research demonstrates the benefits of
possessing self-knowledge that is clear, internally consistent,
and well integrated across one’s social roles.
The same is true for being motivated to learn about oneself:
The more one takes an open and nondefensive
stance toward learning about oneself, the better one’s
overall psychological functioning. Moreover, possessing
substantial knowledge about one’s emotional states,
for example, what makes one happy or sad, also confers
considerable benefits toward one’s health and wellbeing.
Importantly, learning about oneself is an ongoing
process that continues throughout the life span.
Unbiased Processing
Processing positive and negative evaluative information
in an objective manner allows individuals to
gain accurate self-information that they can use to
make well-informed decisions regarding their skills
and abilities. In contrast, distorting information to
exaggerate one’s positive qualities or minimize one’s
negative qualities may feel good in the short run, but it
is detrimental in the end. For example, research indicates
that experts rate people as narcissistic and not
well adjusted if they view themselves considerably
more positively than others view them. Conversely,
exaggerating negative self-relevant information or being
overly self-critical increases one’s risk for depression
and other psychological disorders.
Behavior
Researchers have found that people who pursue
goals that are congruent with their core self are less
depressed, feel greater vitality and energy, and generally
are more psychologically adjusted than are people
who pursue goals that are not congruent with their core
self. Thus, it is very important to consider why people
adopt their goals. When people adopt goals because
they are personally important, interesting, and fun, they
are healthier than when they adopt goals because they
feel pressured by others or because they want to avoid
feeling guilty or anxious (signs that the goal is not
fully congruent with the core self). In general, people

whose behavior is consistent with who they really are
and their central values are happier and healthier than
people whose behavior is based primarily on attaining
rewards or avoiding punishments.
Relational Orientation
Healthy close relationships involve trust and intimate
self-disclosures. People vary in how willing or
able they are to share their foibles and shortcomings
with their relationship partners. Those whose
close relationships involve reciprocal intimate selfdisclosures
are generally more satisfied with their
relationships than are people whose close relationships
involve more shallow or nonreciprocal selfdisclosures.
Research indicates that a major factor
contributing to adolescents acting falsely (suppressing
the expression of their true thoughts and feelings
within those relationships) is that they perceive a lack
of parental and peer approval. Likewise, adults who do
not feel validated by their relationship partners tend to
exhibit increased false-self behaviors within the relationship,
which in turn accounts for their heightened
feelings of depression and low self-esteem.
Michael H. Kernis
Brian M. Goldman
See also Self; Self-Awareness; Self-Esteem Stability
Further Readings
Goldman, B. M., & Kernis, M. H. (2002). The role of
authenticity in healthy psychological functioning and
subjective well-being. Annals of the American
Psychotherapy Association, 5, 18–20.
Harter, S. (1997). The personal self in social context: Barriers
to authenticity. In R. D. Ashmore & L. J. Jussim (Eds.),
Self and identity: Fundamental issues (pp. 81–105).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Hodgins, H. S., & Knee, C. R. (2002). The integrating self
and conscious experience. In E. L. Deci & R. M. Ryan
(Eds.), Handbook of self-determination research
(pp. 87–100). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press.
Kernis, M. H., & Goldman, B. M. (2006). A multicomponent
conceptualization of authenticity: Theory and research. In
M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 38, pp. 283–357). New York: Academic
Press.
Authoritarian Personality———81
Reis, H. T., & Patrick, B. C. (1996). Attachment and intimacy:
Component processes. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski
(Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles
(pp. 523–563). New York: Guilford Press.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2002). An overview of
self-determination theory: An organismic-dialectical
perspective. In E. L. Deci & R. M. Ryan (Eds.),
Handbook of self-determination (pp. 3–36). Rochester,
NY: University of Rochester Press.
Sheldon, K. M., Ryan, R. M., Rawsthorne, L. J., & Ilardi, B.
(1997). Trait self and true self: Cross-role variation in the
Big-Five personality traits and its relations with
psychological authenticity and subjective well-being.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73,
1380–1393.
Trilling, L. (1971). Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY
Definition
The authoritarian personality describes a type of person
who prefers a social system with a strong ruler—
the authoritarian person is comfortable being the
strong ruler but if the individual is not the strong ruler
then he or she will demonstrate complete obedience to
another strong authority figure. In both cases, there is
little tolerance toward nonconservative ways of thinking.
People whose personalities are structured in the
manner of an authoritarian personality tend to conform
to authority and believe that complete obedience
to rules and regulations is completely necessary; any
deviation from rules is to be treated harshly. The
authoritarian personality often results in people harboring
antagonistic feelings towards minority groups,
whether religious, ethnic, or otherwise.
History and Development
The history of research on the authoritarian personality
stems largely from the end of the Second World
War and the Holocaust. During the 1950s, one prevailing
fear was the potential spread of anti-democratic
ideologies as had been seen by the rapid spread of
Nazi fascism. The origin of racism and prejudice was
an important topic in the academic world because of
the mass genocide of the Jews. Scientists also realized

82———Authoritarian Personality
that prejudice and anti-democratic ideologies—and
fascism in particular—were not characteristic of any
specific group, which meant that they began looking
for another theory to explain these phenomena.
Concerns over the potential rise of fascism led to a
search for a theory to identify those who were susceptible
to anti-democratic ideologies. Theodor Adorno, a
sociologist, is credited with the theory of authoritarian
personality, which addressed the need for an explanation
of prejudice and racism. Adorno believed that a
certain personality structure was common among
people who may fall victim to anti-democratic ideology.
Adorno and his colleagues characterized the
authoritarian personality structure on nine dimensions,
discussed in the following section.
One implication of the theory that a personality
structure causes this susceptibility is that the prejudice
or racism is a product mostly of the people believing it,
and not of the actual target. More specifically, anti-
Semitism would not have much to do with the characteristics
of Jewish people, but rather the characteristics
of the people who dislike the Jews.
The authoritarian personality is thought to emerge
from childhood experiences. This reasoning comes
from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. Freud
suggested that childhood experiences, especially those
with parents, lead to people’s attitudes as adults. For
example, if children have a very strict authoritarian
parent, they will learn to suppress thoughts, feelings,
and actions which might be considered immoral (e.g.,
aggression or sex drive). Later, because the child
learned not to act on certain urges, the urges are projected
onto other “weaker” people, often minorities.
This results in the negative attitudes that authoritarian
people carry regarding other groups. Again, the projection
of internal suppressed urges onto others suggests
that the prejudice is due to the individual’s personality,
not to traits of the oppressed group.
Though the term authoritarian personality implies
a dominating or controlling personality, in theory a
person with an authoritarian personality can actually
prefer to be obedient to a clear authority figure. This
type of personality desires strict adherence to rules
and sees a clear distinction between the weak and the
strong. Authoritarian personalities are somewhat conflicted
because they want power, but also are very
willing to submit to authority.
Despite Adorno’s efforts to separate right-wing
conservatism from authoritarian personality, Robert
Altemeyer’s later version of authoritarian personality
was almost synonymous with right-wing conservatism.
Altemeyer’s take on authoritarian personality
included only three of Adorno’s nine dimensions associated
with authoritarian personality: conventionalism,
authoritarian aggression, and authoritarian submission.
Recently, a book by John Dean critically discussed
conservatism (and the Republican Party) from
the right-wing authoritarian personality viewpoint put
forth by Altemeyer.
Research
The first research on authoritarian personality was, for
the reasons mentioned above, very politically driven.
While the overarching goal was to explain racism and
prejudice, the research direction boiled down to trying
to predict who would be susceptible to anti-democratic
ideas by measuring personality traits.
Three scales that were assumed to be indicative of
authoritarian personality (the anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism,
and political economic conservatism scale) were
used to measure the general agreement with an antidemocratic
or fascist viewpoint. Adorno and his colleagues
sought to further understand the personality
structure and developed a scale, the F-scale, which was
meant to measure “implicit antidemocratic tendencies
and fascist potential.” The scale’s more general purpose
was to show the underlying structure of an authoritarian
personality and to predict potential for conforming
to fascism and anti-democratic ideology. The F-scale is
made up of questions relating to nine aspects: conventionalism,
authoritarian submission, authoritarian
aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy,
power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism,
projectivity, and sex.
Each of the aspects of the scale is meant to tap a different
part of the authoritarian personality. Conventionalism
questions get at how strongly one believes in
middle-class values. Fascism was thought to originate in
the middle class and potential fascists would then score
high on conventionalism. Those who are very willing to
submit to authority and desire strong leaders would
score high on authoritarian submission questions. High
ratings on the authoritarian aggression questions reflect
attitudes that imply dislike toward minority groups and
the belief that deviations from authority deserve severe
punishment. It was thought that a person high in authoritarian
aggression had probably had a strict childhood,
preventing him or her to indulge in few desires, which
led to this person projecting his or her frustration onto

other people who participated in “morally unsound”
practices. Anti-intraception is a characteristic of the
authoritarian personality which results in a low tolerance
for creative thinking and emotion-importance;
people who are anti-intraceptive (i.e., are not particularly
self-aware) reject subjective thinking in favor of
more concrete thinking (e.g., placing high importance
on clearly observable facts instead of thoughts and feelings).
Superstition and stereotypy show the extent to
which a person feels that his or her fate depends mostly
on external forces and that he or she cannot personally
influence outcomes of situations. A strong belief in two
types of people (e.g., strong and weak) will be reflected
in power and toughness questions. Authoritarian
personalities prefer strong leaders who can maintain
order by severe punishment of those who deviate. The
destructiveness and cynicism variable again addresses
the authoritarian personality’s aggression, but this time
the aggression is not based on morality. The idea here is
that people with authoritarian personalities harbor
aggression and are just waiting for an opportunity to act
on it. The projection items on the F-scale are used to tap
subjects’ repressed urges (which were mentioned in
relation to authoritarian aggression) by asking them
about the negative attributes of others. For example, an
anti-Semite’s view that Jews are hostile may actually
reflect his or her own repressed hostility projected onto
someone else. Finally, the sex items on the F-scale also
deals with the suppression of urges, namely sexual.
Because authoritarian personalities suppress their sexuality
(they see it as immoral), their attitudes toward
people who engage in these acts is especially negative.
Since the creation of the F-scale, its validity (i.e.,
ability to actually predict what it claims to predict) has
been called into question on numerous occasions, and
on numerous occasions has failed these validity tests.
It has also failed to predict right-wing authoritarianism,
as many left-wing group members can score high
on the test. However, the F-scale has shown some correlations,
or relationships, to other constructs such as
superstition and “old-fashioned” values. Another suggestion
has been that the F-scale reflects narrowmindedness.
Overall, scientists have abandoned the use of the Fscale
to study prejudice and racism today. If the scale
merely reflects values from the early 1900s or superstitious
beliefs, it is not very useful for identifying and
predicting racist attitudes. Many of the scale’s questions
do mirror the cultural environment of the 1920s
and 1930s, but this does not necessarily imply that
these values are strongly related to potential for fascist
behavior. Also, the idea that racism exists because of
alternative attitudes of a few people is not very plausible.
Rather, scientists now believe that racism and
prejudice result largely from group membership attitudes
that reside in all humans. Research on prejudice
and racism now tend to take a group approach, instead
of studying the personalities of people individually.
Political researchers, on the other hand, still make
use of authoritarian personality, but generally use
Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism in place of
Adorno’s original construct.
Noelle M. Nelson
See also Attitudes; Personality and Social Behavior; Political
Psychology; Prejudice; Racism
Further Readings
Autobiographical Narratives———83
Adorno, T. W. (1950). The authoritarian personality.
New York: Harper.
Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of freedom: Understanding
right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Dean, J. (2006). Conservatives without conscience.
New York: Viking Press.
Martin, J. L. (2001). The authoritarian personality, 50 years
later: What questions are there for political psychology?
Political Psychology 22(1), 1–26.
AUTHORITY RANKING
See RELATIONAL MODELS THEORY
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVES
Definition
Autobiographical narratives are the stories people
remember (and often tell) about events in their lives.
Some autobiographical narratives refer to memories
of important personal events, like “my first date” or
“the day my father died.” Others may seem trivial, like
a memory of yesterday’s breakfast. Many psychologists
study the extent to which memories of personal
events are accurate. They ask questions like these:
How true is the memory? Is the story a distortion of

84———Autobiographical Narratives
what really happened? Other psychologists are interested
in what autobiographical narratives say about a
person’s self-understanding or about social life and
social relationships more generally. Their questions
include these: What does a particular memory mean
for the person remembering it? How do people use
autobiographical narratives in daily life?
What Do We Remember?
People’s memory of personal events is not like a video
recording that can simply be played back. For one
thing, people eventually forget most of the events that
occur to them. Try to remember what you ate for lunch
on June 1, 2005. Or what you wore the day before that.
Clearly, the brain has more important things to do than
remember every event that has ever occurred. Second,
the details of those events people do recall, even when
they recall them vividly, often turn out to be inaccurate
and mixed up, especially as those events fade into the
distant past. At the same time, research suggests that
while people often make errors in recalling the details
of important personal events from long ago, their narrative
accounts are surprisingly accurate in conveying
the overall gist of those events. People remember the
big picture better than they do the small facts.
Many psychologists see autobiographical memory
as an active and creative process. People construct
memories by (a) attending to certain features of a tobe-remembered
event, (b) storing information about
that event according to personally meaningful categories
and past experiences, (c) retrieving event information
in ways that help solve social problems or meet
situational demands, and (d) translating the memory of
the event into a coherent story. What people attend to,
how they store autobiographical information, what
they eventually retrieve from their memory, and how
this all gets told to other people are all influenced by
many different factors in the person’s life and social
world, including especially a person’s goals. For example,
a person whose life goal is to become a physician
may have constructed especially vivid personal
memories of interacting with doctors and nurses growing
up, positive experiences with biology and the
health sciences, and episodes of helping other people.
Autobiographical narratives provide a ready supply of
episodic information that people may consult in making
important decisions about the future.
Development and Functions
Most people can recall virtually nothing from before
the age of 2 years. Autobiographical memory begins
to manifest itself in the third and fourth year of life as
young children begin to form simple memories about
events that have happened to them. Parents, siblings,
and teachers often provide considerable assistance in
the development of early autobiographical memory.
They will ask young children to recall recent events
(yesterday’s trip to the park, Sarah’s birthday party)
and encourage them to relate the event as a story. By
the age of 5, most children are able to tell coherent
stories about events in their lives, complete with setting,
characters, plot, and a sense of beginning, middle,
and end. As children move through elementary
school, their autobiographical memories become
more complex and nuanced.
In adolescence and young adulthood, people begin
to organize memories of particular personal events into
larger, integrative life stories. These internalized and
developing life stories may serve as expressions of narrative
identity. In other words, people’s life stories—
their autobiographical understandings of their lives as
a whole—help to provide their lives with meaning and
direction, explaining in story form how they believe
they came to be who they are today and where they
believe their life may be headed in the future. Life stories
continue to develop as people move through their
adulthood years, reflecting new experiences and challenges
as well as their ever-changing understanding of
the past. An adult’s life story may contain many key
scenes, such as especially important early memories,
high points, low points, and turning points. While
these important scenes may originate from almost any
point in the life span, research shows that people tend
to have an especially large number of emotionally
vivid autobiographical recollections from their lateadolescent
and early-adult years—memories of events
that took place between the ages of about 15 and 25.
People often share their stories of important personal
events with friends and acquaintances. Personal
storytelling, therefore, often promotes interpersonal
intimacy. Parents often tell their children stories from
their own past, teachers often employ autobiographical
narratives to promote learning in the classroom, and
many adults see personal narratives as effective vehicles
for socialization and imparting moral lessons for
young people. The stories people tell about their own

lives, furthermore, reflect the values and norms of their
culture. For example, research suggests that American
children tend to develop more elaborate personal memories
than do Japanese and Chinese children, arguably
reflecting a Western emphasis on the full expression
of the individual self (over and against an East Asian
emphasis on the collective). Stories are shaped by
social class and gender: Working-class people prefer
certain kinds of stories about the self while uppermiddle-class
people may prefer others; women and
men are expected to tell different stories about their
lives. In important ways, autobiographical memories
reflect what has actually happened in a person’s life.
But they are also strongly shaped by a person’s values
and goals; the people with whom, and the occasions
wherein, personal stories are told; and the broad forces
of social class, gender, religion, society, and culture.
Dan P. McAdams
See also Memory; Search for Meaning in Life; Self-
Reference Effect
Further Readings
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories.
Review of General Psychology, 5, 100–122.
Thorne, A. (2000). Personal memory telling and personality
development. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
4, 45–56.
AUTOMATIC PROCESSES
Definition
Automatic processes are unconscious practices that
happen quickly, do not require attention, and cannot be
avoided.
Analysis
Imagine you are driving a very familiar route, such as
your daily route to school, the university, or your work.
You mindlessly drive along various familiar roads and
upon arrival, a friend asks you, “Did you see there’s a
new DVD/video store on the square near the church?”
You did pass this square, as you always do, but you
Automatic Processes———85
didn’t notice the new store, and you answer, “Oh, I was
thinking about our upcoming exam, I didn’t even see
the square, let alone the new store.”
From a psychological viewpoint, something very
interesting happened here. How can you drive safely
and negotiate traffic without consciously noticing
where you are? Let’s face it (just remember the first
few times you drove a car), driving is really quite complicated.
You have to carefully look at the road, at the
traffic, and in your rearview mirror. You have to slow
down in time before a curve, you have to steer, if you
are driving a stick shift, you have to change gears. In
addition, you have to do all these things more or less
simultaneously. How can you do all of those things
while thinking about your exam, that is, without any
conscious attention directed at the driving?
The answer is that driving (assuming you are
skilled and the route is familiar) is a largely automatic
process. Of course you saw the square when you
passed it; otherwise you could not have negotiated it.
You cannot drive blindfolded. However, the process of
driving through the square is so automatized that a
fleeting glance of the square is enough. You do not
need to pay conscious attention, and you do not have
to interrupt thinking about the exam. In fact, if you
drive a familiar route, you usually pay attention only
to things that are unexpected. And those are the only
things you later remember (“I did notice there was an
accident on Main Street”).
The Four Horsemen of
Automaticity
In the 1970s, psychologists started to distinguish
between psychological processes that were automatic
and psychological processes that were controlled.
Automatic processes are unconscious (i.e., you are not
consciously aware of them), efficient (they require no
effort), unintentional (you don’t have to want them to
happen), and uncontrollable (once started, you cannot
stop them). Controlled processes are the opposite:
They are conscious (you have to be consciously aware
of them), inefficient (they require effort), intentional
(they only happen when you want them to happen),
and controllable (you can stop them).
Soon thereafter, psychologists discovered a problem.
According to the criteria outlined in the previous
paragraph, relatively few psychological processes are

86———Automatic Processes
fully automatic and even fewer are fully controlled.
There are exceptions of course. If an object (such as a
snowball) quickly approaches your face, you close
your eyes. This is a reflex and it is fully automatic. It
does not require conscious awareness, it does not
require any effort, it is unintentional, and also uncontrollable
(you cannot stop it). Conversely, writing is
fully controlled. You need to be aware of it, it requires
effort, it is intentional and controllable. However,
most interesting psychological processes have both
automatic and controlled elements. Think again about
driving. If you are a skilled driver driving a familiar
route, driving can be mostly unconscious (except
when something unexpected happens). It is also
highly efficient as you can easily have an interesting
conversation with someone while you drive—that is,
the driving does not require effort. However, it is
intentional. You do not suddenly find yourself driving
somewhere. You drive to school or work because you
want to go there. Finally, driving is controllable. You
can stop the process if you so desire.
As a consequence, according to the psychologist
John Bargh, it would be more useful to look at the
separate criteria for automaticity (Bargh called them
the four horsemen), rather than viewing automaticity
and control as all or none concepts.
1. Conscious versus unconscious. Some behavior
requires conscious attention; other behavior does not
and can proceed unconsciously. Obviously, most bodily
functions, such as breathing, do not require conscious
awareness. However, many psychological
processes are unconscious as well. For instance, we
automatically categorize objects or people we perceive
as good or bad. That is, we possess the capacity of
“automatic evaluation.” Investigating whether processes
require conscious awareness can be done in different
ways. The technique used most often in social psychological
research is priming. Psychologists surreptitiously
present people with stimuli (such as words or
pictures). When these stimuli have psychological consequences
(such as when a primed stimulus influences
an impression formed of a person later on) without
people being aware of this influence, psychologists
can conclude it is an unconscious process.
2. Efficient versus inefficient. Some behavior
requires effort and uses what is called “attentional
resources.” Other behavior does not. The driving example
is useful again. The first few times you drive a car, you
need attentional resources to control the car and to navigate
traffic. Once you are a skilled driver, however, you
do not need attentional resources anymore. The way to
investigate whether a process is efficient or not is to have
people do it while also performing a secondary task that
requires attentional resources (such as memorizing
digits or talking). If a process breaks down while one
engages in a secondary task, the process is inefficient. If
not, it is efficient. A skilled driver can have an interesting
conversation with a passenger while driving,
because driving has become efficient. A starting driver
cannot drive and talk at the same time without running
the risk of causing dangerous situations, because driving
is still inefficient.
3. Intentional versus unintentional. Some behavior
only happens when we want it to happen, whereas other
behavior unfolds regardless of our desires. Driving is
intentional, and so are behaviors such as reading or
writing. However, some of the behavior we display during
social interactions is unintentional. It has been
found that people, without being aware of it, to some
extent mimic their interaction partner. If we talk to
someone, we often use the same gestures, our bodily
postures match, and even our speech patterns converge
a little bit. This does not happen because we want it to
happen; rather, it is unintentional. One way to find out
whether a process is intentional is to see whether it
occurs when it has negative consequences. Priming
research shows that priming people with a social stereotype
leads to behavioral assimilation. For instance, if
people are primed with pictures of senior citizens, they
become a little slower and more forgetful; if people are
primed with professors, they perform better on a general
knowledge test. These effects also hold for behaviors
that are clearly negative. Priming people with
supermodels makes them perform worse on a general
knowledge test. This means the effect is unintentional,
as no one deliberately wants to come across as stupid.
4. Controllable versus uncontrollable. This criterion
is relatively simple. Can people stop a psychological
process after it has started? If it is stoppable, it is called
controllable. Closing your eye when a snowball is about
to hit you is uncontrollable. Breathing is too. You can
hold your breath for a short while, but not for too long.
Reading and talking are controllable. You can stop
whenever you want to. Investigating the controllability
of a process is relatively easy. See if people can stop an

activity when you ask them to. If so, the process is controllable.
If not, the process is uncontrollable.
Automaticity Is Adaptive
There are basically two kinds of automatic processes.
Some things, such as reflexes, are automatic simply
because of the way humans developed as a species.
Other behavior is initially largely controlled (in the
sense that it requires conscious awareness and effort)
and can become automatic through learning. Driving
is again a good example. Another is people’s morning
routine. Many people think about the day ahead while
they take a shower. This is possible because taking a
shower is a routine, automatic process. It is efficient,
so that we can use attentional resources to do more
important things, such as planning our day. This is
highly adaptive: The more we can do automatically,
the more time we have left for the behaviors that do
require conscious awareness and effort.
Ap Dijksterhuis
See also Attention; Auto-Motive Model; Consciousness;
Nonconscious Processes; Priming; Scripts;
Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable
automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54,
462–476.
Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering the
adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
AUTO-MOTIVE MODEL
Definition
The auto-motive model as proposed by John Bargh in
1990 describes the complete sequence of goal pursuit—
that is, reaching a goal—as a process taking place outside
of conscious awareness and control. The term
motive is chosen to encompass goals, motives, and values,
yet in most cases, research has focused on goals
used in a broad sense. The auto-motive model complements
self-regulatory models that focus more on the
Auto-Motive Model———87
role of conscious goal choice. According to the automotive
model, a strong mental link is supposed to
develop between goals that individuals chronically pursue
and cognitive representations of situations. Thus,
due to consistent and repeated pairing, goals are automatically
activated given a goal-relevant, so-called critical
situation. As a consequence, these automatically
activated goals direct behavior without intentional or
deliberate involvement of the individual. In turn, reflective
choice and other controlled influences on behavior
can be bypassed. In other words, goals are supposed to
be represented in the mind in the same way as stereotypes,
schemata, and other social constructs and their
activation potential are understood to function in a similar
manner. Therefore, they can also be automatically
activated by situational features. Procedures and plans
to attain the respective goal thus influence subsequent
behavior, judgments, and decisions outside of the conscious
control of the individual. As an example, a student
holding an academic achievement goal returns to
campus after a break. Being on campus activates the
goal, and the student’s behavior now turns more toward
studying than parties.
History and Background
Research on perception up to the 1940s considered
perception mainly to be a transformation process.
Since the “new look” approach after World War II—
numerous studies have shown that consciously and
unconsciously activated goals of an individual shape
the way this person perceives the environment and how
this information is interpreted and remembered. The
auto-motive model draws on this motivational principle
of perceptual readiness (i.e., more attentional
resources are given to context information in line with
a current activated goal), yet takes the development of
the “new look” research toward cognitive approaches
into account. Under this later “new look” perspective,
schemata, or stereotypes, were understood to function
in a way similar to goals and values in the early days
of the “new look.” The model introduced by Bargh
bridges the two, motivational and cognitive, perspectives
by proposing that much human behavior is
guided by goals automatically activated through situational
features, similar to cognitive activation effects
(e.g., stereotypes). Central to the auto-motive model
is the assumption that the situational cues for these
motives rest in the unconscious as well.

88———Auto-Motive Model
Automatic Response Activation
According to the Auto-Motive Model
The actual auto-motive model is quite complex and
describes several paths for automatic responses to
environmental features to occur. In general, automatic
goal activation can happen by means of three different
routes. First, situational features can activate goals
and motives if a consistent pairing preexists between
the situational cues and the goal. The activated goals
and motives are idiosyncratic in their character, that
is, specific to the individual in his or her chronic
attainment. Second, situational features can directly
activate socially shared norms beyond an idiosyncratic
level. In other words, strong normative goals are
being activated, too. The third route includes other
individuals one is interacting with in the given situation.
Thus, the activation does not depend on the situational
setting alone, but on the goals and intentions of
the interaction partners as well. In this case, perceived
goal representations of the interaction partner are
being activated. Given these three pathways, the subsequent
steps toward behavior are quite different.
Within the first route, situational cues lead to an activation
of an individual goal: Either goal-relevant procedures
or plans are activated. Plans lead to automatic
response behavior, whereas procedures influence
judgments and decisions. Within the second route, a
more global normative activation results in plans that
again activate response behavior. For the third path,
the route to response behavior is a little more complex
because it includes cognition about a third person. The
activation of the goal representation of an interaction
partner leads to an activation of personal, rather individual
reactive goals. It is these goals that activate
goal-related plans, which in turn activate corresponding
behavior. The reason why the third path is comparatively
more complex than the first two is due to
the fact that while one can assume an automatic link
between environmental features and situational representation,
behavioral information of others is much
more ambiguous relative to the perceived goal of the
interaction partner. Put differently, the individual goal
activation depends on the accessibility and applicability
of the different possible goals of the interaction
partner. Once this perceived goal has been defined,
one’s own response goal is assumed to be activated
immediately. This response goal activation is flexible
and is dependent on the most accessible and best
applicable perceived goal representation.
As one can easily see, the model encompasses three
distinct routes to judgmental or behavioral responses.
Depending on the features of the social environment,
one of these automatic paths is being utilized.
Empirical Evidence
The auto-motive model—as described in the previous
section—cannot be tested in its full extent, nor is it
designed to be tested, as one would expect from a theory.
Yet there are many research questions that have
been influenced and instigated by the auto-motive
model, and research addressing them has provided
abundant evidence for each of the three paths to automatic
behavior. Above and beyond the general influence
of goals on perception, there is evidence for
auto-motives in person and group judgment and in
interpersonal interaction.
The influence of auto-motives on perception can be
tied nicely to early work in the “new look.” It was
shown that words describing values participants had
previously indicated to hold were recognized faster
than words irrelevant to participants’ goals and values.
More recent research revealed, for example, that individuals
who can be labeled as chronic egalitarians recognized
words relevant to egalitarianism faster, if they
were preceded by a goal-relevant stimulus. In the
case of this particular experiment, pictures of African
Americans and Caucasians were used as stimuli of
which only the pictures of African Americans automatically
triggered the chronic goal of egalitarianism
for the respective individuals. These participants then
showed lower response latencies to relevant target
words. In line with the auto-motive model, a specific
context activated a chronic goal (i.e., egalitarianism).
Given this activation, these goals facilitate what an
individual is more ready to perceive and what not.
But auto-motives also function beyond perceptual
readiness; they can also influence how people judge
other people or nonsocial objects. The body of research
in this field is vast, and there is substantial converging
evidence. Certain instrumental values or standards not
only filter what people perceive in the world around
them, they also determine people’s interpretation of it.
On a more general societal level, goals and values can
be embedded in the structure of stratified societies. To
sustain this social structure, impressions and social
judgments are made in line with the prevailing maintenance
goal for the social dominance stratification to
which individuals adhere.

Auto-motives also influence interpersonal interaction
in very peculiar ways. So far, automatic goal activation
within the auto-motive model has been
understood to result from context cues and information
paired with chronic goals. Recently, evidence has
been found for goal activation by human beings close
to the individual actor, for example, by a parent or
a partner. If, for example, an academic achievement
goal is linked to fulfilling the wish of one’s father,
then the activation of the mental representation of the
father can activate the related achievement goal.
Another auto-motive is the so-called chameleon effect
describing mimicry behavior. This nonconscious imitation
is especially pronounced for individuals with
a strong perspective-taking ability (i.e., being able
to understand the ideas, perceptions, and feelings of
another person). For them, interaction partners serve
as triggers for their chronic perspective taking, which
in turn leads to automatic and uncontrolled imitation
behavior (e.g., rubbing your nose or shaking you
foot). However, interpersonal relationships do not
always have to be characterized by imitation. An intimacy
versus an identity goal that is chronically accessible
for an individual determines how this person
approaches interpersonal relationships, either as a
means for interdependence and mutual responsibility
or as a constant source for self-verification and establishment
of an individual identity.
In sum, the research described in this entry provides
sufficient evidence supporting the auto-motive
model. It is clear that aspects of detail may be subject
to alternative interpretations, but overall the auto-motive
model provides a sound background for research
describing automatic responses to the environment.
It has fused early research on motivated perceptual
readiness with later approaches addressing more cognitive
activation effects into one comprehensive model
with the central tenet that goal activation and response
behavior activation can happen unconsciously given a
chronic association of the goal with a set of perceived
environmental features.
See also Accessibility; Automatic Processes; Goals;
Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Kai J. Jonas
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (2000). The mind in the
middle: A practical guide to priming and automaticity
research. In H. T. Reis (Ed.), Handbook of research
methods in social and personality psychology
(pp. 253–285). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Moskowitz, G. B. (2005). Social cognition: Understanding
self and others. New York: Guilford Press.
Wyer, R. S., Jr. (Ed.). (1997). The automaticity of everyday
life. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
AUTONOMY
Autonomy———89
The term autonomy literally means “self-governing”
and thus connotes regulation by the self (auto). Its
opposite, heteronomy, refers to regulation by “otherness”
(heteron) and thus by forces “other than,” or alien
to, the self. In short, autonomy concerns the extent to
which a person’s acts are self-determined instead of
being coerced or compelled.
Within the field of psychology, the concept of
autonomy is both central and controversial. Autonomy
is central in that developmental (child), personality,
and clinical psychologists have long considered autonomy
to be a hallmark of maturation and healthy or
optimal functioning. It is controversial in that the concept
of autonomy is often confused with concepts such
as independence, separateness, and free will, generating
debates concerning its relevance and import across
periods of development, gender, and individualist versus
collectivist cultures.
The issue of autonomy was originally imported into
social psychology through the work of Fritz Heider
and Richard deCharms. Heider argued that it is
people’s “naive psychology” (their intuitive understanding)
that determines how they interpret events
and therefore how and why they act as they do. Among
the most important dimensions within his naive psychology
was Heider’s distinction between personal
causation, in which behaviors are intended by their
authors, and impersonal causation, in which actions or
events are brought about by forces not in personal control.
Heider reasoned that individuals usually hold
people responsible only for behaviors that they personally
caused or intended. Subsequently, deCharms elaborated
on Heider’s thinking by distinguishing two
types of personal causation. Some intentional acts are
ones a person wants to do and for which he or she feels
initiative and will. These are actions deCharms said
have an internal perceived locus of causality. Other
intentional behaviors are attributed to forces outside

90———Autonomy
the self, and these have an external perceived locus of
causality.
Self-determination theory is a contemporary perspective
that builds upon the Heider and deCharms tradition
with a comprehensive theory of autonomy as it
relates to motivation. Self-determination theory specifically
defines autonomy as the self-determination of
one’s behavior; autonomous action is behavior the
actor stands behind and, if reflective, would endorse
and value. That is, autonomy represents a sense of
volition, or the feeling of doing something by one’s
own decision or initiative. The opposite of autonomous
action is controlled motivation, in which behavior is
experienced as, brought about, or caused by forces that
are alien or external to one’s self. Controlled actions
are those a person does without a sense of volition or
willingness.
Any behavior can be viewed as lying along a continuum
ranging from less to more autonomy. The least
autonomous behaviors are those that are motivated by
externally imposed rewards and punishments. Externally
regulated actions are dependent on the continued
presence of outside pressure or reinforcements and
thus, in most contexts, are poorly maintained. A student
who does homework only because parents
reward him or her for doing so is externally regulated
but not very autonomous. When the rewards stop, the
effort on homework may also fade. Somewhat less
controlled are introjected regulations, in which a person’s
behaviors are regulated by avoidance of shame
and guilt and, on the positive side, by desires for selfand
other-approval. When a teenager refrains from
cheating because he or she would feel guilty, this
would be introjected, because the teenager is controlling
him- or herself with guilt. Still more autonomous
are integrated regulations, in which the person consciously
values his or her actions and finds them fitting
with his or her other values and motives. A person
who acts from a deeply held moral belief would be
acting from an integrated regulation and would feel
very autonomous. Finally, some behaviors are intrinsically
motivated, which means they are inherently
fun or enjoyable. A person who plays tennis after
school just for fun is intrinsically motivated and
would feel autonomous in doing it.
Several theorists in social and personality psychology
have suggested that autonomy is a basic psychological
need. This is because in general, when people
behave autonomously, they feel better and perform
better. Lack of autonomy makes people lose interest in
their work and can even make them sick. Accordingly,
factors that support autonomy can enhance not only
the quality of motivation but also the individual’s overall
adjustment.
Many studies demonstrate how social events can
affect perceived autonomy and, in turn, people’s ongoing
motivation. When parents, teachers, or bosses use
rewards to control behavior, pressure people with evaluations,
take away their choices, or closely watch over
them, people typically feel controlled. Conversely,
when authorities provide others more choice, allow
them to express opinions and make inputs, and provide
positive and noncritical feedback, they foster greater
autonomy and enhance motivation and persistence.
The topic of how external rewards can affect
people’s autonomy has been very extensively studied
and is very controversial, because it is a very important
issue in settings such as work, school, and family
life. Studies show that when rewards are administered
in a manner intended to control the behavior or performance
of recipients, they typically undermine a sense
of autonomy and thus diminish both interest and
intrinsic motivation. Thus, a child who is learning to
play a new musical instrument might become less
interested after someone gives her a reward for playing.
Now the child would only want to play if again
rewarded, which means the child is less intrinsically
motivated. However, rewards can also be used in noncontrolling
ways, such as when they are given unexpectedly
or as an acknowledgement of competence;
when given in this way, rewards usually do not undermine
autonomy.
As noted previously, autonomy is a concept that is
often confused with independence. One simple way to
distinguish these ideas is to think of independence as
not relying on others for resources or supports, whereas
autonomy concerns how volitional or self-determined
one is. Thus, people can be autonomously or willingly
dependent, as when they choose to rely on someone
else for help. People can also be forced to rely on somebody
else, in which case they would lack autonomy.
Similarly, one can be heteronomously independent, as
when forced to “go it alone,” or autonomously independent,
as when one desires to do something by oneself,
without getting help.
Distinguishing autonomy from independence is
especially critical for developmental and crosscultural
studies. For example, research has suggested
that adolescents who autonomously rely on parents tend
to be better adjusted than those who are more detached

or independent of parents. It is also clear that cultures
differ greatly in values regarding independence, with
individualist cultures placing greater value on people
acting independently and collectivist cultures more
focused on interdependence. Research suggests, however,
that whether a person engages in individualist or
collectivist practices, it still matters whether or not
they feel autonomous. It appears that people in all cultures
feel better when they are acting choicefully, even
though what they normatively do may differ. This is
why people around the world often fight for freedoms
and the right to pursue what they truly value.
Similarly, autonomy is not associated with separateness.
Separateness refers to a lack of connection
with close others. People can be very autonomously
connected with others, as when they love someone
and want to be close to that person. Indeed, people are
often very autonomous in trying to connect with and
take care of people they love.
Another important distinction is between autonomy
and free will. Free will, by most interpretations,
involves some notion of an undetermined action, or
action that is caused by a soul or self that is completely
independent of an environment. Autonomy, in
contrast, does not have these implications. Most social
scientists believe that all behaviors have an impetus or
cause either within the organism or its environment.
But even if all actions are caused in this sense, they
can still vary considerably in the degree to which they
are volitional or autonomous.
Practical applications of research on autonomy can
be found everywhere. Insofar as people who are acting
autonomously are more persistent, perform better, and
are more adjusted, it becomes important to identify
factors in the real world that facilitate autonomy. Thus
there has been a lot of research on how to support
autonomy in domains such as education, sport, work,
health care, and psychotherapy. Across domains, both
the structure of incentives and supervision styles have
been shown to influence autonomy and the positive
outcomes associated with it.
Autonomy also is something that can be cultivated
from within. Because autonomy concerns regulating
behavior through the self, it is enhanced by a person’s
capacity to reflect and evaluate his or her own actions.
One can learn to engage in reflection that is free,
relaxed, or interested, which can help one to avoid
acting from impulse or from external or internal compulsion.
Within self-determination theory, such reflective
processing is characterized by the concepts of
awareness and mindfulness. Greater mindfulness can
help people be clearer about why they are acting as they
are and can provide information that helps them subsequently
act with more sense of choice and freedom.
See also Control; Self-Determination Theory
Further Readings
Richard M. Ryan
Aislinn R. Sapp
Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being
present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological wellbeing.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84,
822–848.
Chirkov, V., Ryan, R. M., Kim, Y., & Kaplan, U. (2003).
Differentiating autonomy from individualism and
independence: A self-determination theory perspective on
internalization of cultural orientations and well-being.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 97–110.
deCharms, R. (1968). Personal causation. New York:
Academic Press.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and
self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000) Self-determination theory
and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development
and well-being. American Psychologist, 55, 68–78.
Taylor, J. S. (2005). Personal autonomy. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
AVAILABILITY HEURISTIC
Availability Heuristic———91
Definition
The availability heuristic describes a mental strategy in
which people judge probability, frequency, or extremity
based on the ease with which and the amount of information
that can be brought to mind. For example,
people may judge easily imaginable risks such as terrorist
attacks or airplane crashes as more likely than the
less easily imaginable (but objectively more likely)
risks of influenza or automobile accidents.
Context, Consequences, and Causes
Availability was one of three judgmental heuristics (or
mental shortcuts), along with representativeness and
anchoring and adjustment, that Amos Tversky and

92———Aversive Racism
Daniel Kahneman hypothesized people adopt to simplify
complex judgments. Because information about
events that are more likely, frequent, or extreme is
typically more available than information about
events that are less likely, frequent, or extreme, the
availability heuristic typically yields accurate judgments.
However, the heuristic can also produce biased
and erroneous judgments—as illustrated by people’s
perception that terrorist bombings are more risky than
influenza—because cognitive availability can be
influenced by factors, such as media coverage or
vividness, that are unrelated to probability, frequency,
or extremity.
Researchers believe that the availability heuristic is
partly responsible for several judgmental biases.
People who live together, for instance, tend to claim
too much responsibility for collaborative efforts such
as washing dishes and starting arguments, partly
because it is easier for people to think about their own
contributions than to think about their cohabitants’
contributions. People also overestimate the magnitude
of the correlation between clinical diagnoses (e.g.,
depression) and invalid diagnostic tests (e.g., drawing
a frowning face), because diagnoses and tests that go
together are more available than unrelated diagnoses
and tests.
Researchers distinguish between two aspects of
availability: the amount of information retrieved (e.g.,
the number of terrorist bombings) and the subjective
experience of retrieving information (e.g., the perceived
ease with which people can remember terrorist bombings).
The amount of information retrieved and the
experience of retrieving information often are confounded;
that is, information that is more plentifully
retrieved is also more easily retrieved. In a series of
experiments, Norbert Schwarz and colleagues demonstrated
that the experience of retrieving information
influences judgments independent of—and sometimes
in spite of—the amount of information retrieved. In one
experiment, participants were asked to list either three
or nine examples of chronic diseases. Participants who
listed three examples judged chronic diseases to be
more prevalent than those who listed nine examples
because listing three examples is easier than listing nine
examples even though three is less than nine.
Leaf Van Boven
See also Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic; Illusory
Correlation; Representativeness Heuristic
Further Readings
Schwarz, N., & Vaughn, L. A. (2002). The availability
heuristic revisited: Ease of recall and content of recall as
distinct sources of information. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin,
& D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases: The
psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 103–119).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1973). Availability: A
heuristic for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive
Psychology, 5, 207–232.
AVERSIVE RACISM
Definition
Aversive racism is a form of contemporary racism that,
in contrast to the traditional form, operates unconsciously
in subtle and indirect ways. Aversive racists
regard themselves as nonprejudiced but, at the same
time, harbor negative feelings and beliefs about members
of minority groups. Aversive racism was originally
hypothesized to characterize the attitudes of many welleducated
and liberal Whites in the United States, toward
Blacks, but the basic principles apply to the attitudes of
members of dominant groups toward minority groups in
other countries with strong contemporary egalitarian
values but discriminatory histories or policies. Despite
its subtle expression, aversive racism has resulted in significant
and pernicious consequences, in many ways
paralleling the effects of traditional, overt racism (e.g.,
in the restriction of economic opportunity).
Nature of the Attitudes
Like other forms of contemporary racism, such as
symbolic and modern racism (which focus on people
with conservative values), the aversive racism framework
views contemporary racial attitudes as complex.
A critical aspect of the aversive racism framework is
the conflict between positive aspects of people’s conscious
attitudes, involving the denial of personal prejudice,
and underlying unconscious negative feelings
toward, and beliefs about, particular minority groups.
Because of current cultural values in the United States,
most Whites have strong convictions concerning fairness,
justice, and racial equality. However, because
of a range of normal cognitive, motivational, and

sociocultural processes that promote intergroup biases,
most Whites also develop some negative feelings
toward, or beliefs about, Blacks, of which they are
unaware or which they try to dissociate from their nonprejudiced
self-images. These processes include the
spontaneous categorization of people as ingroup and
outgroup members on the basis of race (and the associated
cognitive biases), motivations for status for oneself
and one’s group, and sociocultural processes that
promote stereotypes and system-justifying ideologies.
Consistent with the aversive racist framework, Whites’
conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) attitudes
are typically dissociated.
Subtle Bias
The aversive racism framework also identifies when
discrimination against Blacks and other minority
groups will or will not occur. Because aversive racists
consciously endorse egalitarian values, they do not
discriminate in situations with strong social norms,
which would make discrimination obvious to others
and to themselves. In these contexts, aversive racists
are especially motivated to avoid feelings, beliefs, and
behaviors that could be associated with racist intent.
However, aversive racists also possess unconscious
negative feelings and beliefs, and these feelings are typically
expressed in subtle, indirect, and easily rationalized
ways. Aversive racists discriminate in situations in
which normative structure is weak or when they can
justify or rationalize negative responses on the basis
of factors other than race. Under these circumstances,
aversive racists engage in behaviors that ultimately
harm Blacks but in ways that perpetuate their nonprejudiced
self-image. In addition, aversive racism often
involves more positive reactions to Whites than to
Blacks, reflecting a pro-ingroup rather than an antioutgroup
orientation, thereby avoiding the stigma of
overt bigotry and protecting a nonprejudiced self-image.
Evidence in support of the aversive racism framework
comes from a range of paradigms, including
studies of helping behavior, selection decisions, juridic
judgments, and interracial interaction. For example, in
personnel or college admission selection decisions,
Whites do not discriminate on the basis of race when
candidates have very strong or weak qualifications.
Nevertheless, they do discriminate against Blacks when
the candidates have moderate qualifications and the
appropriate decision is therefore more ambiguous. In
Aversive Racism———93
these circumstances, aversive racists weigh the positive
qualities of White applicants and the negative qualities
of Black applicants more heavily in their evaluations,
which provide justification for their decisions. In interracial
interactions, Whites’ overt behaviors (e.g., verbal
behavior) primarily reflect their expressed, explicit
favorable racial attitudes, whereas their more spontaneous
and less-controllable behaviors (e.g., their nonverbal
behaviors) are related to their implicit, generally
more negative, unconscious attitudes.
Combating Aversive Racism
Traditional prejudice-reduction techniques have been
concerned with changing old-fashioned racism and
obvious expressions of bias. However, traditional techniques
that emphasize the immorality of prejudice are
not effective for combating aversive racism; aversive
racists recognize that prejudice is bad, but they do not
recognize that they are prejudiced.
Nevertheless, aversive racism can be addressed with
techniques aimed at its roots at both individual and collective
levels. At the individual level, strategies to combat
aversive racism can be directed at unconscious
attitudes, for example, with extensive training to create
new, counterstereotypic associations with Blacks. In
addition, because aversive racists consciously desire
to be egalitarian, inducing aversive racists to become
aware of their unconscious negative attitudes motivates
them to try to inhibit their bias in both thoughts and
action.
At the intergroup level, interventions may be targeted
at changing the ways people categorize others.
One such approach, the common ingroup identity
model, proposes that if members of different groups
(e.g., Whites and Blacks) think of themselves in terms
of shared group identities (e.g., as Americans), intergroup
attitudes will improve. Under these circumstances,
pro-ingroup biases will be redirected to others
formerly seen as outgroup members thereby producing
more positive feelings toward them and reducing intergroup
bias. Many of the conditions outlined by the contact
hypothesis and other anti-bias interventions reduce
bias, at least in part, by creating a sense of a common
ingroup identity.
Summary
Although aversive racism is expressed in indirect and
easily rationalized ways, it operates to systematically

94———Awe
restrict opportunities for Blacks and members of other
traditionally underrepresented groups, contributes to
miscommunication between groups, and fosters a climate
of interracial distrust. Understanding the nature
of aversive racism can help contribute to policies that
inhibit its effects (e.g., by focusing responsibility on
decision makers) and help identify new techniques for
eliminating unconscious bias.
John F. Dovidio
Samuel L. Gaertner
See also Prejudice; Racism; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2004). Aversive racism.
In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 36, pp. 1–51). San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (1986). The aversive form of
racism. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.),
Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 61–89).
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup
bias: The common ingroup identity model. Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
Kovel, J. (1970). White racism: A psychohistory. New York:
Pantheon.
AWE
Definition
Awe refers to an intense emotional response people
may have when they encounter an object, event, or
person that is extraordinary. Things that elicit awe are
typically vast in size, significance, or both. Frequent
elicitors of awe include nature, natural disasters,
grand architecture and historical ruins, supernatural or
spiritual experiences, scientific or technological marvels,
childbirth, and being in the presence of powerful
or celebrated individuals.
Awe involves some degree of surprise, disbelief,
or disorientation as one strives to assimilate the presence
of the extraordinary and make it conform to one’s
expectations, prior experiences, and beliefs about what
is possible. Quite often, awe results in the need to alter
existing belief structures—sometimes in profound and
life-changing ways—to accommodate the experience
and its implications. This process of change and reorientation
may take moments or days and can range in
tone from pleasant to terrifying, depending on the situation
and the individual’s personality.
The roots of the word awe lie in Germanic
words for fear and terror, and early religious uses of
awe almost always involve fear (as the result of interactions
with the Divine). In modern times, however,
the word awe is used most often to describe experiences
that are positive.
History and Context
Awe has long been associated with religious traditions,
which typically emphasize the life-transforming
aspects of awe. Numerous religious texts tell stories
that center around a moment of awe in the transformation
of an ordinary person into a saint, prophet, or
hero (e.g., St. Paul in the New Testament, Arjuna in
the Bhagavad Gita). Upon recovery from the experience,
the awe-inspired individuals then go forth and
spread word of it, often performing great deeds or
miracles that induce awe (and awe-inspired changes)
in those who witness or (more typically) hear about
them. In modern times, a central moment of awe
appears frequently in the religious conversion narratives
analyzed by William James in The Varieties of
Religious Experience. Indeed, the experience of awe
is often so transformative that many people find it fitting
to speak of having been “born again” into a new
and more harmonious configuration of self.
Some 60 years after William James, Abraham
Maslow made major contributions to the literature on
awe. Maslow spent years analyzing people’s reports of
their encounters with the extraordinary. Maslow used
the term peak experience to refer to these moments of
deep insight and awe, during which new perspectives
are revealed to people. Maslow maintained that all
humans are capable of having peak experiences,
although some appear to be more prone to them than
others. He referred to such people as Peakers (as
opposed to non-Peakers) and speculated that they were
likely to have greater well-being, deeper relationships,
and more meaning in life—predictions that continue to
be of great interest to contemporary research psychologists.
Maslow also maintained that non-Peakers could
learn to become more like Peakers.

Maslow compiled a list of 25 of the most common
aftereffects of peak experiences. Included are lack of
concern about the self, decreased materialism, feelings
of overwhelming positivity (including feelings
that the world is good and desirable), transcendence of
dichotomies, and increased receptivity to change.
Awe in Contemporary Society and
Psychological Research
Awe, and the pursuit of awe, is a major influence on
contemporary culture and the world’s economies.
People spend billions of dollars per year to visit exotic
islands, sacred ruins, grand cathedrals, castles, and
national parks. They climb mountains, ride in hot air
balloons, sky dive, scuba dive, and take their wideeyed
children to Disney’s Magic Kingdom. One of the
best illustrations of the relevance of awe to contemporary
culture may be found in Hollywood. A content
analysis of the top 100 highest-grossing movies of all
time indicates that epic, awe-eliciting movies (such as
Lord of the Rings or Star Wars) account for an inordinately
high percentage of the top 50 (relative to the
bottom 50). Awe is indeed a draw.
While the pursuit of awe has long been a popular
pastime, empirical work on awe within the field of psychology
is in its infancy. Most of what is known about
awe comes from people’s retrospective reports of their
experiences. Although such methods can add much to
researchers’ knowledge of awe (as was the case with
James’s and Maslow’s work), experiments that use random
assignment and adequate control conditions are
typically preferable. Several emotion theorists have justified
the paucity of research on awe by arguing that
awe is not a “basic” emotion and is therefore less worthy
of attention than are other emotions. The term basic
emotion refers to those six emotions (anger, disgust,
fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) that have been shown
to have a universal facial expression. Numerous emotions
not determined to be basic (e.g., love, guilt, shame,
and gratitude) have, however, received ample attention
within the psychological literature.
One impediment to the experimental study of awe
has been the difficulty of eliciting awe in a laboratory
setting. Recent technological advances have, however,
made such an undertaking more feasible. Research
psychologists are currently using digital video, large
screen televisions, vast environments, and virtual reality
to begin to elicit awe in the lab and study it experimentally
with random assignment and adequate
control conditions.
Work has also begun to investigate individual differences
in responsiveness to awe. A recent theoretical
paper by Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt proposes
that individuals who are highly responsive to beauty,
nature, and human excellence may also be more
responsive to awe experiences and may be more likely
to seek them. Like the people Maslow dubbed Peakers,
those with higher responsiveness are expected to experience
greater overall well-being and be more resilient
to stress.
Compelling stories about the unique and powerful
ability of awe to make people more malleable and
receptive to change (both personal and societal) have
been documented for millennia. It is only now, however,
that research psychologists are beginning to
catch up with thinkers in philosophy and religion in
studying the emotion of awe.
See also Emotion; Search for Meaning in Life
Further Readings
Awe———95
J. Patrick Seder
Jonathan D. Haidt
James, W. (1963). The varieties of religious experience; a
study in human nature. New Hyde Park, NY: University
Books.
Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral,
spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion,
17, 297–314.
Maslow, A. H. (1970). Religions, values, and peakexperiences.
New York: Penguin.

BABYFACENESS
Definition
Babyfaceness refers to a configuration of facial qualities
that differentiates babies from adults. A baby’s
head is characterized by a large cranium with a perpendicular
forehead and small lower face with a
receding chin. Compared with adults, babies also have
relatively large eyes, full cheeks, fine eyebrows, and
a “pug” nose. Although the appearance of babies
defines babyish facial qualities, babyfaceness is not
synonymous with age. At every age level, including
infancy and older adulthood, some individuals are
more babyfaced than others. Thus, a more babyfaced
adult could be younger or older than one who is more
maturefaced. More babyfaced individuals share certain
features with babies, such as rounder faces, larger
eyes, smaller noses, higher foreheads, and smaller
chins. There are babyfaced and maturefaced individuals
of both sexes, although women’s facial anatomy
tends to resemble that of babies more than men’s does.
Babyfaced individuals also are found among people
of all racial backgrounds, which is consistent with the
fact that the differences in facial appearance between
babies and adults are similar for all humans. Indeed,
there are even some similarities across species.
Context and Importance
Recognizing babies and responding appropriately to
them has had great evolutionary importance. Those
who didn’t do so were certainly less likely to have
B
97
passed their genes on to the next generation. Thus we
have evolved a ready recognition of babies’ distinctive
appearance qualities that generalizes to people of all
ages who resemble babies. There is high agreement
in perceiving some adults as more “babyfaced” than
others. Moreover, people can recognize babyish facial
features in a racially unfamiliar person just as well as
in someone from their own group. The ability to identify
babyfaced individuals develops at an early age.
Not only can infants differentiate babies from older
individuals, but also they discriminate between babyfaced
and maturefaced people of the same age by
showing a preference for looking at the more babyfaced
person. Young children are able to show their
keen sensitivity to variations in babyfaceness with
words. When shown two photographs of young adults
and asked which one looks “most like a baby,”
children as young as 3 years old tended to choose the
same face that college students judged as the more
babyfaced of the two.
Individuals who resemble babies experience effects
far more significant than just being labeled babyfaced.
Just as babies deter aggression and elicit warm, affectionate,
and protective responses, babyfaced individuals
of all ages elicit unique social interactions. These
derive from the tendency to perceive them as having
more childlike traits, including naïveté, submissiveness,
physical weakness, warmth, and honesty.
A sense that babyfaced individuals should be
protected from those who are more maturefaced is
revealed in the finding that more babyfaced plaintiffs
in small claims court are awarded more compensation
from maturefaced than babyfaced perpetrators. Other
evidence of stronger protective responses to babyfaced

98———Bad Is Stronger Than Good
individuals is provided by the finding that people who
find a lost letter with a resume enclosed are more likely
to return it when the photo on the resume shows a
babyfaced than a maturefaced person. A sense that
babyfaced individuals are naïve is revealed in the finding
that adults speak more slowly when teaching a
game to babyfaced 4-year-olds than when teaching the
same game to more maturefaced 4-year-olds and in the
finding that adults assign less cognitively demanding
chores to babyfaced than maturefaced 11-year-olds.
The perception that babyfaced individuals are submissive
is revealed in the finding that they are less likely
to be recommended for jobs requiring leadership than
are equally qualified maturefaced job applicants. On
the other hand, those who are more babyfaced are
more likely to be recommended for jobs requiring
warmth. A job applicant’s babyfaceness made as much
of a difference in job recommendations as the applicant’s
sex, and the actual jobs that people held were
influenced as much by their babyfaceness as by their
personality traits, further demonstrating the power of
babyfaceness to influence social outcomes.
The perception of babyfaced individuals as more
honest and naïve than their maturefaced peers has significant
consequences for their judged culpability
when accused of wrongdoing. Adults perceive the
misbehavior of babyfaced children as less intentional
than the same misdeeds by maturefaced children of
the same age. Similarly, babyfaced adults are less
likely to be convicted of intentional crimes than their
maturefaced peers. In contrast, babyfaced adults are
more likely to be convicted of negligent crimes, consistent
with stereotyped perceptions of their naiveté.
These effects have been found not only in laboratory
experiments but also in actual trials in small
claims courts. Interestingly, when babyfaced adults or
children admit committing intentional wrongdoing,
they are punished more severely than the maturefaced,
whereas they are punished less severely for acknowledged
negligent acts. It seems that others react more
harshly to people’s negative behavior when their appearance
makes that behavior very unexpected.
One might wonder whether babyfaced individuals
actually have the traits that others expect. Although
others’ expectations may sometimes elicit confirming
behavior from babyfaced individuals in a particular
social interaction, evidence suggests that babyfaced
people do not reliably show the expected traits. Indeed,
there are documented differences between babyfaced
and maturefaced people that are opposite to the stereotypes.
More babyfaced young men tend to be more
highly educated, contrary to impressions of their
naïveté, more assertive and likely to earn military
awards, contrary to impressions of their submissiveness
and weakness, and more likely to be juvenile
delinquents when they come from a high risk population,
contrary to impressions of their honesty.
Although these differences are small, they still call
for an explanation. One possibility is that babyfaced
young men try so hard to refute others’ stereotypes of
them that they overcompensate.
Leslie A. Zebrowitz
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Halo Effect; Stereotypes
and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Montepare, J. M., & Zebrowitz, L. A. (1998). Person
perception comes of age: The salience and significance of
age in social judgments. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances
in experimental social psychology (Vol. 30, pp. 93–163).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (1997). Reading faces: Window to the soul?
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD
Definition
Bad is stronger than good refers to the phenomenon
that the psychological effects of bad things outweigh
those of the good ones. Bad usually refers to situations
that have unpleasant, negative, harmful, or undesirable
outcomes for people, while good usually refers
to situations that have pleasant, positive, beneficial,
or desirable outcomes for people. Bad things have
stronger effects than good things for virtually all
dimensions of people’s lives, including their thoughts,
their feelings, their behavior, and their relationships.
Few topics in social psychology have approached the
generality and validity of bad is stronger than good
across such a broad range of human behavior.
Context and Importance
The bad is stronger than good phenomenon is at the
heart of a centuries-old debate, namely, the relative
importance of good and bad forces in the struggle of

humankind. History is replete with stories on gods
and devils fighting to get the upper hand on humanity.
In everyday life, people are confronted with a continuous
battle between what is good and what is
bad. These battles may concern important issues, for
example, behaving altruistically, such as by missing
an important interview to help a friend, versus behaving
selfishly, such as by refusing to help a friend to
attend the interview that may double one’s salary.
They may also concern mundane issues, such as eating
a healthy meal versus devouring a meal at one’s
favorite junk food restaurant, staying sober versus
drinking a glass of beer, or studying for one’s exam
versus going out with one’s friends. Reflecting its
importance in people’s lives, almost everybody, even
little children, know the difference between what is
good and what is bad.
What form does this eternal struggle take in social
psychology? Ample research in social psychology
provides evidence showing that bad is stronger than
good. That is, negative events have a greater impact on
us than positive events. For example, people are more
distressed by the loss of $50 than they are made happy
by finding $50. This does not necessarily mean that
bad will triumph over good. Some researchers suggest
that good may prevail over bad by outnumbering it. To
illustrate, within good, lasting relationships, friends
and intimate partners have approximately five good
interactions for each negative interaction. Thus, many
good interactions can override the negative effects of
one bad interaction. Given equal numbers of good and
bad, however, the effects of bad ones are generally
stronger than those of the good ones.
The most recognized reason that bad is stronger
than good is evolutionary. Organisms that are attuned
to preventing bad things are suggested to flourish and
thrive more than those oriented primarily toward
maximizing good things. A person who ignores the
danger of fire may not live to see the next day. A person
who ignores the pleasures of a fun night out may
lose nothing but that, a fun night out. People’s survival
and well-being thus seem to require more urgent
attention to avoiding bad outcomes than to approaching
good outcomes.
Evidence
A broad variety of evidence confirms the relative
strength of bad over good. Probably the strongest evidence
is provided by research on relationships.
Initially, it was argued that human beings have a
Bad Is Stronger Than Good———99
fundamental need to belong, their central task and
goal in life being to sustain a network of close, positive,
and long-lasting relationships. As it turned out,
however, the need to belong does not concern a need
for positive interactions as much as a need for nonnegative
interactions. A closer look at the evidence
from relationship research does indeed suggest that
the harmful effects of bad relationship characteristics
outweigh the beneficial effects of good characteristics
of relationships. Typically, in studies on relationships,
couples are videotaped for about 15 minutes during
which they talk about various topics such as their marital
problems or how their day went. Couples’ verbal
and nonverbal behavior during these interactions is
registered and coded as positive or negative.
Reflecting the principle that bad is stronger than
good, the findings generally show that the presence or
absence of negative behaviors is more strongly related
to the quality of a relationship than the presence or
absence of positive behaviors. Thus, increasing positive
behaviors will affect the relationship less strongly
than decreasing the negative behaviors. This has been
found in longitudinal studies, daily interactions
among spouses, parents, and parents and children.
Thus, based on bad is stronger than good, advice for
good relationships is not “do the good things” but “do
not do the bad things.”
Overall the evidence is clear and consistent that bad
is stronger than good within relationships. However,
bad is stronger than good is not just a relational phenomenon,
but reflects a general principle among a
broad range of psychological phenomena. For instance,
research on how people form impressions of others has
found that negative information receives more attention,
is processed more thoroughly, and contributes
more strongly to an impression than does positive
information. Similarly, in the language of emotions and
emotion-related words, there is consistent evidence that
humans have many more (one-and-a-half times more)
words for negative emotions than for positive emotions.
With respect to self-esteem, perceptions of rejections
appear to be much more important to people’s selfesteem
and sense of worth than perceptions of acceptance.
Research on affective forecasting shows that
people overestimate the enduring impact of negative
events much more than they overestimate the effect of
positive events. As a final example, threatening faces in
a crowd are more rapidly detected than are smiling faces.
Catrin Finkenauer
Peter Kerkhof

100———Balance Theory
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Loss Aversion; Need to
Belong
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K. D.
(2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General
Psychology, 5, 323–370.
BALANCE THEORY
Definition
Balance theory describes the structure of people’s
opinions about other individuals and objects as well
as the perceived relation between them. The central
notion of balance theory is that certain structures
between individuals and objects are balanced, whereas
other structures are imbalanced, and that balanced
structures are generally preferred over imbalanced
structures. Specifically, balance theory claims that
imbalanced structures are associated with an uncomfortable
feeling of negative affect, and that this negative
feeling leads people to strive for balanced
structures and to avoid imbalanced structures. An
example for a balanced structure is when your best
friend also likes your favorite rock band; an example
for an imbalanced structure is when your best friend
dislikes your favorite rock band. According to balance
theory, the first case makes you feel good, whereas the
second case creates an uncomfortable tension.
Theoretical Assumptions
The original formulation of balance theory was
designed to describe the pattern of relations between
three individuals. Such relation patterns between three
objects or individuals are often referred to as “triadic”
relations. From a general perspective, a triadic relation
between three individuals includes (a) the relation
between a first person A and a second person O, (b) the
relation between the second person O and a third
person X, and (c) the relation between the first person
A and the third person X (also described as A-O-X
triad). In addition, it is assumed that the specific relations
between two individuals can be positive (i.e., the
two individuals like each other) or negative (i.e., the
two individuals dislike each other). According to
balance theory, a triad is balanced when it includes
either no or an even number of negative relations. In
contrast, a triad is imbalanced when it includes an odd
number of negative relations. For example, the resulting
triad of relations between Peter, John, and Paul
would be balanced if (a) Peter likes John, John likes
Paul, and Peter likes Paul; (b) Peter likes John, John
dislikes Paul, and Peter dislikes Paul; (c) Peter dislikes
John, John likes Paul, and Peter dislikes Paul; or
(d) Peter dislikes John, John dislikes Paul, and Peter
likes Paul. However, the resulting triad would be
imbalanced if (a) Peter dislikes John, John likes Paul,
and Peter likes Paul; (b) Peter likes John, John dislikes
Paul, and Peter likes Paul; (c) Peter likes John, John
likes Paul, and Peter dislikes Paul; or (d) Peter dislikes
John, John dislikes Paul, and Peter dislikes Paul.
Even though balance theory was originally developed
to explain patterns of interpersonal relations, it
has also been applied to study attitudes and opinions
about objects. For example, a triad including Sarah,
Alice, and country music would be balanced if Sarah
likes Alice, Alice likes country music, and Sarah also
likes country music. However, the resulting triad would
be imbalanced if Sarah likes Alice, Alice likes country
music, but Sarah dislikes country music.
Over and above these assumptions for personal sentiments,
balance theory assumes that a positive relation
can also result from the perception that two objects or
individuals somehow belong together. Conversely, a
negative relation can result from the perception that
two objects or individuals do not belong together. Such
kinds of relations are typically called “unit relations.”
Positive unit relations can result from any kind of
closeness, similarity, or proximity, such as membership
in the same soccer team, similar hair style, or same ethnic
background. In contrast, negative unit relations can
result from distance, dissimilarity, or distinctness, such
as membership in different soccer teams, different hair
style, or different ethnic background.
Evidence
The distinction between balanced and imbalanced triads
has been shown to have important implications for
a variety of different domains. First, research has
shown that the uncomfortable feeling associated with
imbalanced patterns influences the formation of new
attitudes. Specifically, it has been demonstrated that
newly formed attitudes usually complete triadic relations
in a manner such that the resulting triad is

alanced rather than imbalanced. For example, if Sarah
learns that a yet unknown individual is liked by her
friend Alice, Sarah will form a positive attitude toward
this individual. However, if Sarah learns that the same
individual is disliked by her friend Alice, Sarah will
form a negative attitude toward this individual.
Second, research has demonstrated a general
superiority in memory for balanced as compared to
imbalanced information. For instance, people show
higher accuracy in recalling balanced patterns such as
“Peter likes John, John dislikes Paul, and Peter dislikes
Paul.” However, people show lower accuracy in
recalling imbalanced patterns such as “Peter likes
John, John dislikes Paul, and Peter likes Paul.” This
difference in memory performance is even more pronounced
when the triad includes the perceiver (e.g.,
“I like John, John dislikes Paul, and I dislike Paul”).
Third, balance principles have been shown to have
important implications for people’s identity and the
way people feel about themselves. Research in this area
has shown that mental associations between the self
and a particular group, evaluations of this group, and
personal evaluations of oneself typically show patterns
that can be described as balanced rather than imbalanced.
For instance, if a Black person has a strong mental
association between the self and the category Black,
and in addition shows a positive evaluation of the category
Black, this person will also exhibit a positive selfevaluation
(i.e., “I’m Black, Black is good, therefore
I’m good”). However, if a Black person has a strong
mental association between the self and the category
Black, but shows a negative evaluation of the category
Black, this person will likely exhibit a negative selfevaluation
(i.e., “I’m Black, Black is bad, therefore I’m
bad”). According to balance theory, this transfer of
evaluations is due to the inherent “unit” between the
self and the category Black.
Bertram Gawronski
See also Cognitive Consistency; Cognitive Dissonance
Theory
Further Readings
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations.
New York: Wiley.
Insko, C. A. (1984). Balance theory, the Jordan paradigm,
and the Wiest tetrahedron. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 18,
pp. 89–140). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
BARNUM EFFECT
Definition
Barnum Effect———101
The Barnum effect refers to personality descriptions
that a person believes applies specifically to them
(more so than to other people), despite the fact that
the description is actually filled with information that
applies to everyone. The effect means that people are
gullible because they think the information is about
them only, when in fact the information is generic.
History and Modern Usage
The Barnum effect came from the phrase by the circus
showman P. T. Barnum who claimed a “sucker” is
born every minute. Psychics, horoscopes, magicians,
palm readers, and crystal ball gazers make use of the
Barnum effect when they convince people that their
description of them is highly special and unique and
could never apply to anyone else.
The Barnum effect has been studied or used in psychology
in two ways. One way has been to create feedback
for participants in psychological experiments
who read it and believe it was created personally for
them. When participants complete an intelligence or
personality scale, sometimes the experimenter scores it
and gives the participant his or her real score. Other
times, however, the experimenter gives participants
false and generic feedback to create a false sense (e.g.,
to give the impression they are an exceptionally good
person). The reason that the feedback “works” and is
seen as a unique descriptor of an individual person is
because the information is, in fact, generic and could
apply to anyone.
The other way that the Barnum effect has been
studied is with computers that give (true) personality
feedback to participants. Personality ratings given by
computers have been criticized for being too general
and accepted too easily. Some researchers have done
experiments to see if people view actually true feedback
as being any more accurate than bogus feedback.
People do see actually true descriptions of themselves
as more accurate than bogus feedback, but there is not
much of a difference.
The Barnum effect works best for statements that
are positive. People are much less likely to believe
that a statement applies to them when it is a negative
statement, such as “I often think of hurting people

102———Base Rate Fallacy
who do things I don’t like.” Thus, Barnum effect reports
primarily contain statements with mostly positive items,
such as the items listed here. Note that the negative
phrases are offset by something positive to end the
statement.
• “You have an intense desire to get people to accept
and like you.”
• “Sometimes you give too much effort on projects that
don’t work out.”
• “You prefer change and do not like to feel limited in
what you can do.”
• “You are an independent thinker who takes pride in
doing things differently than others.”
• “Sometimes you can be loud, outgoing, and a peopleperson,
but other times you can be quiet, shy, and
reserved.”
• “You can be overly harsh on yourself and very critical.”
• “Although you do have some weaknesses, you try
very hard to overcome them and be a better person.”
See also Deception (Methodological Technique);
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Kathleen D. Vohs
Johnson, J. T., Cain, L. M., Falke, T. L., Hayman, J., &
Perillo, E. (1985). The “Barnum effect” revisited:
Cognitive and motivational factors in the acceptance of
personality descriptions. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 49, 1378–1391.
BASE RATE FALLACY
Definition
Imagine that you meet Tom one evening at a party. He
is somewhat shy and reserved, is very analytical, and
enjoys reading science fiction novels. What is the likelihood
that Tom works as a computer scientist? The
answer depends on both the knowledge you have
about Tom and the number of computer scientists that
exist in the population. Tom fits the stereotype of a
computer scientist, but there are relatively few computer
scientists in the general population compared
to all other occupations. The knowledge you have
about Tom is often called individuating or case-based
information, whereas knowledge about the number of
computer scientists in the general population is often
called distributional or base rate information. When
presented with both pieces of information—be it when
judging the risk of contracting a disease, when judging
the likelihood of a defendant’s guilt, or when predicting
the likelihood of future events—people often
base their judgments too heavily on case-based or
individuating information and underutilize or completely
ignore distributional or base-rate evidence.
Underutilizing or ignoring base-rate evidence in intuitive
judgments and decision making is known as the
base rate fallacy.
Background
The classic scientific demonstration of the base rate fallacy
comes from an experiment, performed by psychologists
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, in which
participants received a description of 5 individuals
apparently selected at random from a pool of descriptions
that contained 70 lawyers and 30 engineers, or
vice versa. Participants were asked to predict whether
each of the 5 individuals was a lawyer or an engineer.
The compelling result was that participants’ predictions
completely ignored the composition of the pool (i.e.,
the base rates, meaning whether the pool was made
up of 30% lawyers or 70% lawyers) from which the
descriptions were drawn. Instead, participants seemed
to base their predictions of each person’s occupation on
the extent to which the description resembled, or was
similar to, the prototypical lawyer or engineer. Relying
on this representativeness heuristic led participants to
completely disregard the base rates that should also
have been incorporated into their predictions.
Results like these have been replicated in a wide
variety of contexts since this initial demonstration.
Underutilizing population base rates has been used,
for instance, to explain why people are overly concerned
about extremely rare events (such as dying in
a terrorist attack or contracting a rare disease), why
people pay for insurance they do not need, and why
doctors misdiagnose their patients. However, broad
conclusions about the general existence and robustness
of the base rate fallacy in daily life have become
quite controversial for two reasons. First, experimental
results often show that people do indeed utilize
base rates at least some of the time. Empirical research
simply does not support the claim that people completely
ignore base rate evidence when making judgments
and decisions. Second, statisticians have pointed out
the difficulty in determining exactly how much people

should incorporate base rates into their judgments in
daily life. It is therefore difficult, in some contexts, to
argue that people should incorporate base rates into
their judgments and decisions that they naturally
ignore or apparently underutilize.
Evidence
Empirical evidence suggests that base rates are sometimes
completely ignored and at other times are
utilized appropriately. The key issue for social psychologists,
then, is to understand when the base rate
fallacy is likely to emerge and when it is not. At least
four major factors are known to moderate people’s use
of base rates in judgments and decisions.
First, people are more likely to utilize base rates
when making repeated judgments of events with different
base rates than when making a single judgment
of an event with only one base rate. Making repeated
judgments highlights the varying base rates between
events in a way that a single judgment alone does not,
and therefore increases the likelihood that people will
utilize those base rates when rendering their judgments.
People judging the likelihood that they will
experience each of three accidents, such as a gunshot
wound, a paper cut, or a sprained ankle, will be more
sensitive to the base rates of those accidents in the population
than people judging the likelihood that they
will experience only one of those accidents (without
mention of the other two accidents).
Second, people are more likely to use base rates
when they have no individuating or case-specific information
to use in its place. People are more likely to
utilize base rates, for instance, when predicting the
behavior of a randomly selected person than when
predicting their own behavior, in large part because no
individuating or case-based information is available
for the “random person” but a good deal of individuating
information is present when predicting one’s own
behavior.
Third, people are more likely to utilize base rates
when they are perceived to be valid and reliable. Base
rate information about elderly adults, for instance, is
more likely to be utilized when making judgments about
elderly adults than when making judgments about young
adults. Base rates tend to be ignored when they are perceived
to be invalid and unreliable.
Finally, people are more likely to use base rates
when they are presented as frequencies than when
they are presented as single-case probabilities. People
would be more sensitive to the actual population base
Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)———103
rates, for instance, when predicting how many commercial
airplane flights out of 1,000 will crash due to
mechanical malfunctions than when predicting the
likelihood (from 0% to 100%) that any single airplane
flight will crash due to mechanical malfunctions.
Importance
Both trivial and important decisions are often based
on the perceived likelihood of events. People avoid
flying if they believe the likelihood of a crash is high,
marry a dating partner if they believe the likelihood of
divorce is low, and start new businesses depending on
the perceived likelihood of success. Nearly all likelihood
judgments require the integration of case-based
or individuating information and distributional or base
rate evidence. Understanding when people are likely
to utilize these base rates appropriately versus inappropriately
provides insight into when people are
likely to make good versus bad decisions, and understanding
why people might sometimes commit the
base rate fallacy provides insight for how to improve
everyday decision making.
Nicholas Epley
See also Decision Making; Representativeness Heuristic
Further Readings
Koehler, J. J. (1996). The base rate fallacy reconsidered:
Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19, 1–53.
BASKING IN REFLECTED GLORY
(BIRGING)
Definition
Basking in reflected glory, also known as BIRGing,
refers to the tendency of individuals to associate themselves
with the successful, the famous, or the celebrated.
A baseball fan’s use of the inclusive term we to
describe the victory of his or her favorite team (as in
“We won”) is an example of BIRGing. Mentioning
that one has taken a class taught by a Nobel Prize winner
is also an example of basking in reflected glory.
Other examples include recounting the story of a
chance encounter with a celebrity, such as sitting next

104———Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRGing)
to them on a plane or dining at the same restaurant,
and mentioning that one is related to a famous politician
or musician. Basking in reflected glory need not
be limited to verbal associations (e.g., people are more
likely to wear clothing affiliated with a winning team
than a losing team).
Background and History
Basking in reflected glory was first scientifically investigated
in the mid-1970s by a team of researchers
headed by Dr. Robert Cialdini. According to their
research, after a winning football game, not only were
college football fans more likely to wear clothing that
endorsed the football team, they were more likely to
use the pronoun we to describe the events of the game
as compared to fans after a losing football game. In the
case of a loss, college students distanced themselves
from the football team, a tendency called cutting off
reflected failure (CORFing). In the case of a team loss,
the fans were less likely to wear clothing such as hats
and T-shirts endorsing the team, and, when asked to
describe the events of the game, they were more likely
to use the pronoun they to describe the events (e.g.,
“They blew it”).
Basking in reflected glory has also been demonstrated
outside the sports domain. For instance,
people in Belgium who endorsed a political party that
swept the national elections were more likely to display
posters and lawn signs that endorsed their political
part for a longer duration after an election than
were those who endorsed the losing party. This suggests
that people who place bumper stickers on their
cars endorsing their preferred political party or candidate
may be more likely to leave the sticker on the car
after a win than a loss.
Basking in reflected glory is one of many indirect
impression management tactics. When people engage
in impression management, they emphasize certain
qualities that they think will make the best impression
on their audience. For instance, when a man on a date
tries to impress his date (e.g., by mentioning his success
in the workplace), he is trying to create the
impression that he would be a good provider and therefore
a good long-term partner. Similarly, a computer
programmer trying to impress a prospective employer
may mention that a computer program she developed
won a prestigious reward. These are examples of a
direct impression management tactic. Indirect impression
management tactics such as BIRGing involve
emphasizing or de-emphasizing connections with
others. For instance, in an attempt to convey the impression
he would be a good long-term partner, that same
man on a date may BIRG by emphasizing how close
he is to his brother who is happily married. And in an
attempt to covey competence, the computer programmer
may BIRG by mentioning that she once worked
with a celebrated computer programmer. So, individuals
BIRG in an attempt to make themselves look better
by associating themselves with the glorious rather than
by directly boasting of their own gloriousness.
Basking in reflected glory serves to enhance
people’s public image or self-esteem. However, the situations
in which people BIRG vary, and certain situations
may lead individuals to BIRG more. Because
BIRGing is intended to enhance an individual’s selfesteem,
people are more likely to engage in basking in
reflected glory when their public self-image is threatened.
For instance, people who receive feedback that
they performed poorly on a test are more likely to
engage in BIRGing than are people who receive feedback
that they did well. However, the type of association
people emphasize may vary. That is, if a person
fails on a test of math ability, that person is more likely
to emphasize his or her connection with an individual
who is good at something other than math if given the
option between basking in reflected glory of a math
expert or sports expert. People do this because it makes
them feel better to emphasize an association with a celebrated
other; after all, it is something positive about
themselves.
The connections people emphasize between themselves
and others when they BIRG are often trivial
connections (e.g., being a fan of a successful team, a
member of a winning political party, or the relative of
someone who met someone famous). It brings to light
a positive yet trivial connection between the individual
and the celebrity. However, these connections need
not be trivial, and in some cases, basking in reflected
glory may occur when the connections are strong (e.g.,
parents who place “my child is an honor’s student”
bumper stickers on their cars are BIRGing).
Rosanna E. Guadagno
See also Impression Management; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R., Thorne, A., Walker, M., Freeman, S.,
& Sloane, L. T. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three
(football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 34, 366–375.

BEHAVIORAL CONTAGION
Definition
Behavioral contagion is the tendency for people to
repeat behavior after others have performed it. People
very often do what others do. Sometimes we choose to
imitate others, for example, by wearing the same type
of clothes as our friends. Most of the time, however,
we are not aware of the fact that we copy behavior.
Research shows that humans nonconsciously imitate a
lot of behaviors. Examples are speech variables such
as syntax, accents, speech rate, pauses, tone of voice
and behavioral variables such as gestures, mannerisms,
postures. Furthermore, we take over each other’s facial
expressions, moods, and emotions. Other well-known
examples are laughter and yawning.
Analysis
Why do we imitate? Whereas behavioral synchrony in
many species of animals promotes safety (think of
schools of fish or flocks of birds), in humans, imitation
also serves other functions. First, imitation is a
very efficient tool to understand others and learn from
them. By doing what another does, we know what
the other person is doing. We don’t have to make the
same mistakes and go through trial and error learning;
rather, we can copy the best behavioral option immediately.
This is also an efficient way to transfer skills
and culture. In case of emotional contagion, when we
take over the facial expression of our interaction partner,
we feel what others feel, we understand them and
can empathize with their pleasure or pain, which brings
us to another function of imitation.
Imitation also serves a social function and is a
powerful tool in bonding and binding people together:
It functions as social glue. We like others who imitate
us (as long as we don’t notice it, otherwise it will feel
awkward), act more prosocial toward them and feel
closer to them. Many salespersons and other professionals
know this aspect of imitation and use it in
attempts to influence consumers or clients. Imitation
or mirroring is often advised in commercial books on
sales and influence tactics.
How do we imitate? The human brain seems to be
wired for imitation. There is an intimate connection
between perception and action, seeing and doing, in
the human brain. A nice example of this intimate link is
the so-called mirror neuron, discovered by a group of
Italian researchers in the mid-1990s. These brain cells
are active both when people perform a certain behavior
(e.g., grasping) and when we merely see someone else
perform that behavior. These brain cells do not discriminate
between our own and other people’s behavior.
Although there is no final word about these mirror
neurons and whether they actually cause imitation, there
is more and more evidence for the hypothesis that imitation
is hardwired in the human brain. Researchers
nowadays are trying to explain exactly how imitation
works and how it is related to human characteristics
such as empathy and mind reading.
Rick van Baaren
See also Mimicry; Similarity-Attraction Effect; Social
Learning
Further Readings
Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect:
The perception-behavior link and social interaction.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 893–910.
Meltzoff, A., & Prinz, W. (Eds.). (2002). The imitative mind.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Behavioral Economics———105
Definition
Everyday life is full of decisions and choices. Economic
decisions are especially important to our lives whether
we are deciding what to buy for lunch, shopping around
for the best price on books, thinking about saving for
vacation, or negotiating for a better salary. An important
question for many researchers is how people make
economic decisions. Specifically, researchers are interested
in the assumptions, beliefs, habits, and tactics
that people use to make everyday decisions about their
money, work, savings, and consumption. Behavioral
economics is a field of study that combines the techniques,
methods, and theories of psychology and economics
to research, learn about, and explain the
economic behavior of real people. Whereas neoclassical
economics has traditionally looked at how people
should behave, behavioral economics tries to answer
the question of why people act the way they do.
Behavioral economics can inform a variety of realworld
phenomena, including stock market pricing, bubbles,
crashes, savings rates, investment choices, buying

106———Behavioral Economics
habits, consumption addiction, and risky behavior—
all of which are important economic issues with tremendous
monetary and lifestyle implications for all of us.
Although behavioral economics is a relatively new
field of study, it has attracted supporters in academia,
industry, and public policy along with criticism from
skeptics, who question its contribution and methods.
History
As neoclassical microeconomics developed during the
20th century, psychology as an academic discipline was
in its infancy—with techniques, theories, and methods
that were not considered well developed by many academicians.
As a result, those who studied economics
viewed psychology skeptically, and the two disciplines
developed independently. As psychology developed
into a sound, theoretically based discipline, its theories
and findings were nonetheless largely ignored by economists
because of the long and separate history between
the two disciplines. As a result, economists and psychology
have tended to look at financial behavior through
different lenses. Neoclassical economists tend to assume
that human beings will, for the most part, act rationally
when it comes to decision making and money. They
also assume that people know what they want, try to
always get the most that they can and consistently make
the same types of choices under similar circumstances.
On the other hand, psychologists have come to understand
that human beings are prone to make mistakes,
are fickle and inconsistent, and often do not get the
best deal when making financial choices. Psychologists
investigate the biases, assumptions, and errors that affect
how people make decisions in all aspects of life. Over
time, economists also began to wonder why financial
markets and the individuals that participate in them did
not always act according to traditional economic theory.
The convergence of economics and psychology
eventually created a new field of study referred to as
behavioral economics.
Theoretical Developments
The concept of bounded rationality is extremely important
to understanding behavioral economics. Bounded
rationality suggests that people are neither purely rational
nor completely irrational in their economic behavior
but instead try to be sensible and thoughtful economic
decision makers. Bounded rationality further suggests
that because human beings are limited in how much
information they can process at any one time, they are
prone to errors and biases when they formulate their
preferences and choices. We often make decisions
based on emotion, whim, or by mistake. We sometimes
even avoid making certain financial decisions, such as
saving for retirement, because the process is just too
complicated or we are having too much fun doing other
things. People tend to cope with difficult economic
decisions by using tricks like mental accounts, habits,
heuristics (simple rules of thumb), satisficing (settling
for a minimum but not the maximum level of an
outcome), maximization, and selective processing of
information. These are the phenomena that behavioral
economists are interested in. Although traditional economists
prefer to assume that people (or agents as they
are referred to by economists) are perfectly rational and
will try to maximize their own personal, financial gain
(or maximize utility as economists like to say), bounded
rationality suggests that we do not always choose the
most rational or even the most optimal choice when
making economic decisions.
A key paper in the development of behavioral economics
was published in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman
and Amos Tversky and introduced prospect theory,
which stimulated interest in understanding the underlying
psychological mechanisms of economic preference,
judgment, and choice. In 2002, Vernon Smith (who was
instrumental in developing economics into an experimental
discipline) and Kahneman were awarded the
Nobel Prize in Economics for their contributions to
experimental and behavioral economics.
Methodology
Behavioral economics tends to use experiments to test
theories and hypotheses. However, more recent work
has included many other techniques used in traditional
economics studies, including field data, field experiments,
and computer simulations. In addition, studies
in behavioral economics have also used tools from
social psychology and cognitive science—including
brain scans, psychophysical techniques such as galvanic
skin conductance, hormonal levels, and heart rate—to
measure subject response.
Over the past 50 years, scientists have experimented
with a number of hypothetical game scenarios to determine
models of how people make choices in economic
situations. Researchers often use games to simulate
the kind of financial scenarios that happen in the real
world. One game often used in behavioral economics

studies is the ultimatum game, which is also called the
“take it or leave it” game. In the ultimatum game, a
player, Ann, is given a sum of money (usually referred
to in economics as an endowment) and is asked to split
the money between herself and another player, Bob. At
that point, Bob can decide whether to take it or leave it.
In other words, if the split is accepted, each player gets
what Ann had originally decided to give, but if Bob
decides that the deal is not good enough, he can reject
the deal and neither player will get anything, thereby
ending the game. Classical game theory assumes that
we will all act rationally and choose to maximize our
own outcome. Therefore, according to game theory,
Bob should accept any amount that Ann offers as long
as it is more than zero, since something is better than
nothing. If Ann assumes that Bob is perfectly rational,
Ann will offer the minimum amount, say $1, to Bob
so that she is maximizing her own “expected utility.”
However, in repeated experiments of the ultimatum
game, a surprising outcome occurs. People don’t act
rationally when they feel others are taking advantage of
them, and people often choose to act altruistically so
that a sense of fairness exists between the two players.
Neither of these two strategies leads to a traditional
type of income maximization.
Another game that is often used in behavioral economics
experiments is called the trust game, or the
stock broker game. Just as in the ultimatum game, Ann
starts off with a pot of money, usually $10, and she can
choose to keep some of the money for herself and
invest the remaining amount with Bob. Bob functions
like a stock broker or a trustee. The money that Ann
gives Bob is tripled, and Bob can now decide how
much he wants to keep and how much he wants to give
back to Ann. This game tests how altruistic, trusting,
and trustworthy people are when in comes to money.
Again, experiments have uncovered an interesting
effect. If the game is repeated over many rounds,
investors tend to invest about half of their money with
the broker and the brokers tend to return to the investor
more than was originally sent or about half the tripled
amount. This indicates that people do not always try to
get as much as they can for themselves, but instead try
to play fair most of the time—especially when they are
involved in multiple transactions with the same partner.
Topics
A number of topics have been investigated by behavioral
economists. Some of the key topics in behavioral
Behavioral Economics———107
economics include intertemporal choice, loss aversion,
framing, and fairness.
Intertemporal choice deals with how people choose
to make decisions about events in the past, present,
and future. Examples of the type of intertemporal
choices that people make every day include deciding
whether to save for retirement or choosing to buy a
new outfit on impulse. While neoclassical economists
assume that people discount the future at a rational
and constant rate, behavioral economists look at how
the psychology of an individual shapes the decisions
and choices about the future.
Loss aversion is an important phenomenon investigated
in seminal papers by Tversky and Kahneman.
They found that people tend to value losses and gains
differently. In fact, the research found that people are
much more sensitive to suffering a “loss” than they are
to netting a “gain.” According to neoclassical economics,
people should value both losses and gains the same
as long as the final outcome is the same. However,
experiments have found that a loss is seen by most
people as much more painful than the pleasure from an
equal gain.
Framing is another important concept that developed
from the loss aversion finding. Framing refers to
how outcomes that are presented or stated to a person
will influence which choice the person will make. An
example of the framing effect can be seen in the Asian
disease problem. The problem poses to research subjects
a hypothetical situation wherein a disease threatens
600 citizens and the subjects need to choose
between two options. In the positive frame, subjects
are given the choice between (a) a 100% chance of
saving 200 lives, or (b) a one-third chance of saving
all 600 with a two-thirds chance of saving no one. In
the negative frame, subjects are given the choice
between (c) 400 people dying for sure, or (d) a twothirds
chance of 600 dying and a one-third chance of
no one dying. Although all of the choices result in the
same number of lives at risk, most people choose a
over b in the positive frame, switching their preferences
to choose d over c in the negative frame. Depending
on which frame is presented, research subjects
tend to change the type of solution they choose, which
would be considered inconsistent and irrational by
neoclassical economists.
Fairness is an interesting concept that seems to have
a great deal of impact on economic choices, but it is
not included in traditional economic models. Studies
have found that people tend to reject inequality even if

108———Behavioral Economics
it means walking away from a reward, which does not
seem to indicate a rational agent in all situations. The
ultimatum game and the trust game have been used in
experiments to test when fairness, altruism, and trust
influence economic decision making.
New Directions
New research directions based on ideas and theories
from behavioral economics have started to use methods
developed in cognitive neuroscience. Advances in brain
imaging technology (e.g., functional magnetic resonance
imaging, or fMRI), in addition to clinical studies
using patients with brain lesions compared to normal
subjects, have been used to examine which neural substrates
underlie economic decision making. This new
area, coined as neuroeconomics, has opened up new
areas of inquiry for behavioral economic questions.
Neuroeconomics is interested not only in exposing
brain regions associated with specific behavior but also
in identifying neural circuits or systems of specialized
regions that control choice, preference, and judgment.
Criticism
Behavioral economics has been criticized in a number
of ways. One criticism is that it focuses on anomalies
in behavior instead of creating a unified theory that
explains what people usually do. However, researchers
in this area argue that anomalies in behavior may be
just as important to understanding economic choice
since these anomalies have proven to have powerful
effects in markets. Examples of these powerful effects
can be seen in bubbles and crashes in the stock or real
estate markets, anger at the gas pump when prices rise
too quickly, or conflict in deciding whether to save a
tax refund or spend it on a fancy dinner.
In addition, some have criticized the validity of
experiments (which are based in the laboratory) because
they are seen as being too different from real-world
situations. However, the use of repeated experimental
tests of findings and the additional use of field
data have been cited as substantiating the findings in
the lab.
Current models of decision making only partially
explain human behavior. When the actual behavior of
real people is examined, these elegant, simple, mathematically
based models are not always very accurate
or realistic. Behavioral economists defend their discipline
by arguing that behavioral economics augments
and informs these traditional economic models and
provides a more realistic view of the how and why of
financial decision making.
Conclusion
Behavioral economics, like the related disciplines of
behavioral finance, behavioral game theory, economic
sociology, and neuroeconomics, attempts to enrich the
classical theories of economics to build better theories,
concepts, and models about economic decision making.
By attempting to integrate psychological factors
into economic theory, it is not the intent of behavioral
economists to supplant the important contributions that
traditional economics has made, but instead to enhance
and augment economic theory so that a more complete
and realistic view of economic behavior can be developed.
Understanding market phenomena, such as stock
market crashes and real estate bubbles, why people do
or don’t save, how people spend their money and how
people make risky decisions, is important not only to
academicians but also to public policymakers who
seek to create as stable an economic system as possible
to preserve the public good. Behavioral economics
can even be applied to public health issues such as smoking
and other risky behaviors by attempting to understand
what economic mechanisms underlie people’s
consumption choices.
Above all, behavioral economics strives to improve
understanding of the financial choices that are an
important part of everyday life. Through experiments
and field data, behavioral economics has been able to
test new ideas about how people make economics
choices in a variety of settings in an attempt to create
better predictive models of economic and financial
decision making and to hopefully help everyone make
better financial choices.
Dante Pirouz
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Decision Making;
Delay of Gratification; Gain–Loss Framing; Prospect
Theory; Research Methods
Further Readings
Berg, J., Dickhaut, J., & McCabe, K. (1995). Trust,
reciprocity, and social history. Games and Economic
Behavior, 10(1), 122–142.

Camerer, C. L., & Loewenstein, G. (2003). Behavioral
economics: Past, present, future. In C. L. Camerer,
G. Loewenstein, & D. Rabin (Eds.), Advances in
behavioral economics (pp. 3–51). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Camerer, C. L., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2005).
Neuroeconomics: How neuroscience can inform
economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 43, 1,9.
Camerer, C. L., Loewenstein, G., & Rabin, M. (2003).
Advances in behavioral economics. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (Eds.). (1982).
Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory:
An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica,
47(2), 263–292.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (2000). Choices, values, and
frames. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Loewenstein, G., Read, D., & Baumeister, R. F. (Eds.).
(2003). Time and decision: Economic and psychological
perspectives on intertemporal choice. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Thaler, R. (1992). The winner’s curse. New York: Free Press.
BELIEF PERSEVERANCE
Definition
People tend to hold on to their beliefs even when it
appears that they shouldn’t. Belief perseverance is
the tendency to cling to one’s initial belief even after
receiving new information that contradicts or disconfirms
the basis of that belief. Everyone has tried
to change someone’s belief, only to have them stubbornly
remain unchanged. For example, you may have
had such debates concerning the death penalty, or abortion,
or evolution.
In many cases, resistance to challenges to beliefs is
logical and defensible. For example, if you’ve always
done well in math classes, getting a “C” on a math test
should not lead you to abandon your belief that you
are usually good at math. However, in some cases
people cling to beliefs that logically should be abandoned,
or at least modified. There is overwhelming
evidence that smoking increases the likelihood of contracting
cancer and that exposure to media violence
increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior. Yet,
some people strongly deny these scientific truths.
Belief Perseverance———109
Scientists studying belief perseverance have been
most interested in cases in which people appear to
cling too strongly to prior beliefs.
Types
Three different types of belief perseverance have been
extensively studied. One involves self-impressions,
beliefs about oneself. Examples include beliefs about
your athletic skills, musical talents, ability to get along
with others, or even body image. Perhaps you know
someone who is extremely thin but who persists in
believing that he or she is too fat. Such a mistaken and
perseverant belief can lead to serious consequences.
Another involves social impressions, beliefs about
specific other people. Examples include beliefs about
your best friend, mother, or least favorite teacher. The
third type involves naïve theories, beliefs about how
the world works. Most perseverance research on naïve
theories has focused on social theories, beliefs about
people and how they think, feel, behave, and interact.
Examples include stereotypes about teenagers, Asian
Americans, Muslims; beliefs about lawyers, artists,
firefighters; even beliefs about the causes of war,
poverty, or violence.
Studies
Early belief perseverance studies tested whether people
sometimes truly cling to unfounded beliefs more so
than is logically defensible. But, it is difficult to specify
just how much a given belief “should” change in
response to new evidence. One “C” on a math test
should not totally overwhelm several years of “A”s in
other math classes, but how much change (if any) is
warranted?
There is one clear case in which researchers can
specify how much belief change should occur. That
case is when the basis of a specific belief is totally discredited.
For example, assume that Mary tells José that
the new student Sam is not very smart. José may even
meet and interact with Sam for several days before
learning that Mary was actually talking about a different
new student. Because José knows that his initial
belief about Sam’s intelligence was based on totally
irrelevant information, José’s social impression about
Sam should now be totally uninfluenced by Mary’s initial
statement. This essentially describes the debriefing
paradigm, the primary method used to study unwarranted
belief perseverance.

110———Beliefs
In the first belief perseverance study using this
method, half of the research participants were led to
believe that they had performed well on a social perceptiveness
task; the other half were led to believe that
they had performed poorly. Later, all were told that
their performance had been manipulated by the
researcher to see how participants responded to success
or failure. Participants were even shown the sheet
of paper that listed their name and whether they were
supposed to be given success or failure feedback.
Later, participants had to estimate how well they really
did and predict how well they would do in the future
on this task. Logically, those in the initial success and
failure conditions should not differ in their self-beliefs
about their actual or future performance on this social
perceptiveness task, because initial beliefs based on
the fake feedback should revert to their normal level
once it was revealed that the feedback was faked.
Nonetheless, participants who received fake success
feedback continued to believe that they were pretty
good at this task, whereas those who received fake failure
feedback continued to believe that they were pretty
bad at it. Other studies of self and social impressions
have found similar effects concerning very different
beliefs.
The first study of social theory perseverance used a
similar debriefing paradigm to see whether fictitious
information about the relation between the personality
trait “riskiness” and firefighter ability could produce
a perseverant social theory. In fact, after debriefing
about the fictitious nature of the initial information,
participants initially led to believe that risky people
make better firefighters and those initially led to
believe that risky people make poorer firefighters persevered
in their initial beliefs.
At least three psychological processes underlie
belief perseverance. One involves use of the “availability
heuristic” to decide what is most likely to happen.
When judging your own ability at a particular task, you
are likely to try to recall how well you’ve done on similar
tasks in the past, that is, how available (in memory)
are past successes versus failures. But whether you
recall more successes or failures depends on many factors,
such as how memorable the various occasions
were and how often you’ve thought about them, but
not necessarily on how frequently you’ve actually succeeded
or failed. A second process concerns “illusory
correlation,” in which one sees or remembers more
confirming cases and fewer disconfirming cases than
really exists. A third process involves “data distortions,”
in which confirming cases are inadvertently created and
disconfirming cases are ignored. For example, if you
are told that a new student is rude, you are more likely
to treat that person in a way that invites rudeness and to
forget instances of politeness.
Research also has investigated ways to reduce
belief perseverance. The most obvious solution, asking
people to be unbiased, doesn’t work. However, several
techniques do reduce the problem. The most successful
is to get the person to imagine or explain how the
opposite belief might be true. This de-biasing technique
is known as counterexplanation.
Craig A. Anderson
See also Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic; Attitude
Change; Availability Heuristic; Illusory Correlation
Further Readings
Anderson, C. A. (1995). Implicit personality theories and
empirical data: Biased assimilation, belief perseverance
and change, and covariation detection sensitivity. Social
Cognition, 13, 25–48.
Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R., & Ross, L. (1980). The
perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in
the persistence of discredited information. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037–1049.
Anderson, C. A., & Lindsay, J. J. (1998). The development,
perseverance, and change of naive theories. Social
Cognition, 16, 8–30.
Lord, C. G., Lepper, M. R., & Preston, E. (1984).
Considering the opposite: A corrective strategy for social
judgment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
47, 1231–1243.
Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance
in self-perception and social perception: Biased
attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 880–892.
BELIEFS
Definition
Beliefs are generally defined as convictions that things
held in the mind are true. If individuals think particular
tenets are likely to be true, they are said to believe them.
If individuals think particular tenets are unlikely to be
true, they are said to disbelieve them. In their most

asic form, beliefs are nonevaluative. For example, if
one believes the sky is blue, that belief could either be
positively evaluated (if the individual likes the color
blue and thinks the sky would look worse in red), or
that belief could be negatively evaluated (if the individual
dislikes the color blue and thinks a red sky would be
nicer). As such, there is a fine distinction between attitudes
and beliefs. Often, beliefs will, at least partially,
form the basis or foundation of attitudes.
Beliefs can also form the basis of behavior. An
example of this is found in health psychology via the
health belief model. In this model, health behavior
is predicted by several types of beliefs: (a) beliefs
about all of the possible consequences of engaging in
or failing to engage in a particular health behavior,
(b) beliefs about personal vulnerability (i.e., how likely
is the occurrence of these outcomes for oneself),
(c) beliefs about the likelihood that a behavioral change
would either stop negative outcomes from occurring
or would facilitate positive outcomes, and (d) beliefs
about whether the necessary behaviors can be enacted.
According to this model, behavior change occurs when
individuals believe that a particular action leads to
negative, likely consequences that could be personally
stopped. This model has successfully predicted smoking
cessation, skin cancer preventative behaviors, tooth
flossing, breast self-examination, safer sexual behavior,
and eating a balanced diet.
Beliefs are important foundations of attitudes and
behavior, but they can be extremely difficult to change.
Often, people will vehemently maintain their beliefs
even in light of disconfirming evidence. This phenomenon
is known as belief perseverance. Belief perseverance
typically occurs because people base their beliefs
on information that they find logical, compelling, or
attractive in some way. Therefore, even when beliefs
are seemingly disconfirmed by new evidence, the
foundation for what the person believes may still exist.
At times, the belief will still be maintained because of
the remaining support of the explanation behind it.
Understanding how beliefs form and how they
underlie subsequent attitudes and behaviors is important
because it can aid understanding of social phenomena
like prejudice and discrimination, helping
and aggressive behaviors, impression formation, obedience
to authority, interpersonal attraction, and group
decision making. In general, beliefs are the most basic
type of social knowledge.
Natalie D. Smoak
See also Attitudes; Belief Perseverance
Further Readings
Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R., & Ross, L. (1980).
Perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in
the persistence of discredited information. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037–1049.
Rosenstock, I. M. (1990). The health belief model:
Explaining health behavior through expectancies.
In K. Glanz, F. M. Lewis, & B. K. Rimer (Eds.), Health
behavior and health education (pp. 39–62).
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
BENEVOLENT SEXISM
Benevolent Sexism———111
Definition
Benevolent sexism is a form of paternalistic prejudice
(treating a lower status group as a father might treat
a child) directed toward women. Prejudice is often
thought of as a dislike or antipathy toward a group.
Benevolent sexism, however, is an affectionate but
patronizing attitude that treats women as needing men’s
help, protection, and provision (i.e., as being more like
children than adults). Benevolently sexist attitudes suggest
that women are purer and nicer than men, but also
mentally weaker and less capable. Behaviors that illustrate
benevolent sexism include overhelping women
(implying they cannot do something themselves), using
diminutive names (e.g., “sweetie”) toward female
strangers, or “talking down” to women (e.g., implying
they cannot understand something technical).
Although benevolent sexism might seem trivial,
patronizing behaviors can be damaging. For instance,
people who see a woman repeatedly being treated
chivalrously by a man (opening doors, pulling out
chairs) view her as less independent. On the job, when
women are given patronizing praise instead of promotions
or important assignments, they become angry and
their performance suffers. Patronizing praise that communicates
low expectations (e.g., “You figured out
how to tie your shoes—good for you!”) is irritating
and harmful. Because benevolent sexism is often more
subtle, however, many women are induced to accept its
promise of men’s affection, protection, and help, without
fully realizing that this can diminish their own
independence and opportunities.

112———Benevolent Sexism
Measurement
Benevolent sexism is typically measured by assessing
people’s beliefs using the benevolent sexism scale,
which is part of Peter Glick and Susan Fiske’s Ambivalent
Sexism Inventory. The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory
also includes a hostile sexism scale that measures
hostility or antipathy toward types of women whom
sexists view as seeking power or control over men
(e.g., feminists or women who use sexuality to “control”
men). Considerable research (both in the United
States and in other nations) confirms that benevolent
and hostile sexism are distinct forms of sexist belief
(though their positive correlation indicates that sexists
tend simultaneously to endorse both the hostile and
benevolent varieties). Benevolent sexism is related to
subjectively favorable, and hostile sexism to subjectively
unfavorable, stereotypes of women, but both are
associated with traditional views about gender roles
(e.g., that a woman’s place is in the home).
Origins and Function
Paternalistic prejudices, such as benevolent sexism,
develop when intergroup inequality is combined with
interdependence between the groups. Although men
have more power (in most societies) than women, the
two sexes are intimately interdependent. Men need
women to reproduce. Heterosexual men rely on women
as romantic partners and, in traditional relationships,
to raise their children and keep their houses. This interdependence
means that even if men are more powerful
than women, it is in men’s interest to gain women’s
cooperation, rather than to elicit their resentment.
Whereas some intergroup relations are purely hostile,
intimate interdependence between the sexes means
that hostility must be tempered with benevolence; it
is unlikely, for example, that men will ever commit
genocide against women.
Yet benevolent sexism placates women while still
maintaining men’s power by encouraging women to
remain in traditional roles. This is why it is a form of
sexism—because it promotes continued inequality
(even if most people who endorse benevolent sexism
are not fully aware of how it functions). A key point is
that benevolent sexism is directed only at women who
stay within traditional gender roles (as wives, mothers,
and helpers) that do not challenge (but rather
reinforce) men’s power and that serve men’s needs.
Benevolent sexism may be sweet, but it is also
contingent—women who fail to fulfill its expectations
(e.g., by challenging male power) instead evoke
hostile sexism (dislike or antipathy).
The ambivalent sexism inventory has been administered
in dozens of nations. Cross-cultural comparisons
reveal that societies where people more strongly
endorse benevolently sexist beliefs have the least gender
equality (e.g., fewer women in powerful positions
in government and business) and exhibit the most hostile
sexism. That is, benevolent sexism comes at the
cost of gender inequality—women are protected and
provided for only if they yield power to men—and, in
such societies, women who reject this bargain are
treated with hostility.
In sum, benevolent and hostile sexism are complementary
tools of control, rewarding women for sticking
to traditional roles and punishing those who do
not. If women faced only hostile sexism, they would
be likely to be resentful and rebellious. By “sweetening
the pot” (promising that men will use their greater
power and resources to take care of women), benevolent
sexism punctures women’s resistance to inequality.
In fact, women who endorse benevolently sexist beliefs
are more likely to endorse other gender-traditional
attitudes, including hostile sexism. Benevolent sexism,
by falsely appearing to offer only benefits to women,
induces many women to accept the idea that men
ought to be in charge.
Peter Glick
See also Prejudice; Sexism; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). Ambivalent sexism. In
M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 33, pp. 115–188). San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). The Ambivalent Sexism
Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 491–512.
Vescio, T. K., Gervais, S. J., Snyder, M., & Hoover, A.
(2005). Power and the creation of patronizing
environments: The stereotype-based behaviors of the
powerful and their effects on female performance in
masculine domains. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 88, 658–672.

BENNINGTON COLLEGE STUDY
Definition
The Bennington College study was conducted by sociologist
Theodore Newcomb from 1935 until 1939. The
study examined the attitudes of students attending the
then all-female Bennington College early in the college’s
history; indeed, the study began during the first
year that the college had a senior class. The study is
notable not only for the findings it yielded in relation to
group influence on individual attitudes, but also because
of its methodological significance in being the first
major study to interview the same group of individuals
about their attitudes on multiple occasions across time.
Background and History
The social climate at the time that the study was conducted
was one of change and controversy. Many of
the students came from affluent families with very conservative
political attitudes. The faculty at Bennington
College, however, were predominantly male, social
activists in their 30s with liberal social, political, and
economic attitudes.
Beginning in 1935 with the incoming freshman
class, Newcomb measured the Bennington College
women’s attitudes toward nine social and economic
issues. He then reassessed the women’s attitudes each
year until 1939. Most of the women’s attitudes changed
from conservative to liberal. Newcomb concluded that
the college’s social climate was liberal enough that
students perceived liberal, as opposed to conservative,
attitudes as the social norm, a norm that then became
their reference group.
A few individuals, however, did not change their
attitudes in the liberal direction. Two things seemed to
predict who would and would not change their attitudes.
The first was the degree of involvement of
the student in the college community. Students who
desired more independence from their families and
who wanted to take a more active role in college activities
changed their attitudes more than those students
who desired to maintain close familial ties. The second,
but related, factor was the personality of the individuals
who did not change their attitudes. These
individuals tended to have lower self-esteem, be more
socially insecure, and be more socially isolated.
Importantly, the attitude change observed among the
majority of the Bennington College students was quite
stable. In 1960–1961, Newcomb conducted a follow-up
study with the women who participated in the initial
study. The correlation between the women’s attitudes
at the time of graduation and their attitudes in the early
1960s was .47, suggesting remarkable consistency in
the attitudes over the 20+ year span of time. Additional
follow-up studies up to 50 years later showed similar
patterns of stability in attitudes over time.
Importance and Consequences
The fact that the majority of the women’s attitudes
changed from conservative to liberal over the course of
their 4 years in college, remained remarkably consistent
from that point on suggests that late adolescence is
a key time for change and influence in people’s social
and political attitudes. More importantly, however, the
Bennington College study highlights the influence of
a group on individual attitudes and preferences. The
salience of the liberal group norm at the college, in
combination with students’ willingness to break with
existing beliefs and a desire to assume leadership positions
within the group, facilitated the ease with which
the majority of women changed their attitudes from
conservative to liberal.
See also Attitudes; Reference Group
Further Readings
Robin M. Kowalski
Newcomb, T. (1943). Personality and social change: Attitude
formation in a student community. New York: Dryden.
Newcomb, T., Koenig, K. E., Flacks, R., & Warwick, D. P.
(1967). Persistence and change: Bennington College and
its students after 25 years. New York: Wiley.
BETRAYAL
Definition
Betrayal———113
Betrayal refers to situations in which individuals (victims)
believe that a relationship partner (a perpetrator)
has harmed them by knowingly violating a norm

114———Betrayal
governing their relationship. In this context, norms
refer to expectations about how the relationship partners
should treat one another. Typical betrayals might
involve witnessing a romantic partner flirt with somebody
else at a party or learning that a good friend
has lied to you about something important. Although
betrayals are especially likely to be experienced in
close relationships, they can also be experienced in
more casual relationships. For example, individuals
may feel betrayed when a casual acquaintance spreads
nasty gossip about them.
Norms vary in the degree to which they are generally
accepted in a given culture versus distinctive to a
particular relationship. In 21st-century American culture,
for example, most individuals agree that having
an extramarital affair and lying to one’s partner about
it constitutes a betrayal. In contrast, other norms apply
only within certain specific relationships (e.g., “We
must check in with one another at least once every
three hours”). Victims experience betrayal when they
perceive a norm violation by the perpetrator, regardless
of whether the norm is commonly accepted in the
culture or distinctive to that particular relationship.
The Experience of Betrayal
Severe betrayals are among the most painful experiences
individuals endure during their lifetimes, frequently
resulting in negative emotions such as anger
and/or sadness and in motivations to enact revenge
and/or to avoid the partner. In extreme cases, betrayals
can color all aspects of victims’ lives for an extended
period of time, leaving them in a state of pain, confusion,
and uncertainty. Even in more mild cases, betrayals
are upsetting, frequently causing victims to
experience impulses toward grudge and retaliation.
As a consequence of its negative effects on victims,
betrayals create an interpersonal debt wherein the perpetrator
owes some sort of compensation to repair the
damage. Imagine that Linda and James are involved
in a happy romantic relationship until James lies to
Linda about something important. This betrayal temporarily
alters the dynamics in their relationship:
Linda becomes hurt and angry; James may well experience
guilt and remorse. Both partners experience a
sense that James has the primary responsibility to get
the relationship back on track. In a sense, James owes
Linda something, perhaps acknowledging the responsibility
to “make it up” to her with gifts or other considerate
gestures.
The situation is complicated, however, by perpetrators’
and victims’ tendencies to experience betrayal incidents
from strikingly different perspectives. In a process
termed the empathy gap, both the victim and the perpetrator
engage in self-serving distortions of perspective
that allow them to view themselves in the most positive
light. Relative to perpetrators, victims regard perpetrator
behavior as more arbitrary, incomprehensible, and gratuitous;
experience greater distress; describe the transgression
as more severe; attribute responsibility more to
the perpetrator than to the self; and report that the transgression
exerted more damaging and enduring effects
on the relationship. Perpetrators experience greater guilt
than victims do but also tend to regard victims’ reactions
as somewhat excessive and out of line with the magnitude
of the transgression.
Responding to Betrayal
Victims of betrayal are faced with a difficult decision:
to act on the basis of retaliatory impulses or to overcome
them in favor of more forgiving responses. Although
forgiveness generally predicts enhanced relationship
and personal well-being, it is typically incompatible
with victims’ gut-level impulses. In addition, forgiveness
cancels the interpersonal debts created by the
betrayal, which is likely to benefit the relationship but
also to strip the victim of a privileged status.
Research has identified many factors that promote
victims’ willingness to forgive betrayals. For example,
certain personality characteristics of the victim (e.g.,
empathy, self-control, lack of entitlement) predict tendencies
toward forgiveness. Second, certain properties
of the betrayal event itself (e.g., low severity, minimal
implication that the perpetrator disrespects the victim,
the victim’s belief that the betrayal was unintentional
or uncontrollable) seem to make forgiveness easier.
Third, certain characteristics of the perpetrator–victim
relationship (e.g., trust in and commitment toward the
perpetrator) predict the willingness to forgive betrayals.
Finally, forgiveness is more likely if the perpetrator
accepts responsibility for the betrayal by sincerely
apologizing and making genuine efforts to atone.
A Benefit of Betrayal
Although relationships are generally better off to the
degree that they have a smaller rather than a greater
number of betrayal incidents, there is one substantial
relationship benefit that can emerge from the

experience of betrayal: Betrayals, and both partners’
behaviors in response to them, provide excellent opportunities
to evaluate the partner’s motivations toward
the self.
Because betrayals tend to pit the victim’s and the
perpetrator’s motives against one another, they frequently
provide circumstances in which individuals
can evaluate the partner’s willingness to work toward
the betterment of the relationship. For example, if a
perpetrator of a betrayal is clearly distraught by the
pain caused to the victim and atones sincerely, the victim
might actually become more confident in the relationship
than before the betrayal was perpetrated.
Similarly, if the victim forgives the betrayal despite
having every right to hold a grudge, the perpetrator
learns valuable information about the victim’s devotion
to the relationship. In short, although betrayals are
frequently harmful to relationships, they can sometimes
provide the opportunity to strengthen them.
Eli J. Finkel
See also Forgiveness; Interdependence Theory; Norms,
Prescriptive and Descriptive
Further Readings
Rusbult, C. E., Kumashiro, M., Finkel, E. J., & Wildschut, T.
(2002). The war of the roses: An interdependence analysis
of betrayal and forgiveness. In P. Noller & J. A. Feeney
(Eds.), Understanding marriage: Developments in the
study of couple interaction (pp. 251–281). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Worthington, E. L. (2005). Handbook of forgiveness.
New York: Routledge.
BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS
Definition
The Big Five personality traits are the most basic
dimensions that shape the structure of human personality
and underlie the regularities in people’s thinking,
feeling, and behavior. The Big Five are dimensional,
which means that each of them describes a continuum
between two extreme poles. All people, regardless of
gender, age, or culture, share the same basic personality
traits, but people differ in their relative standing
on each of the traits. The individual Big Five are
Big Five Personality Traits———115
Neuroticism (vs. Emotional Stability), Extraversion
(or Surgency), Openness to Experience (also called
Culture or Intellect), Agreeableness (vs. Antagonism),
and Conscientiousness. As a memory aid, note that the
first letters can be rearranged to spell OCEAN, a term
that suggests the vast scope of this model in encompassing
personality traits.
The Big Five Dimensions
Personality is structured hierarchically; at the broadest
or domain level are the Big Five, and below them, at a
lower level of generality, are narrower traits or facets.
Thus, each of the Big Five dimensions is a combination
of several distinct but closely related traits or
characteristics. For example, most people who like to
cooperate with others are also more honest and compassionate.
Although there are individual exceptions
to this rule, the associations among these characteristics
in the general population are strong enough to
justify combining them under the broader category
of Agreeableness. When specific facets are formally
included in a Big Five model, the term Five-Factor
model is commonly used to describe the hierarchy.
People who score high on Neuroticism are emotionally
sensitive; they become upset easily and frequently
experience negative emotions. Individual
facets include sadness, anger, anxiety/worry, selfconsciousness,
vulnerability to stress, and a tendency
to act impulsively. People who score low on Neuroticism
are emotionally stable and calm. Even under stressful
conditions, they remain confident and experience few
negative emotions.
Highly extraverted people are warm, talkative, and
generally like to be around others. They are assertive,
active and full of energy, cheerful and high in positive
affect, and they prefer stimulating environments.
Introverted people, in contrast, like to be alone or with
a few close friends. They rarely want to lead others.
They are reserved and serious, value their independence,
and prefer quiet environments.
People who score high on Openness to Experience
are curious, imaginative, have broad interests, and easily
embrace unconventional ideas and values. Other
facets include sensitivity to aesthetic experiences and
fantasy, as well as a rich emotional life. People who are
low in Openness have a narrower set of interests and are
more conventional in their outlook and behavior. They
are closed to new ideas, actions, and value or belief systems.
They also experience their emotions less intensely.

116———Big Five Personality Traits
Highly agreeable people are altruistic, cooperative,
compassionate, and trust the good intentions of others.
The facets of modesty and straightforwardness are
associated with Agreeableness as well. Disagreeable
people, in contrast, tend to be characterized by antagonism,
skepticism, and a competitive rather than cooperative
take on life.
Finally, people who score high on Conscientiousness
strive to achieve high standards and are self-disciplined,
orderly, deliberate, and dutiful. Low-conscientious persons
rarely plan ahead. They may be careless and disorganized
in personal matters, and they often fail to
establish a well-defined set of life goals.
Although the Big Five are most easily characterized
by their extreme poles, it is important to keep in
mind that relatively few people are at the extremes.
Most people are around the middle of the continuum.
Theoretical Perspectives
The American trait approach to personality, from
which the Big Five were derived, originated in the
1930s. Whereas previous approaches to personality
research tied their inquiries to theoretical preconceptions,
the trait approach focused on data, especially on
the analysis of person-descriptive adjectives found in
common speech. Words like shy, irritable, or inquisitive
are part of every natural language and illustrate
the typical patterns of how people think and talk about
themselves and others. The trait approach aims to
identify the broad dimensions underlying such everyday
personality descriptions. Because of its focus on
language analysis, this line of research is also called
the lexical approach.
Today, there is a wide range of theoretical perspectives
regarding Big Five research. Researchers in the
lexical tradition such as Lewis R. Goldberg and Gerard
Saucier have been content to describe the structure of
personality traits without attempting to explain their
causes or consequences. Others have focused on relatively
specific aspects of the Big Five. Interpersonal
researchers such as Jerry S. Wiggins examined the
relationship patterns that are associated with certain
personality characteristics central to social interactions.
Based on increasing evidence for a genetic basis
of the Big Five, David M. Buss and other evolutionary
psychologists have studied the implications of certain
trait configurations for reproduction and survival.
The Five-Factor Theory (FFT) postulated by Robert
R. McCrae, Paul T. Costa, Jr., is a more comprehensive
theoretical account that addresses the structure of the
personality system as well as its causal underpinnings
and real-life consequences. According to FFT, personality
traits are genetically based biological dispositions.
Depending on our relative standing on these
basic tendencies and in interaction with our individual
environment, we develop specific patterns of thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors (also referred to as characteristic
adaptations) that in turn influence our objective
biography. Although our standing on the five basic tendencies
is thought to remain generally stable over time,
characteristic adaptations may change. For example,
a woman who is high in Neuroticism (basic tendency)
may develop coping strategies (characteristic adaptations)
that help her deal with stressful situations, and
this allows her to take on a challenging new job (objective
biography). Nevertheless, she is still high in
Neuroticism and remains more emotionally sensitive
than the average person.
Measurement
The Big Five are commonly measured by asking
people to describe themselves on questionnaires. Some
measures are simply lists of person-descriptive words
(e.g., “talkative”), but such adjective lists tend to be
ambiguous because of their lack of interpretive context.
Whole sentences (e.g., “I enjoy parties with lots
of people”) provide a better assessment of personality.
As an alternative to such self-reports, relatives, friends,
or other people who know a person very well may provide
observer ratings for this person’s personality.
A comprehensive assessment of personality is
provided by the NEO Personality Inventory–Revised
(NEO PI–R). Based on people’s agreement with 240
short sentences, the NEO PI–R not only provides
scores for the five broad domains but also scores for
six subordinate dimensions (or facets) within each of
the Big Five.
Personality Development
Across the Life Span
From early infancy, children show individual differences
in general activity or irritability. These biologically
based tendencies (also referred to as temperament)
evolve into differentiated personality traits over the
course of childhood. The familiar Big Five structure was
found in children as young as elementary school level
and appears to be firmly established by adolescence.

In adolescence and early adulthood, personality
changes in predictable ways. On average, people become
less neurotic and extraverted and more agreeable and
conscientious. Openness peaks in young adulthood and
declines thereafter. After the age of 30, personality
remains comparatively stable, although small changes
continue in these same directions.
Although average levels of adult personality remain
relatively stable, individual changes are of course possible.
Depressive episodes, for example, are associated
with an increase in Neuroticism. With the onset
of dementia, people become more distress prone or
higher in Neuroticism and less conscientious. In comparison
to personality changes related to psychological
disorders, changes in response to significant life
events such as marriage or divorce are usually small
and not very consistent across different studies.
Real-Life Outcomes
Over the years, the Big Five have been linked to a wide
range of relevant outcomes. To give just a few examples,
people who score high in Neuroticism cope more poorly
with stressors and are more likely to be diagnosed with
psychiatric disorders; extraverted people have a higher
number of romantic partners and excel in sales and management
positions; open individuals do well in creative
professions; low Agreeableness is associated with juvenile
delinquency; and high Conscientiousness is related
to healthy behaviors and greater longevity—arguably
the most important “outcome” of all.
When it comes to evaluating the real-life implications
of the Big Five, it is important to examine the full
profile of a person’s personality instead of focusing only
on individual traits. For instance, people who score high
in Neuroticism are more likely to abuse drugs if they are
also low in Conscientiousness, and people with clinical
depression have less chance of recovery if they are not
only high in Neuroticism but also low in Extraversion.
The wide range of real-life implications of the Big
Five traits illustrates that understanding the basic structures
that underlie a person’s personality is not merely
an academic exercise but highly relevant for helping
clinical psychologists, personnel recruiters, teachers,
or health care workers adjust their strategies to the
individual needs and abilities of their clients.
Corinna E. Löckenhoff
Paul T. Costa, Jr.
See also Agreeableness; Extraversion; Individual Differences;
Neuroticism; Traits
Further Readings
Digman, J. M. (1990). Personality structure: Emergence of
the Five-Factor Model. Annual Review of Psychology,
41, 417–440.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (2003). Personality in
adulthood: A Five-Factor Theory perspective (2nd ed.).
New York: Guilford Press.
Piedmont, R. (1998). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory
(NEO PI-R). New York: Plenum.
BINGE EATING
Definition
Binge eating is eating a large amount of food in a
small amount of time. It is distinguished from overeating
because it is accompanied by a feeling of a loss of
self-control while eating. The process of the binge is
engrossing, pleasant, and can have a frantic quality. At
some point the bingeing ends, and the binger is usually
upset, embarrassed, and full of negative thoughts
and feelings about his or behavior and self.
Analysis
Binge Eating———117
Binge eating is significantly more common among
women, although a small number of men engage in it
as well (often as part of a social group such as an athletic
team where weight is an issue). Binge eating is
often done in private, although it can happen as part of
a small social group.
Binge eating is a main component in two recognized
psychological disorders: bulimia nervosa and
binge eating disorder. The behavioral pattern of binge
eating, however, is essentially a large exaggeration of
a normal phenomenon. It is typical for Americans to
eat large amounts of calories at special events, holidays,
parties, and so on. This is often followed by dieting,
increased exercise and activity levels, and a conscious
decision to diet or otherwise reduce weight and food
intake. Occasional food binges are common enough
among men and women, but repeated binge eating,
often done alone and with a loss of control, followed
by increased depression, lowered self-esteem, and

118———Binge Eating
other dark thoughts are considered to be a sign of a
significant problem.
People who are concerned about their body image,
their weight, and their physical appearance and attractiveness
are most likely to engage in binge eating.
This is probably because these kinds of psychological
concerns lead to dieting. Successful dieting is very
difficult, and there are numerous physiological and
neurological mechanisms that can act powerfully to
maintain body weight. Dieters are often very hungry,
smells and tastes improve in their urgency, and foodrelated
thoughts can dominate the dieter’s day. If a
dieter engages in what is known as “black and white
thinking,” with a strong line drawn between “good”
and “bad” foods, between “healthy” and “unhealthy”
eating, then any small falling off of a diet, even a bite
or two of a forbidden food becomes a significant and
total failure. This small failing has the effect of disinhibiting
eating—when a person has crossed the line
into forbidden territory, the next bad behavior is not
much more of an offense. With this kind of thinking,
bingeing can spiral out of control. When it ends, the
binger is left with self-blame, guilt, and unhappiness.
This in turns leads to renewed commitment to dieting,
exercise, and lowering caloric intake. This in turn sets
up the next bingeing episode.
The clinical evidence for this cycle is excellent and
is much the same for people who have trouble controlling
their drinking, gambling, smoking and other drug
taking, or sexual appetites. The most important difference
between binge eating and binge drinking or gambling,
sexual binges, or drug addictions is that eating is
a normal and essential part of life, and one cannot forswear
eating. This makes the careful management of
eating, allowing some eating—but not too much—
more important, and self-control becomes especially
difficult. Stress, life challenges, or simply depletion
from working on other problems all make self-control
more difficult, and this can increase the probability of
setting of a binge.
Binge eating is also associated with a range of other
variables associated with poor psychological functioning,
including anxiety, low self-esteem, depression,
perfectionism, and so on. All of these are indicators of
difficulty with functioning in life, particularly in the
area of self-control. There is evidence that binge eaters
are people who continually have troubles with selfcontrol,
either as a personality trait or because they
experience life stress or other difficulties that deplete
their ability to manage their eating. Binge eating, like
other addictive behaviors, may be a way to avoid paying
attention to the self. Because binge eating allows a
person to narrowly focus on a pleasant and (temporarily)
rewarding activity, binge eating can shut out competing,
more painful awareness of failings, unfulfilled
desires, and personal shortcomings.
Binge eating is not entirely new, but the high rates
of binge eating—particularly among adolescent
women—do seem to be a fact of the past few decades.
This has been traced to social changes that allowed
increased access to food, a connection of thinness to
attractiveness and high social class among women,
and related facts of modern life. There is little evidence
that bingeing, followed by shame, guilt, and
resolutions to diet (or more rarely, vomiting), existed
in any high numbers before the 1970s.
Binge eating seems to run in social groups, such
as cheerleading squads, men’s and women’s athletic
teams, dance camps, and sororities. There is evidence
that binge eating is a behavior that is passed among
friends. Sorority members seem to pick it up from their
friends. When entering a group with social norms that
favor binge eating, women have been shown to increase
their binge eating levels to match those of their friends.
Conversely, when women with higher rates of binge
eating join a friendship group with lower rates of binge
eating, their own binge eating tends to go down. Men
on athletic teams where weight is an important determinant
of competitiveness (e.g., wrestling, lightweight
crew) often acquire binge eating and purging as part of
their repertoire. This cycle might become part of their
week, with dieting leading up to the weigh-in day, followed
by binge eating. Even though this cycle becomes
a part of the week, it is rarely accompanied by shame,
guilt, or feelings of being out of control. When binge
eating is a part of athletics, there is often little or no
affective roller coaster, and the binge eating often ends
with the competitive season.
Binge eating is not unusual and is quite common
among adolescent and college-age women. Many
women seek treatment when binge eating gets out of
control and when it is accompanied by significant and
painful feelings of anxiety, depression, shame, and
guilt. But the underlying pattern of binge eating, followed
by regret and a determination to “be good” in
the future, is a common and normal phenomenon. It is
only when it becomes frequent and uncontrollable that
it becomes a problem.
Chris Crandall

See also Bulimia; Depression; Guilt; Self-Regulation; Shame
Further Readings
Crandall, C. S. (1988). Social contagion of binge eating.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 588–598.
Fairburn, C. G., & Wilson, G. T. (1996). Binge eating: Nature,
assessment, and treatment. New York: Guilford Press.
Heatherton, T. F., & Baumiester, R. F. (1991). Binge eating
as an escape from self-awareness. Psychological Bulletin,
110, 86–108.
Striegel-Moore, R. H., Silberstein, L. R., & Rodin, J. (1986).
Toward an understanding of risk factors for bulimia.
American Psychologist, 41, 246–263.
BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL MODEL
Definition
The term biopsychosocial model refers to a type of
theory in which biological, psychological, and social
psychological processes are combined or integrated to
explain behaviors in ways that account for how these
different types of processes combine or influence a
type of behavior.
Background
Beginning in the 1990s, Jim Blascovich and colleagues
developed and expanded a biopsychosocial
model of challenge and threat motivational processes.
In motivated performance situations, ones that are
important to the individual, challenge or threat may
occur. Challenge results when the individual assesses,
consciously or unconsciously, that his or her resources
(e.g., abilities, social support) meet or exceed the
demands of the situation (e.g., required effort, danger),
and threat results when the individual assesses that the
demands of the situation exceed his or her resources.
To measure challenge and threat, Blascovich and
colleagues use cardiovascular (i.e., heart-related)
responses, including how hard a person’s heart is beating
(specifically, how strongly the main pumping chambers
are contracting); how much a person’s arteries are
opening or closing; and how much blood is being
pumped by the heart through the arteries to the body. In
several studies, these investigators determined that when
subjects were challenged by a task, their hearts would
Biopsychosocial Model———119
beat harder, their arteries would dilate, and more blood
would be pumped by the heart throughout the body.
The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat
has proven useful in at least two major ways. First,
within basic research, the model allows examination
of many different social psychological phenomena
via their motivational implications. Second, within
applied social psychological research, the model has
proven valuable for predicting future performance of
various activities in which individuals are motivated
to engage.
Basic Research
The rationale for using the biopsychosocial model and
its associated cardiovascular measures is based on a
simple idea. Specifically, if a challenge or threat prediction
can be hypothesized or deduced from a specific
social psychological theory, then challenge and
threat measures (i.e., the cardiovascular patterns associated
with challenge and threat) can be used to test
the specific social psychological theory. Quite a variety
of social psychological theories have been tested
in this way.
For example, many attitude theories suggest that
having an attitude (e.g., a like or dislike for something)
helps people make decisions in everyday life, such as
what to buy in a grocery store. In other words, attitudes
are functional. If these theories are correct, then individuals
with relevant attitudes should find decision
making more challenging than would individuals
without relevant attitudes. In one study, investigators
induced research participants’ attitudes toward abstract
paintings by having them say out loud how much they
liked or disliked each of a set of 15 abstract paintings
they had never seen before that was repeatedly shown
to them. Later, investigators asked these same participants
to decide quickly which of two paintings they
liked more in each of many slides of randomly paired
abstract paintings. For half the participants, the paintings
were drawn from the ones that they had expressed
their attitudes toward in the first part of the experiment.
For the other half, the participants had never seen the
paintings before. All the while, their cardiovascular
response patterns associated with challenge and threat
were recorded. In line with both attitude functionality
theory and the biopsychosocial model, participants in
the first condition exhibited the challenge pattern of
cardiovascular responses, and participants in the second
condition exhibited the threat pattern.

120———Blaming the Victim
Another example involves social comparison theory.
When individuals are unsure about how well they
are performing, they often socially compare themselves
to others to gauge or estimate how they perform compared
to others. Sometimes this results in what is called
“downward social comparison,” that is, when the other’s
performance is worse than one’s own. Sometimes, it
results in “upward social comparison,” that is, when
the other’s performance is better than one’s own.
Researchers reasoned that if an individual was performing
and comparing with a downward comparison
other, challenge should result and that if an individual
was performing and comparing with an upward comparison
others, threat should result. Using the cardiovascular
markers, these hypotheses were confirmed
by the researchers.
Many social psychologists have studied how people
interact with stigmatized others; more specifically how
nonstigmatized individuals interact with members of
stigmatized groups. A stigmatized group is one that is
devalued in a society. For example, in the United States,
race, physical deformities, and low socioeconomic status,
among other characteristics, can cause an individual
to be identified as a member of a stigmatized group.
For more than 40 years, stigma researchers hypothesized
that interactions with members of stigmatized
groups were threatening to nonstigmatized individuals.
However, until the biopsychosocial model was developed
and its cardiovascular markers validated, little
evidence existed to support this hypothesis. Recently,
researchers have conducted many experiments in which
nonstigmatized and stigmatized individuals worked
with each other on a cooperative task; they found that
the cardiovascular markers confirmed the stigma threat
notion. Furthermore, threat occurred whether the interactant
was stigmatized because of disfigurement, race,
socioeconomic status, speech accent, and so on.
Applied Research
Recently, researchers have conducted studies to determine
whether challenge and threat theory and its associated
cardiovascular patterns could be used to predict
how well people would perform on a future task.
Their rationale was that if individuals were required
to give a speech about how they would perform in a
critical situation, the cardiovascular markers of challenge
and threat would predict actual performance
in the future during the type of critical situation discussed
in the speech.
These researchers focused on baseball. University
varsity baseball and softball players each gave two
3-minute speeches, one about friendship (a control
speech) and one about how they would approach a critical
hitting situation (the critical or predictor speech).
Controlling for the cardiovascular responses during the
control speech, the cardiovascular challenge/threat
index that occurred during the performance-relevant
speech reliably predicted major outcome measures of
offensive baseball performance (runs created, batting
averages, etc.). Hence, what was important to predict
baseball performance was not how threatening participants
experienced speech giving in a psychology laboratory
but the relevance of the speech to the predicted
task.
Summary
The biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat is
one being continuously refined and used for basic and
applied research purposes in social psychology. Its
demonstrated valid physiological (i.e., cardiovascular)
measurement techniques to assess whether an individual
is experiencing challenge or threat has proven
valuable for both of these research approaches.
Jim Blascovich
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Motivated Cognition;
Motivated Reasoning; Social Psychophysiology
Further Readings
Blascovich, J., & Mendes, W. B. (2000). Challenge and threat
appraisals: The role of affective cues. In J. Forgas (Ed.),
Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition
(pp. 59–82). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Blascovich, J., Mendes, W. B., Hunter, S. B., & Lickel, B., &
Kowai-Bell, N. (2001). Perceiver threat in social
interactions with stigmatized others. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 253–267.
BLAMING THE VICTIM
Definition
A victim is a person who is harmed by the actions
of another person or as the result of circumstance.
Blaming the victim occurs when people hold the victim

esponsible for his or her suffering. When people blame
the victim, they attribute the cause of the victim’s suffering
to the behaviors or characteristics of the victim,
instead of attributing the cause to a perpetrator or situational
factors.
Why People Blame Victims
Ironically, victim blame often stems from a desire to
see the world as a just and fair place where people get
what they deserve. This belief in a just world lets
people confront the world as though it were stable and
orderly. If people did not believe in a just world, it
would be difficult to commit themselves to pursuing
long range goals or even to getting out of bed in the
morning! Because believing in a just world is so adaptive,
people are very reluctant to give up this belief.
The “problem” with victims, then, is that they violate
people’s belief that the world is just and fair. One way
to restore this threat to their belief system is for people
to convince themselves that the victims actually
deserved their fate. By derogating victims and blaming
them for their negative outcomes, people can maintain
the belief that the world is a fair place after all.
One psychological benefit of blaming victims lies
in the fact that it lets people convince themselves that
they could never be subject to the same fate as the victim.
When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in
August 2005, leaving many residents of New Orleans
trapped for days in miserable conditions inside the
Superdome, many people responded by saying that the
victims’ fate was their own fault for not evacuating. In
actuality, many of the people trapped in the Superdome
had no access to transportation out of the city and had
no money to afford a place to go. Nevertheless, by
blaming the hurricane victims for their own suffering,
people are able to maintain their belief that the world
is fair and just. Ultimately, blaming victims allows
people to maintain their own sense of control. It lets
them think, “That could never have happened to me,
because I would have done things differently.”
Evidence
In one enlightening study of victim blame, participants
were given descriptions of a series of events that took
place between a young woman and a man during a date.
In some versions of the study, participants read that the
date ended with the man raping the woman. In other
Blaming the Victim———121
versions, the date ended with the man taking the
woman home (and not raping her). When participants
rated the behaviors of the woman, they were much
more likely to rate her behavior as foolhardy and irresponsible
if the date ended in rape than if it did not.
That is, the exact same behaviors were seen in a different
light depending on the outcome of those behaviors.
This shows how when people are faced with injustice,
it can motivate people to find fault with the victim’s
behavior even though they would not find fault with
those same behaviors under other circumstances.
Characteristics of the victim can influence how
much people blame victims. People are more likely to
blame respectable victims than less respectable victims
because the fate of the former seems more unjust and
increases the need for people to restore their sense of
justice through victim blame. For example, one study
examined reactions to rape victims who were virgins,
married, or divorced. Women who were virgins or married
were more likely to be blamed for the rape than
women who were divorcées. The knowledge that innocent,
respectable females can be raped is threatening to
people’s beliefs that the world is just, which leads
people to reduce the threat by blaming the victims.
Numerous other factors can influence how much
blame people assign to victims. First, people with rightwing,
conservative political ideologies are more likely
to blame victims, especially victims of poverty and
racial discrimination, while people with more left-wing,
liberal ideologies are more likely to blame situational
and environmental factors. Second, people who are
angry or upset by previous events unrelated to the victim’s
fate are more likely to blame victims. Negative
emotions can carry over into other domains, and people
can misinterpret their anger and anxiety as being
caused by the victims’ fate, which leads them to blame
the victims more strongly. Finally, some individuals
are more committed than others to the belief in a just
world. People who strongly endorse the belief that the
world is a fair place are more likely to be threatened
when they witness the suffering of innocent victims,
which in turn leads them to blame the victims.
Reducing Victim Blame
There are several ways to reduce victim blame. If
people have immediate and easy solutions to alleviate
the suffering of victims, they are less likely to blame
those victims. Helping victims allows people to restore
the threat to their belief in a just world, reducing the

122———Bobo Doll Studies
need to restore the threat via victim blame. However,
sometimes there are no easy and immediate solutions
to alleviating victim’s suffering. Once people have
jumped to the conclusion that a victim is responsible,
it is harder to convince them to aid the victims. It is
also possible to reduce victim blame by encouraging
people to empathize with victims. If people are able to
take the perspective of the victims or can easily imagine
being in the victim’s shoes, they are less likely to
blame the victim. Finally, most people feel that it is not
really fair to blame innocent people for their suffering.
Many times people blame victims without being consciously
aware of what they are doing. Giving people
conscious reminders that victim blame is socially unacceptable
can encourage them to withhold from blaming
the victim.
See also Attributions; Beliefs; Control; Ideology
Further Readings
Laurie T. O’Brien
Lerner, M. J., & Goldberg, J. H. (1999). When do decent
people blame victims? The differing effects of the
explicit/rational and implicit/experiential cognitive
systems. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process
theories in social psychology (pp. 627–640). New York:
Guilford Press.
Ryan, W. (1971). Blaming the victim. New York: Random
House.
BOBO DOLL STUDIES
Definition
Albert Bandura conducted the Bobo doll studies in the
1960s to investigate whether children could learn new
behaviors through observation. The descriptive name of
these studies comes from an inflatable child’s toy, a
“Bobo doll,” that had a weighted bottom which allowed
it to be repeatedly knocked over and yet bob back up.
Children who observed an adult kicking, punching, or
otherwise attacking the Bobo doll were more likely to
later act in the very same way against the doll than were
children who had observed nonviolent play or no play
at all. Variations of the original study produced similar
findings, even when a live clown was used in place of a
doll. Collective findings from the Bobo doll studies
aided Bandura in the development of social learning
theory.
Study Description
Nursery school children were divided into three similar
groups. Children in two of the groups were taken
individually by an experimenter into a room where
they could play with a variety of toys. The experimenter
also escorted an adult into a corner of the same
room to play with another set of toys. At this point, the
children observed one of two things. Children in one
group saw the adult in the corner playing quietly with
a set of Tinker toys. However, children in the other
group saw the adult begin to play with the Tinker toys,
but then begin behaving aggressively toward the Bobo
doll. This aggressive play included punching the doll
in the nose, picking up a mallet and pounding the doll,
and tossing the doll in the air. Although each child was
in a position to observe this entire situation, no direct
contact existed between the adult and the child.
After 10 minutes, the experimenter led the child into
another room. This phase of the study also included
children from a third group who had not observed an
adult in either of the previous play conditions. After
experiencing a frustrating situation (not being allowed
to play with nicer toys), the child was led into yet
another room to play while the experimenter completed
paperwork nearby. The room contained toys that could
be played with violently (such as dart guns), nonviolent
toys (such as dolls and toy trucks), and a Bobo doll.
Children who had observed the adult playing with
the Bobo doll in an aggressive manner were more likely
to act aggressively toward the doll than were children
who had watched the adult playing nonaggressively.
However, children who had viewed nonaggressive play
were more likely to later play peacefully than even
those children who had not observed any modeled play.
Thus, it was demonstrated that children could learn
both good and bad behaviors in the absence of punishment
or reward simply by observing others modeling
those behaviors.
See also Modeling of Behavior; Social Learning
Further Readings
L. Brooke Bennett
Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of
aggression through imitation of aggressive models.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575–582.

BOGUS PIPELINE
Definition
If you ask a person about their sexual activity, illicit
drug use, or prejudices against certain others, you may
not get a straight answer. Embarrassment, fear of legal
repercussions, or a simple desire to look good can create
distortions in responses to such questions. Social
psychologists have developed many research techniques
to get more accurate responses to survey questions.
Contemporary implicit measurement techniques,
such as the Implicit Association Test, use computer
assessment of millisecond-level differences in
response time to sidestep respondents’ strategic efforts
at self-presentation. Much earlier, social psychologists
used a more primitive method. The bogus pipeline
technique, pioneered in the early 1970s, was based on
the idea that people might give truer responses if they
feared getting caught in the act of lying. The term itself
refers to a purported “pipeline to the soul” that happens
to be faked.
The bogus pipeline involved an elaborately theatrical
laboratory procedure. The researcher staged a ruse
to convince the respondent that a newly developed lie
detector was capable of providing highly accurate feedback
on the truthfulness of any answer to a survey question.
As a result, the respondent might answer truthfully
to embarrassing questions because the prospect of
being caught in a lie feels worse than any potential
embarrassment. Of course, error-free lie detectors do
not exist today, and they certainly did not exist in the
1970s. A key component of the bogus pipeline procedure,
therefore, was to convince respondents that the
impressive-looking machine that they were being wired
into was truly effective at lie detection. This was
accomplished by having respondents first complete a
supposedly anonymous survey in another lab room,
during which their answers were surreptitiously
recorded. Later, when wired into the lie detector (which
did not actually work), a hidden researcher manipulated
the fake machine to produce the “correct” responses as
the respondent was asked the same questions as earlier.
Once respondents had been “convinced” that the lie
detector worked as advertised, the main experiment
would proceed, with the main survey questions of interest
now posed.
The bogus pipeline works. Its effectiveness was
verified across many experiments in which responses
collected using the bogus pipeline were compared
directly to responses collected using the more traditional
“paper-and-pencil” survey method. A study from
the early 1970s, for example, revealed racial prejudice
to be more common among respondents tested using
the bogus pipeline than with paper and pencils. In the
1980s, the technique was widely used to gauge illicit
drug use among young adults. Not surprisingly, however,
some condemned the procedure on the grounds
that its elaborate deception was unethical, that it was
wrong to lie to people to get better survey responses.
Largely supplanted today by more effective implicit
measurement techniques (one of which goes by the
name bona fide pipeline), simpler versions of the technique
are nevertheless still used on occasion to shed
light on theoretical problems involving implicit versus
explicit cognition.
Neal J. Roese
Rachel Smallman
See also Deception (Methodological Technique); Implicit
Association Test; Research Methods; Self-Presentation;
Social Desirability Bias
Further Readings
Plant, E. A., Devine, P. G., & Brazy, P. B. (2003). The bogus
pipeline and motivations to respond without prejudice:
Revisiting the fading and faking of racial prejudice.
Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 6, 187–200.
Roese, N. J., & Jamieson, D. W. (1993). Twenty years of
bogus pipeline research: A critical review and metaanalysis.
Psychological Bulletin, 114, 363–375.
BRAINSTORMING
Definition
Brainstorming———123
Brainstorming is a widely used method to stimulate
creativity in problem solving. In a structured session,
people (usually in a group) generate as many creative
ideas as possible. Social psychologists have mainly
studied whether it is more effective to brainstorm in a
group or alone, and have come to the counterintuitive
conclusion that brainstorming often is better done alone.
Underlying the brainstorming procedure are two
basic principles. First, people are encouraged to come
up with as many ideas as possible, because the more

124———Brainwashing
ideas, the more likely it is that good ideas are among
them (“quantity breeds quality”). Second, although
eventually the quality of ideas should be evaluated,
idea generation and evaluation are strictly separated
(“deferment of judgment”), because fear of negative
evaluation interferes with people’s creativity. There is
evidence for both principles: Quantity and quality of
ideas are positively related, and fear of evaluation is
bad for idea quality.
Brainstorming is usually done in groups, and much
research has studied the effectiveness of group brainstorming.
These studies have consistently revealed that
people generate more ideas and better ideas when they
brainstorm individually as compared to when they
brainstorm in a group. In these studies, the number of
ideas generated by a group is compared to the number
of ideas of the same number of people who brainstorm
individually. Counting duplicate ideas (ideas generated
by more than one person) only once, results
show that N individuals generate more ideas than an
N-person group. The difference is quite large and
increases with group size.
One major factor that causes the so-called productivity
loss of groups is production blocking: Group
members have to wait for their turns to express ideas,
because only one person can speak at any given time.
Thus, group members block each other’s contributions,
which hampers their idea generation.
At the same time, people generally think that their
creativity is enhanced in a group and feel that overhearing
others’ ideas is stimulating. And in fact, this
also is true: There is evidence that listening to others
generating ideas helps one’s own idea generation.
However, production blocking completely overrides
these positive effects in normal brainstorming sessions.
If ideas are not articulated aloud but are shared
on pieces of paper (brainwriting) or through computers
(electronic brainstorming), production blocking
can be eliminated. Indeed, groups can be more productive
than individuals when ideas are exchanged on
written notes or through computers, rather than articulated
aloud.
Bernard A. Nijstad
See also Creativity; Group Performance and Productivity
Further Readings
Paulus, P. B., Dugosh, K. L., Dzindolet, M. T., Coskun, H., &
Putman, V. L. (2002). Social and cognitive influences in
group brainstorming: Predicting production gains and
losses. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European
review of social psychology (Vol. 12, pp. 299–325).
Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Stroebe, W., & Diehl, M. (1994). Why groups are less
effective than their members: On productivity losses in
idea-generating groups. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone
(Eds.), European review of social psychology (Vol. 5,
pp. 271–303). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
BRAINWASHING
Definition
Brainwashing is a term that was adopted by the press
to describe the indoctrination of U.S. prisoners of war
(POWs) during the Korean War. Social scientists now
recognize brainwashing as a form of severe indoctrination
marked by physical and psychological stress,
intense social pressure, and a variety of persuasion
techniques. This form of intense indoctrination usually
promotes some particular form of political or religious
doctrine, often entailing costly sacrifices by adherents.
History
Modern social scientists became concerned with brainwashing
when American POWs during the Korean War
were subjected to systematic persuasive techniques by
their captors. Following this indoctrination, some of
these POWs did, in fact, cooperate with the enemy, at
least superficially. Such prisoners praised their captors
or made hard-to-believe confessions about participating
in various war atrocities. The brainwashing procedures
directed against American POWs in Korea were modeled
upon indoctrination procedures used by Chinese
revolutionary forces when “educating” their own political
cadres. In point of fact, however, at the end of hostilities
in Korea, only a handful of these POWs actually
elected to refuse repatriation to the United States. When
one considers that several thousand American soldiers
were exposed to these techniques, this low rate of
refusal indicates that the long-term persuasive results
from these early procedures were meager. Beginning in
the 1970s however, shocking events—including series
of group suicides among the members of groups such
as the Heaven’s Gate cult and the Peoples Temple
(where over 900 people perished)—established that
group indoctrination could induce extremely costly

ehavior from group members. In light of these events,
social scientists took renewed interest in extreme forms
of systematic indoctrination.
Procedures and Analysis
According to most experts, the intense indoctrination
associated with the term brainwashing unfolds in a
series of stages. The earliest stage entails strong forms
of psychological and physical stress. Here, the indoctrinee,
or recruit, is almost always sequestered in a retreat
or a training center away from their normal friends,
coworkers, and family, where they are surrounded
instead by members of the indoctrinating group and
other indoctrinees. Here prolonged sleep deprivation is
extremely common, as are changes in diet and pattern
of dress. Public self-criticism is generally encouraged
often under the guise of self-analysis. The recruit’s time
is carefully regimented and filled with a multitude of
activities most often related to, and advocating, an
unfamiliar, complex doctrine. This advocacy can take
the form of lectures, readings, and other group activities.
This initial stage can be as short as a few days but
also can extend for weeks. It is designed to evoke such
emotions as fear, guilt, exhaustion, and confusion on
the part of the recruit.
This introductory stage segues subtly into the second
stage of indoctrination in which the recruit is
encouraged to “try out” various group activities. These
activities may involve such things as self-analysis, lectures,
praying, and working at group-related chores.
This tentative collaboration may be spurred by such
elements as social pressure, politeness, legitimate
curiosity, or a desire to curry favor with authority figures.
Eventually however, this collaboration leads the
recruit to begin to seriously consider the wisdom of the
doctrine in question, thereby leading to the third stage
of indoctrination in which actual belief change begins.
In this third stage, the recruit is typically surrounded
by believers and kept isolated from anyone who might
disagree with the doctrine, thereby producing particularly
potent peer pressure. In addition, the information
and reading provided to recruits is carefully screened
to justify the group teachings. Added to this, the recruit
generally remains physically and mentally exhausted
and is given little time for unbiased analysis of the doctrine.
This makes it difficult for the recruit to generate
private cognitive objections to the group doctrine. As a
result, sincere belief change commonly begins at this
point in the process.
Brainwashing———125
In the final stage of indoctrination, initial belief
change regarding the group and its doctrine is consolidated
and intensified to the point that the new recruit
comes to accept group teachings and decisions uncritically
while viewing any contrary information as either
enemy propaganda or necessary “means/ends tradeoffs.”
By this point, the recruit has been cajoled into
taking a series of public and/or irrevocable actions
in service to the group. These acts entail increased
effort, cost, and sacrifice over time. As one example,
when Patricia Hearst was being indoctrinated by the
Symbionese Liberation Army, she initially was asked
to just train with the group. Then she was asked to
tape-record a prewritten radio speech. Next she was
asked to both write and record such a talk. Soon after
that, she was required to accompany the group on a
bank robbery carrying an unloaded weapon. Thus, the
level of sacrifice required of her escalated over her
time with the group. In this final stage, as before,
recruits remain surrounded by those who endorse the
doctrine. These co-believers corroborate the recruit’s
expressions of that doctrine. Moreover, they admire,
reward, and endorse the recruit’s acts of loyalty and
sacrifice. Interestingly, according to recent news reports,
these procedures correspond quite closely to those followed
in the training of suicide bombers once they
express an initial willingness to make such a sacrifice.
Such individuals are kept secluded in safe houses, cut
off from family, and often make videos to be used in
later propaganda efforts.
Experts note that the procedures (stages) described
in the previous paragraphs coordinate a variety of
potent persuasive techniques. Peer pressure is known
to be particularly effective when an individual faces
a united consensus especially if the individual is confused,
frightened, or facing an ambiguous issue. People’s
ability to resist a flawed persuasive message is particularly
impaired when they lack the opportunity to
think clearly about inadequacies of the message due to
fear, sleep deprivation, and/or overactivity. Moreover,
when likeminded individuals (such those found in
extremist groups) discuss a topic they basically agree
upon, the result is a polarization of opinion, with
group members taking a more extreme view after discussion.
Similarly, extreme attitudes also result when
people find that others share and admire their opinions.
In addition, when individuals agree to costly
(and public) sacrifices, they have a strong tendency to
justify such actions by intensifying any attitudes that
support these acts, a process referred to as the reduction
of cognitive dissonance. Finally, the grandiose

126———Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions
goals of many extremist groups appeal to the human
need to feel important, significant, and part of some
timeless, meaningful social movement be it religious,
political, scientific, or historic. In this emotional context,
the intense indoctrination associated with the
term brainwashing combine to create a persuasive
milieu that, at least for some targets, has the power to
evoke surprising changes in both belief and behavior.
Robert S. Baron
See also Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Conformity; Group
Polarization
Further Readings
Baron, R. S. (2000). Arousal, capacity, and intense
indoctrination. Review of Personality and Social
Psychology, 4, 238–254.
Pratkanis, A., & Aronson, E. (2001). The age of propaganda
(Rev. ed.). New York: Freeman.
Singer, M. (1995). Cults in our midst. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
BROADEN-AND-BUILD THEORY
OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS
The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions
was developed to explain why people experience positive
emotions. What purpose might be served by
fleeting feelings of joy, gratitude, serenity, or love?
Did such pleasant states confer adaptive value over the
course of human evolution?
Within prior theories of emotions, positive emotions
posed a puzzle. This was because most prior
accounts rested on the assumption that all emotions—
both pleasant and unpleasant—were adaptive to
human ancestors because they produced urges to act in
particular ways, by triggering specific action tendencies.
Fear, for instance, is linked with the urge to flee,
anger with the urge to attack, disgust the urge to expel,
and so on. A core idea within the concept of specific
action tendencies is that having these particular actions
spring to mind made emotions evolutionary adaptive
because such quick and decisive actions helped early
humans to survive specific threats to life or limb.
Another core idea is that specific action tendencies
are embodied thoughts: Ss they overtake conscious
thought, they also trigger rapid bodily changes that
support the actions called forth. If you, at this moment,
saw danger looming and were experiencing fear, you
would not only experience an overwhelming urge to
flee to safety, but also within milliseconds your cardiovascular
system would have switched gears to redirect
oxygenated blood to large muscles so that you’d
be physically ready to run away. The major contribution
made by the concept of specific action tendencies,
then, was to explain why emotions infuse both mind
and body and how the forces of natural selection might
have shaped and preserved emotions as part of universal
human nature.
The trouble with the concept of specific action tendencies
came when past theorists tried to pinpoint the
tendencies sparked by positive emotions. Joy had been
linked to the urge to do anything, and serenity with the
urge to do nothing. Not only were these urges vague
and nonspecific, it’s doubtful whether doing nothing is
an action at all! Positive emotions, then, did not fit
the theoretical mold that worked so well for negative
emotions. Noticing this puzzle and other intriguing
features of positive emotions, Barbara L. Fredrickson
offered the broaden-and-build theory to explain the
evolved adaptive significance of positive emotions.
The broaden-and-build theory holds that, unlike
negative emotions, which narrow people’s ideas about
possible actions (through specific action tendencies),
positive emotions broaden people’s ideas about possible
actions, opening their awareness to wider ranges of
thoughts and actions than are typical for them. Joy, for
instance, sparks the urge to play and be creative, interest
sparks the urge to explore and learn, and serenity
sparks the urge to savor current circumstances and
integrate them into new self-views and worldviews.
Whereas the narrowed mindsets sparked by negative
emotions were adaptive in instances that threatened
survival in some way, the broadened mindsets sparked
by positive emotions were adaptive in different ways
and over longer time scales: Broadened mindsets were
adaptive because, over time, such expansive awareness
served to build humans’ resources, spurring on their
development, and equipping them to better handle subsequent
and inevitable threats to survival.
To illustrate, consider the playful mindset sparked
by joy. Ethological research documents that as complex
organisms play with conspecifics, they forge
social alliances (i.e., friendships). In times of trouble,
these gains in social resources might spell the difference
between life and death. Consider also the urge
to explore novel environments sparked by interest.
Behavioral research documents that positive and open

mindsets—because they yield exploration and experiential
learning—produce more accurate cognitive maps
of the local environment, relative to negative and rejecting
mindsets. Such gains in intellectual resources might
again spell the difference between life and death in
certain circumstances.
The broaden-and-build theory states that positive
emotions were adaptive to one’s human ancestors
because, over time, positive states and their associated
broadened mindsets could accumulate and compound
in ways that transformed individuals for the better,
leaving them with more social, psychological, intellectual,
and physical resources than they would have otherwise
had. When these ancestors later faced inevitable
threats to life and limb, their greater resources would
have translated into better odds of survival and of living
long enough to reproduce. To the extent that the
capacity to experience positive emotions was genetically
encoded, this capacity would have been shaped
by natural selection in ways that explain the form and
function of the positive emotions that modern-day
humans experience.
Since its inception, the broaden-and-build theory
has been tested and supported by a wide range of
empirical research. Controlled laboratory experiments
document that, compared to neutral and negative states,
induced positive emotions widen the scope of people’s
attention, expand their repertoires of possible actions,
and create openness to new experiences. Prospective
field studies show that people who, for whatever reasons,
experience more positive emotions than others are
better equipped to deal with life’s adversities and challenges.
Last but not least, randomized controlled tests
of interventions designed to augment people’s positive
emotions—like practicing meditation or cultivating the
habit of counting blessings—have documented that
these interventions build people’s enduring resources,
including immune functioning, mindfulness, and relationship
closeness.
At a practical level, the broaden-and-build theory
gives modern-day humans reason to cultivate and cherish
positive emotions. Pleasant states like joy, interest,
serenity, gratitude, and love do not merely feel good in
the moment, but they also place people on trajectories
toward positive growth: As these positive emotions
accumulate and compound, they pave the way for
people to reach their higher ground: to become healthier,
more knowledgeable, more resilient, and more
socially integrated versions of themselves.
Barbara L. Fredrickson
See also Emotion; Independence of Positive and Negative
Affect
Further Readings
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions?
Review of General Psychology, 2, 300–319.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. A., (2005). Positive
emotions broaden the scope of attention and thoughtaction
repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 313–332.
Fredrickson, B. L., Tugade, M. M., Waugh, C. E., & Larkin,
G. (2003). What good are positive emotions in crises?
A prospective study of resilience and emotions following
the terrorist attacks on the United States on September
11th, 2001. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
84, 365–376.
Gervais, M., & Wilson, D. S. (2005). The evolution and
functions of laughter and humor: A synthetic approach.
Quarterly Review of Biology, 80, 395–430.
Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits
of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to
success? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 803–855.
BUFFERING EFFECT
Buffering Effect———127
Definition
A buffering effect is a process in which a psychosocial
resource reduces the impact of life stress on psychological
well-being. Having such a resource contributes
to adjustment because persons are less affected by negative
life events. Social support is a known buffering
agent: Persons with high support show less adverse
impact from negative events.
History and Modern Usage
The concept of buffering originated from studies on the
effects of life stress. Researchers observed that there
was considerable variability in individual reactions to
major negative events such as illness, unemployment,
or bereavement. Some persons were very affected by
the events, showing high levels of depression, anxiety,
and physical symptoms; but other persons who experienced
such events did not show very high levels of
symptomatology and recovered more quickly. These
observations led to the concept that persons who had
certain resources were relatively protected (i.e., buffered)
from the adverse impact of life events.

128———Bulimia
Buffering effects are demonstrated in studies that
include measures of major life events experienced during
a certain time frame (e.g., the past year), a proposed
resource, and psychological and/or physical
symptomatology. Persons who have experienced more
negative life events have higher levels of symptomatology,
but studies show that life events have less
impact (sometimes almost no impact) among persons
with high levels of psychosocial resources.
The resource most often studied is social support.
Persons who have high levels of social support are
less affected by negative life events. Buffering effects
have been found for aspects including emotional support
(being able to confide in a friend or family member
when one is having problems) and instrumental
support (being able to obtain goods or services, e.g.,
money, transportation, child care) that help one to deal
with stressful events.
Studies of social support have found buffering
effects with mortality as the outcome. Life stress
increases mortality over 5- to 10-year periods, but persons
with larger social networks, more emotional support,
and more participation in community activities
have relatively lower rates of mortality under high
stress, compared with persons having less social support.
Social capital, interpersonal trust, and cohesion
at the community level, may also have such an effect.
Social relationships are not the only buffering agent.
A personality complex termed hardiness, an orientation
toward stressors based on feelings of commitment, control,
and challenge, has shown such effects: Persons
with a hardy personality show fewer symptoms under
high stress. Optimism, the belief that things will generally
turn out well, is an outcome expectancy that can
produce buffering effects for psychological and physical
symptomatology.
Research on buffering has helped to delineate pathways
through which life stress may bring on health
problems. It has also shown that buffering resources
influence how people cope with stressors, leading to
procedures for training persons in adaptive coping
mechanisms so that effects of negative events can be
reduced.
Thomas A. Wills
Carmen R. Isasi
See also Hardiness; Social Support; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Friedman, H. S. (Ed.). (1990). Personality and disease. New
York: Wiley.
Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B., Lochner, K., & Prothrow-Stith, D.
(1997). Social capital and mortality. American Journal
of Public Health, 87, 1491–1498.
Wills, T. A., & Filer, M. (2001). Social networks and social
support. In A. Baum, T. A. Revenson, & J. E. Singer
(Eds.), Handbook of health psychology (pp. 209–234).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
BULIMIA
Definition
Bulimia literally means “ox hunger” and is short for
bulimia nervosa—an eating disorder characterized by
binge eating episodes in which an individual feels a
loss of control over eating and eats very large amounts
of food. The individual reacts to binge episodes by
using extreme measures to prevent weight gain, such
as self-induced vomiting, laxative abuse, diuretic abuse,
fasting, or excessive exercise. Within the United States,
self-induced vomiting is the most common method for
avoiding weight gain among individuals with bulimia
nervosa. Importantly, research has shown that vomiting
is not effective in getting rid of the calories consumed
during binge-eating episodes. Vomiting only
eliminates approximately 25% of the calories consumed
during a typical binge-eating episode. Similar
to individuals with anorexia nervosa, individuals with
bulimia nervosa base their self-worth on their weight
and shape. Like all eating disorders, bulimia nervosa is
a form of mental disorder recognized by the fields of
psychology, social work, nutrition, and medicine.
Bulimia nervosa is an important subject in the field of
social psychology because social factors play an
important role in causing the disorder.
Bulimia nervosa most often occurs in adolescent
and young adult females, affecting 0.5% to 3.0% of
women (or 1 in 200 to 1 in 33) at some point in their
lifetimes. Bulimia nervosa is far less common in
males. Estimates suggest that 0.05% to 0.3% of men
(or 1 in 2000 to 1 in 300) suffer from bulimia nervosa
at some point in their lifetimes. Bulimia nervosa
appears to be a modern problem. A British physician
first used the term bulimia nervosa in 1979 to describe

normal-weight female patients who regularly binged
and vomited. Rates of bulimia nervosa increased dramatically
over a very short period of time in the second
half of the 20th century. In addition to being a modern
problem, bulimia nervosa appears to be a problem
restricted to Western cultures such as the United States
and England or individuals who have been exposed to
Western ideals.
Western Ideals and Bulimia Nervosa
The increasing idealization of thinness for women in
Western culture provides one explanation for increasing
rates of bulimia nervosa over the second half of
the 20th century and the increased rates of the disorder
in women compared to men. In modern, Western
culture, being thin has been equated with being beautiful.
The idealization of thinness has created associations
between thinness and other positive qualities,
such as success, intelligence, motivation, likeability,
and strength. In contrast, fatness has been associated
with many negative qualities, such as laziness, stupidity,
loneliness, ineptitude, weakness, and dependence.
The thin ideal contrasts sharply with the reality of
what most women’s bodies look like, leaving most
women dissatisfied with their own body weight and
shape. In bulimia nervosa, dissatisfaction with weight
and shape influence self-esteem, and the potential
impact of weight gain on self-esteem motivates extreme
attempts to control weight. Ironically, extreme attempts
to control weight may trigger binge-eating episodes,
locking individuals with bulimia nervosa in a vicious
cycle of dieting, binge eating, and purging. The
processes by which attempts to control weight lead
to behaviors that cause weight gain are similar to
processes described in social psychology in the area of
self-regulation. Further, work by Vohs and colleagues
has shown that low self-esteem is directly linked to
binge eating among individuals who perceive themselves
as overweight and have high levels of perfectionism.
Although binge eating would increase the
chasm between actual weight and perfectionistic
weight ideals, it temporarily reduces painful selfawareness
in individuals with low self-esteem. This
explanation is consistent with models put forth by
Baumeister and colleagues for other self-destructive
behaviors as being motivated by a desire to escape
the self.
Given the widespread nature of body dissatisfaction
among adolescent girls and young adult women,
bulimia nervosa is actually quite rare. This means that
within a culture that idealizes thinness there are factors
that further increase risk for developing bulimia
nervosa. Social environments that increase pressures
to adhere to the thin ideal, such as ballet schools or
social groups that model eating disorder behaviors,
may further increase risk for developing bulimia nervosa.
Peer influence may play an important role in
causing the disorder.
Peer Influence
Researchers have hypothesized that peer influence is a
likely causal factor in the development of bulimia nervosa
during adolescence. As teenagers acquire more
independence from their parents, peers become more
important as a reference group. Peer influence is likely
to increase dramatically when adolescents go away to
college because they leave their homes to live among
peers.
Researchers have examined the similarity of peer
behaviors as one indicator of peer influence. According
to the principle of homophily, social groups tend to
share similar behavioral and interpersonal characteristics.
Similar to results from studies of other health risk
behaviors such as smoking, alcohol use, and drug use,
research indicates that bulimic symptom levels are
more similar within friendship groups than between
friendship groups in high school girls. The process of
socialization may cause this similarity.
Socialization
Bulimia———129
In the process of socialization, attitudes and behaviors
spread from one group member to another. Social
norms arise for characteristics that are important to the
group. Individuals experience social rewards for adhering
to these norms, such as an increase in popularity,
and social punishments for deviating from them, such
as a decrease in popularity or even rejection from the
social group. Over time, this social pressure toward uniformity
has a causal effect on an individual’s behavior.
As group members spend more time together, their attitudes
and behaviors should become more similar.
Evidence for the socialization of bulimic symptoms
comes from Christian S. Crandall’s study of friendship

130———Bullying
groups in college sororities. Girls living in one of two
sorority houses completed questionnaires that assessed
binge eating and friendship groups in the fall and the
spring of one academic year. Crandall hypothesized
that socialization during the school year would lead to
similarity on binge eating within peer groups in late
spring (e.g., a few weeks before the sorority closed for
the end of the term). As predicted, Crandall found that
friends’ binge eating grew increasingly similar over the
course of the academic year. In both sororities, popularity
was related to the extent to which an individual’s
binge eating was similar to the norm for her sorority.
However, binge-eating patterns differed between the
two sororities, suggesting that the “right” level of disordered
eating depended upon local social norms—
rather than reflecting college- or culture-wide norms.
In an extension of this work, Zalta and Keel found
socialization of bulimic symptoms in a general college
sample, but this effect was specific to peers who had
been selected on the basis of having similar levels of
perfectionism and self-esteem.
Treatment and Outcome
The most successful treatments for bulimia nervosa
include cognitive-behavioral therapy and antidepressant
medication. Cognitive-behavioral therapy directly
challenges the association between self-worth and body
weight/shape. Both treatments have produced higher
rates of recovery compared to other forms of treatment
used for the disorder. Overall, approximately half of
women treated for bulimia nervosa achieve full recovery
during treatment. Rates of recovery continue to
increase over time such that 75% of women are recovered
by 10 years following treatment. Although most
women with bulimia nervosa will recover, a significant
minority continues to struggle with their eating disorder
into midlife. Bulimia nervosa is associated with significant
health problems and problems in interpersonal
relationships in these individuals. Treatment response
and outcome for male patients or adolescent patients
are not well described because most studies are restricted
to adult female samples.
Other Influences
Although social factors play a crucial role in the
development of bulimia nervosa, many other factors
are involved as well. Biological factors, such as genes,
contribute to risk for developing bulimia nervosa. In
addition, personality factors play an important role in
the development of the disorder. Finally, stressful life
events may serve as triggers for the onset of bulimia
nervosa in vulnerable individuals. For these reasons,
bulimia nervosa is an important topic in many areas of
psychology.
See also Self-Esteem; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Pamela K. Keel
Alyson K. Zalta
Abraham, S., & Llewellyn-Jones, D. (2001). Eating
disorders: The facts (5th ed.). New York: Oxford
University Press.
Costin, C. (1997). The eating disorder sourcebook.
Los Angeles: Lowell House.
Heller, T. (2003). Eating disorders: A handbook for teens,
families and teachers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Hesse-Biber, S. J. (1996). Am I thin enough yet? The cult of
thinness and the commercialization of identity. London:
Oxford University Press.
Kalodner, C. R. (2003). Too fat or too thin? A reference
guide to eating disorders. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press.
Keel, P. K. (2005). Eating disorders. Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
BULLYING
Definition
Bullying is aggressive behavior in which there is an
imbalance of power or strength. Usually, bullying is
repeated over time. Bullying behaviors may be direct
(e.g., hitting, kicking, taunting, malicious teasing,
name calling) or indirect (e.g., rumor spreading, social
exclusion, manipulation of friendships, cyberbullying).
Although adults may tend to view bullying as an
aggressive exchange between two individuals (a child
who bullies and his or her victim), it is more accurately
understood as a group phenomenon, in which
children may play a variety of roles as aggressors, victims,
observers, and defenders.
Attention to Bullying
Although bullying is an age-old phenomenon, it has
only recently been recognized as a serious and pervasive

problem among children and youth in the United
States. Led by the pioneering work of Dan Olweus
in Norway, research attention to peer bullying in
Scandinavia has been active for more than 3 decades,
and there has been widescale public attention to the
problem in Scandinavian countries since the early
1980s. In the United States, such widescale interest in
bullying was not aroused until the spring of 1999, when
media accounts of the shootings at Columbine High
School identified the perpetrators as victims of bullying
by classmates. Research on the nature and extent of
bullying among children and youth has increased significantly
in recent years. A smaller, but growing, literature
on adult workplace bullying has also emerged.
Prevalence
Rates of bullying among children and youth vary
depending on the definition that researchers use and
the populations studied. In an important nationally
representative study of more than 15,000 students
in Grades 6 to 10, Tonya Nansel and her colleagues
found that 17% of children and youth reported having
been bullied “sometimes” or more often during the
school term and 19% had bullied others “sometimes”
or more frequently. These researchers also found that
6% of the students were “bully victims”—they had
bullied others and also had been bullied.
Demographic Differences
The nature and prevalence of bullying among children
and youth have been found to vary by age and gender.
Most research suggests that children are most likely to
be bullied during their elementary school years, followed
by middle school, and high school. Children and
youth typically are bullied either by same-age peers
or by older children and youth. This may explain why
somewhat different age trends are found when focusing
on rates of bullying others versus rates of victimization.
Most researchers have found that children and
youth are most likely to bully others during early to
mid adolescence.
Although both girls and boys are frequently
engaged in bullying problems, researchers have
debated the relative frequency with which they engage
in and experience bullying. Studies relying on selfreport
measures typically have found that boys are
more likely than girls to bully. Research findings are
less consistent when examining gender differences in
peer victimization. Some studies have found that boys
report higher rates of victimization than girls. Other
studies, however, have found either no gender differences
or only marginal differences. What is clear is
that girls are bullied by both boys and girls, while
boys are most often bullied by other boys. Perhaps
more important than the relative frequency of bullying
among boys and girls is the types of bullying in which
they are involved. The most common form of bullying
experienced by both boys and girls is verbal bullying.
However, there are also are notable gender differences.
Boys are more likely than girls to experience
physical bullying by their peers. Girls are more likely
than boys to be bullied through rumor spreading or
being the subjects of sexual comments or gestures.
Causes of Bullying
Bullying is a complex phenomenon with no single
cause. Rather, bullying among children and youth is
best understood as the result of an interaction between
an individual and his or her social ecology—his or her
family, peer group, school, and broader community. For
example, although children who bully tend to share
some common individual characteristics (e.g., have
dominant personalities, have difficulty conforming to
rules, and view violence in a positive light), research
also has confirmed that there are some common family
characteristics of children who bully, including a lack
of warmth and involvement on the part of parents,
a lack of supervision, inconsistent discipline, and exposure
to violence in the home. A child’s peer group also
may influence his or her involvement in bullying.
Children who bully also are likely to associate with
other aggressive or bullying children. Not only are
bullying rates influenced by characteristics associated
with individual children, family units, and peer groups,
but they also may be affected by characteristics of
schools (e.g., have staff with indifferent or accepting
attitudes about bullying) and by factors within a community
or the broader society (e.g., exposure to media
violence).
Effects of Bullying
Bullying———131
Bullying can affect the mental and physical health of
children, as well as their academic work. Bullied
children are more likely than their nonbullied peers to
be anxious, suffer from low self-esteem, be depressed,
and to think of taking their own lives. They also are
more likely than other children to experience a variety
of health problems, such as headaches, stomach
pain, tension, fatigue, sleep problems, and decreases in

132———Bystander Effect
appetite. On average, bullied children also have higher
school absenteeism rates, are more likely to say they
dislike school, and have lower grades compared to their
nonbullied peers. Not only can bullying seriously affect
children who bully, but it also may cause children who
observe or “witness” bullying to feel anxious or helpless.
Bullying can negatively affect the climate or culture
of a school.
Finally, there also is reason to be concerned about
children who frequently bully their peers, as they are
more likely than their peers to be involved in vandalism,
fighting, theft, and weapon carrying, and are more
likely than nonbullying peers to consume alcohol.
Prevention and
Intervention in Schools
Significant recent effort has focused on prevention of
bullying in schools. Research to date suggests that the
most successful efforts are comprehensive schoolbased
prevention programs that are focused on changing
the climate of the school and norms for behavior.
Susan P. Limber
See also Aggression; Power; Rejection; Sexual Harassment
Further Readings
Espelage, D., & Swearer, S. (Eds.). (2003). Bullying in
American schools: A social-ecological perspective on
prevention and intervention. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Limber, S. P. (2006). Peer victimization: The nature and
prevalence of bullying among children and youth.
In N. E. Dowd, D. G. Singer, & R. F. Wilson (Eds.),
Handbook of children, culture, and violence
(pp. 313–332). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Nansel, T. R., Overpeck, M., Pilla, R. S., Ruan, W. J.,
Simmons-Morton, B., & Scheidt, P. (2001). Bullying
behavior among U.S. youth: Prevalence and association
with psychosocial adjustment. Journal of the American
Medical Association, 285, 2094–2100.
Olweus, D. (1993). Bullying at school: What we know and
what we can do. New York: Blackwell.
BYSTANDER EFFECT
Definition
Individuals who see or hear an emergency (but are
otherwise uninvolved) are called bystanders. The
bystander effect describes the phenomenon in which
such individuals are less likely to seek help or give
assistance when others are present. This does not mean
that bystanders are apathetic to the plight of others, for
bystanders often show signs of distress, anxiety, and
concern if they delay responding or fail to respond
at all. It also does not necessarily mean that a victim
will be less likely to receive help as the number of
bystanders present increases—after all, the greater the
number of other people present, the greater is the likelihood
that at least one of them will intervene. In the
event of a medical emergency, for instance, a larger
group of bystanders is more likely to contain someone
trained to administer appropriate first-aid measures.
Rather, the term refers simply to any given individual
bystander’s diminished likelihood of offering help
when part of a group.
Context and Importance
As she was returning to her apartment on March 13,
1964, at 3:30 a.m., a young woman named Kitty
Genovese was attacked and killed in the Kew Gardens
district of Queens, a borough of New York City. Up to
38 witnesses later admitted witnessing the attack from
their apartments as it was taking place, but no one intervened
or reported the attack. These witnesses certainly
had ample opportunity to call the police—the attack
lasted between 30 and 40 minutes. The public and the
media wanted to know why. Analysts and news commentators
tended to focus on stereotypes of New
Yorkers as being uninterested or calloused and lacking
concern for their fellow human beings; they saw the
event as an outgrowth of the anonymity fostered by life
in a very large city. Social psychologists Bibb Latané
and John Darley did not find such explanations particularly
compelling; they thought that perhaps any individual
in a similar circumstance might have hesitated to
help. They argued that, among other reasons, it was the
knowledge that there were so many other potential
helpers, ironically, that inhibited each bystander’s willingness
to act. Indeed, since the murder of Kitty
Genovese, the bystander effect has been observed literally
dozens upon dozens of times in many other cities
and countries, and it is not unique to New York. On
November 7, 2004, in Corona, California, for instance,
a security camera at a mall parking lot recorded two men
kidnapping a woman. The men chased a woman around
the parking lot, carrying her back to the car where
the men then proceeded to stuff her into the trunk of
the vehicle. The camera also recorded the images of a

dozen bystanders scattered throughout the scene and at
various stages of the kidnapping. Several bystanders
turned their heads to watch the incident, but none of
them called the police or went to the woman’s aid. The
security camera even recorded automobiles that drove
past without slowing down to help the screaming
woman as she was being stuffed into the trunk.
The essential element of a social psychological
analysis of the bystander effect focuses on the question
of why individuals in groups are less likely to help or
are slower to respond than those who are alone.
Evidence and Explanations
Bystander effects have been shown to occur in a variety
of laboratory and field settings. Bystanders in
groups are less likely to help people who are in need
in a subway, or to give to individuals seeking small
amounts of change for a phone call. Individuals in
groups are less likely to give or seek help when someone
apparently has been hurt falling from a ladder,
when a stranger suffers an epileptic seizure, and when
smoke pours into their room.
There are three fundamental reasons that the presence
of others inhibits helping; each of these reasons
grows more powerful as the number of other people
present increases.
1. Social inhibition. For this factor to operate, individuals
must believe that the others can see them. The
concern here is that the individual wants to avoid
attracting negative attention for misinterpreting the
situation, overreacting, or doing the wrong thing. Individuals
fear negative evaluation (sometimes especially
from strangers) because they have a strong need to
belong and be accepted. Consequently, they try to minimize
rejection and exclusion by inhibiting any actions
that potentially might bring derision.
2. Pluralistic ignorance. Another cause of the
bystander effect is pluralistic ignorance (or conformity
to the inaction of others). Imagine sitting in a
room and hearing what sounds like someone falling
off a ladder in the hallway. If alone, you might hesitate
slightly to consider whether it was really an accident,
but you are likely to go investigate. In a group,
however, you are first likely to check out others’ reactions
surreptitiously to get assistance in interpreting
the situation. If they, too, are calmly checking out others’
reactions, then there is a room full of others who
are not acting and who appear to be unalarmed. This
Bystander Effect———133
becomes the information that guides interpretations
and, ultimately, the behavior of bystanders. In short,
the message is that this is not an emergency because
no one else is acting like it is an emergency; therefore,
help is not needed. Pluralistic ignorance requires that
the individual can see the others.
3. Diffusion of responsibility. Another explanation
requires neither seeing others or being seen by others;
it merely requires believing that others are around
who could help (as was the case in the Kitty Genovese
murder). This belief reduces the individual’s obligation
to help because others share that same obligation.
The more bystanders who are believed to be present,
the less responsibility the individual bears. Diffusion
of responsibility has been demonstrated to be sufficient
to cause the bystander effect even in the absence
of conditions necessary for social inhibition or pluralistic
ignorance.
A variety of factors can either lessen or amplify the
bystander effect, but these factors are not likely to eliminate
it. One very robust factor is group size: the larger
the group is, the less likely any individual will act (or
the more slowly that person will act). This is not a linear
effect (i.e., it is not the case that ten bystanders are
twice as slow as five bystanders), because the greatest
impact occurs as the number present grows from one to
two bystanders, with slightly less impact from two to
three, and so on. In other words, additional bystanders
beyond the seventh or eighth person have little additional
impact. Other studies show that the bystander
effect is smaller when the bystanders are friends than
when they are strangers, when the person in need is
more similar to the bystanders, and when the situation
is clearly an emergency. Individual differences matter,
too. Individuals who score higher in agreeableness and
prosocial orientation are faster to help.
Still other studies show that the bystander effect is
not restricted to emergency situations and can even
explain someone’s failure to help another person pick
up dropped pencils, or not taking a coupon for a free
meal in the presence of others. In fact, diffusion of
responsibility for helping can be seen as a more general
example of social loafing—that is, exerting less
effort as a function of being part of a collective, no
matter what the request is.
Research has demonstrated that the bystander effect
is an extremely consistent phenomenon. Regardless of
the nature of the situation requiring help, the type of
assistance called for, the age or gender of the research

134———Bystander Effect
participants, or the location in which the research is
being conducted, people are less likely to help when
part of a group than when alone. This finding has
occurred almost without exception, with the existing
body of research presenting nearly 100 such comparisons
to date.
The accepted but not well-tested method of countering
the bystander effect is for victims to narrowcast
their pleas for help (“You in the red coat, call an
ambulance!”) rather than broadcasting the request to
everyone. The victim’s singling out one person does
not allow the bystander to assume that someone else
may help. Being specific in the type of help that is
being requested, targeting an individual from whom it
is requested, and clearly indicating that the situation is
an emergency will aid in eliminating many of the
ambiguities that may exist, thus focusing social pressure
on the individuals whose help is needed.
Implications
Bystander helping intervention is regulated both by
individual differences and the power of the situation.
People in general say they would help in a situation
that requires aid. Research and naturalistic observations
reveal, however, that having more people in a
situation requiring help actually decreases the likelihood
that help will be given. To combat the bystander
effect, Good Samaritan laws have been created in several
countries requiring bystanders, at minimum, to
dial an emergency number or face legal implications.
Kipling D. Williams
Alvin Ty Law
See also Diffusion of Responsibility; Informational Influence;
Need to Belong; Pluralistic Ignorance; Social Loafing
Further Readings
Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive
bystander: Why doesn’t he help? Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Latané, B., & Nida, S. (1981). Ten years of research on group
size and helping. Psychological Bulletin, 89, 308–324.

CATHARSIS OF AGGRESSION
Definition
According to catharsis theory, acting aggressively or
even viewing aggression is an effective way to reduce
angry feelings and aggressive impulses. The word
catharsis comes from the Greek word katharsis, which,
literally translated, means “a cleansing or purging.”
The first recorded mention of catharsis occurred in
Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle taught that viewing tragic
plays gave people emotional release (katharsis) from
negative feelings such as pity and fear. In Greek drama,
the tragic hero didn’t just grow old and retire—he often
suffered a violent demise. By watching the characters
in the play experience tragic events, the viewer’s own
negative feelings were presumably purged and cleansed.
This emotional cleansing was believed to benefit both
the individual and society.
Catharsis also played an important role in ancient
religious and magical healing rituals. By venting their
emotions, people presumably called forth and expelled
the demons and evil spirits that possessed their bodies.
The ancient notion of catharsis was revived by
Sigmund Freud, who believed that repressed negative
emotions could build up inside an individual and
cause psychological symptoms, such as hysteria (nervous
outbursts). Freud believed that expressing hostility
was much better than bottling it up inside.
Freud’s therapeutic ideas on emotional catharsis
form the basis of the so-called hydraulic model of
anger, based on the idea of water pressure (hydraulic
means “water-related”). The hydraulic model suggests
that frustrations lead to anger and that anger, in turn,
C
135
builds up inside an individual, like hydraulic pressure
inside a closed environment, until it is released in
some way. If you don’t let your anger out but try to
keep it bottled up inside, it will eventually cause you
to explode in an aggressive rage. The modern theories
of catharsis are based on this hydraulic model.
The entry on Media Violence and Aggression discusses
whether viewing violence increases aggression.
This entry will therefore focus on whether acting
aggressively (e.g., screaming, yelling, hitting, kicking)
increases aggression.
Belief in Catharsis Is Widespread
The belief in the value of venting is widespread around
the world. For example, for over 20 years Tokyo residents
have been venting their frustrations at an annual
screaming contest. The use of a concept in the popular
press is a sign of how widespread it is. Catharsis messages
frequently appear in plays, films, television programs,
radio programs, magazines, and newspapers.
You can even buy products to vent your anger.
For example, the “Tension Shooter” is a wood gun that
shoots up to six rubber bands per round at targets that
can be personally labeled (e.g., Boss, Mother-in-Law).
Another product is “Wham-It,” an inflatable punching
bag. Products such as these are based on the hydraulic
model of anger. The companies that make them count
on customers who believe that venting anger against
inanimate objects is safe, healthy, and effective. If there
were no such customers, such products would not exist.
The concept of catharsis even infiltrates everyday
language. In the English language, a pressure cooker is
often used as a metaphor for anger. (A pressure cooker

136———Catharsis of Aggression
is a pot used to cook food under pressure, which reduces
cooking time. The pot has a locking lid and valve that
can be used to reduce pressure.) People are like pressure
cookers, and their anger is like the fluid inside
the cooker. As the anger increases, the fluid rises.
People talk about anger “welling up inside” a person. If
people are very angry, their “blood boils” or they reach
the “boiling point.” If the anger becomes too intense,
people “explode,” or “blow up.” To prevent the explosion,
people are encouraged to “vent their anger,” “blow off
steam,” “let it out,” and “get it off their chest.”
Research Evidence
If catharsis theory is true, then venting anger should
decrease aggression because people should get rid of
the anger. Almost as soon as psychology researchers
began conducting scientific tests of catharsis theory,
they ran into trouble. In one of the first experiments on
the topic, published in 1959, participants received an
insulting remark from someone who pretended to be
another participant (a confederate). Then some of the
insulted participants were set to work pounding nails
for 10 minutes—an activity that resembles many of
the “venting” techniques that people who believe in
catharsis continue to recommend even today. The act
of pounding nails should reduce subsequent aggression
(if catharsis theory is true). Participants in the
control group received the same insult but did not
pound any nails. Participants were then given a chance
to criticize the person who had insulted them. The
results showed that people who had hammered the
nails were more hostile toward the accomplice afterward
than were the ones who didn’t get to pound
any nails. Apparently, venting anger against those
nails made people more willing to vent anger against
another person. Numerous other studies have found
similar findings. In 1973, Albert Bandura, a famous
social psychologist, issued a statement calling for a
moratorium on catharsis theory and the use of venting
in therapy. A comprehensive review of the research
published in 1977 found that venting anger does not
reduce aggression; if anything, it makes people more
aggressive afterward. The authors also concluded that
venting anger can reduce physiological arousal (e.g.,
heart rate, blood pressure), but only if people express
their anger directly against the person who angered
them and that person cannot retaliate. Venting against
substitute targets does not reduce arousal. More recent
research has shown that venting doesn’t work even
among people who believe in the value of venting and
even among people who report feeling better after
venting. Aggression breeds further aggression.
One variation of venting is intense physical exercise,
such as running. Although physical exercise is
good for your heart, it is not very good for reducing
anger. Angry people are highly aroused, and the goal
is to decrease arousal levels. Exercise increases rather
than decreases arousal levels. Also, if someone provokes
you after exercising, the arousal from the exercise
might transfer to the provocation, making you
even angrier.
In summary, venting anger is like using gasoline to
put out a fire: It just makes things worse. Venting
keeps arousal levels high and keeps aggressive
thoughts and angry feelings alive—it is merely practicing
how to behave more aggressively.
If Venting Doesn’t Work, What Does?
If the metaphor of a pressure cooker is used to describe
anger, there are three ways to deal with buildup of
steam. The first approach is to try to contain the pressure.
The problem with this approach is that it might
cause the pressure cooker to explode when it can no
longer contain the pressure. Stuffing anger inside and
ruminating about it continually can lead to heart disease
later in life. A second approach is to periodically
siphon off some of the steam. This approach of venting
anger or blowing off steam sounds good in theory, but
it doesn’t work. A third approach is to turn down the
flame and reduce the heat! With the heat down, the
pressure will go down as well. This third approach is
much more effective than the other two approaches at
reducing anger.
All emotions, including anger, consist of bodily
states (such as arousal) and mental meanings. To get rid
of anger you can work on either of those. Anger can be
reduced by reducing arousal levels, such as by relaxing.
Anger can also be reduced by mental tactics, such as
by reframing the problem or conflict, or by distracting
oneself and turning attention to other, more pleasant
topics. Certain behaviors can also help get rid of anger.
For example, doing something such as kissing your
lover, watching a comedy, petting a puppy, or performing
a good deed can help, because those acts are incompatible
with anger and so the angry state becomes
impossible to sustain.
Brad J. Bushman

See also Aggression; Media Violence and Aggression
Further Readings
Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish
the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and
aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 28, 724–731.
Bushman, B. J., Baumeister, R. F., & Stack, A. D. (1999).
Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence:
Self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies? Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 367–376.
Geen, R. G., & Quanty, M. B. (1977). The catharsis of
aggression: An evaluation of a hypothesis. In L. Berkowitz
(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 10, pp. 1–37). New York: Academic Press.
CENTRAL TRAITS VERSUS
PERIPHERAL TRAITS
Definition
A central trait is an attribute in someone’s personality
that is considered particularly meaningful, in that its
presence or absence signals the presence or absence of
other traits. For example, if a person has a warm personality,
it usually means that he or she is also friendly,
courteous, cheerful, and outgoing—among many other
possible traits. A peripheral trait is one whose presence
or absence does not imply many other characteristics.
For example, if a person is sarcastic, it might imply
that he or she is cynical about the world or has a dark
sense of humor—but not much else.
Usage and Implications
The notion of central versus peripheral traits appears
emerges in three related, but separate, areas of
psychology.
Descriptions of Personality
The first usage of these terms crops up in descriptions
of an individual’s personality. Gordon Allport
asserted that an individual’s personality often contained
between five to ten central traits that organized
and influenced much of that person’s behavior. What
those five to ten traits were, however, differed from
Central Traits Versus Peripheral Traits———137
individual to individual, but if those traits could be
identified, an observer could then predict how the person
would respond in a wide variety of situations. At
times, Allport conceded, a person’s behavior might
be dependent on more peripheral traits (which he termed
secondary traits), but the operation of these traits
would be much narrower than that of a person’s central
attributes.
Descriptions of Self
The second usage of central versus peripheral traits
refers to people’s perceptions of themselves. Central
traits loom large in a person’s self-concept; peripheral
traits do not. According to psychological theorists
stretching back all the way to William James, selfesteem
is influenced the most by people’s performances
along these central traits. For example, if
intelligence is a central trait for a person, then academic
performances will have a greater impact on selfesteem
than it will for someone for whom intelligence
is not central.
Studies show how a trait’s centrality influences selfesteem
as well as behavior. People like to do well along
central traits. Indeed, they like to think of themselves as
superior to others along these traits. This desire can
even lead people to sabotage the efforts of their friends
so that they can outperform those friends along central
traits, according to the work by Abraham Tesser on his
self-evaluation maintenance model. Along peripheral
traits, no such sabotage occurs. Instead, people bask in
the reflected glory of their friend’s achievements along
these peripheral dimensions and feel no envy about
being outperformed.
The link between trait centrality and self-esteem,
however, is complex. Failure along central traits does
not guarantee a significant or long-lasting blow to selfesteem.
This is because people often reevaluate a trait’s
centrality after succeeding or failing along it. If a person
chronically fails in the classroom, for example, that
person can choose to de-emphasize the centrality of
academic achievement in his or her self-concept. If the
person succeeds in some other arena—in social circles,
for example—he or she can decide to emphasize traits
relevant to that arena (e.g., social skills) as more central
to their self-concept. Recent evidence shows that the
traits people view as central to their self-concept just
happen to be the ones that they already think they have.
One would expect this if people constantly reanalyzed
a trait’s centrality based on past successes and failures.

138———Cheater-Detection Mechanism
Impressions of Others
The third usage of the concepts central versus
peripheral traits focuses on perceptions of others. Information
about central traits influences perceptions of
others more than does information about peripheral
traits. When people hear that another person possesses
a central trait (e.g., moral), they are more willing to
make a host of inferences about that person than if
they hear that the person possesses a more peripheral
trait (e.g., thrifty).
Two classic experiments demonstrate the impact
that central traits have on people’s impressions of others.
In 1946, Solomon Asch presented some students
with a description of a person who was intelligent,
skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, and
cautious. For other students, the term warm was
replaced with cold. Students later described the first
person much more positively—as wiser, happier, and
more humorous, for example—than they did the second
person. These differences arose, Asch argued,
because warm and cold are central traits that have a
powerful impact on the range of conclusions people
are willing to reach about others. Supporting this
view, replacing warm and cold with polite and blunt,
respectively, did not carry the same impact, presumably
because these were more peripheral traits.
Echoing Asch’s findings, Harold Kelley in 1950 introduced
a guest lecturer to a class to some students as
a warm person and to others as a cold individual.
Students receiving the first description were more
likely to engage in class discussion and to rate the lecturer
as effective and less formal.
One note should be mentioned about trait centrality
for the self and trait centrality for judgments about others.
Often, the traits considered central in the selfconcept
are also the traits that show up as more central
in impressions of others. If extraversion is a trait that is
central to a person’s self-concept, he or she will judge
others more centrally on whether they are extraverted.
If morality is a central trait for self-esteem, morality is
likely to operate as central trait in impressions of others.
Theorists suspect that self-central traits are used
more centrally in judgments of others because doing so
bolsters self-esteem. If one’s own attributes suggest so
many other characteristics and abilities in other people,
then those attributes must be important, and it must be
good to possess such important traits.
See also Schemas; Self-Evaluation Maintenance
David Dunning
Further Readings
Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological
interpretation. New York: Henry Holt.
Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 1230–1240.
Marsh, H. W. (1986). Global self-esteem: Its relation to
specific facets of self-concept and their importance. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1224–1236.
CHEATER-DETECTION MECHANISM
Definition
The human brain can be thought of as a computer—an
organic one, designed by natural selection to process
information in adaptive ways. It is composed of many
programs, each of which evolved because it was good
at solving a problem of survival or reproduction faced
by hunter-gatherer ancestors in the past. The cheaterdetection
mechanism is one of these evolved programs.
The adaptive problem it evolved to solve is detecting
cheaters in situations involving social exchange.
Usage
Whenever you exchange favors, buy things (trading
money for goods), or help someone who has helped
you, you have engaged in social exchange. It is a way
people cooperate for mutual benefit: I provide a benefit
of some kind to you, and you reciprocate by providing
a benefit to me, either now or later. As a result,
we are both better off than we would have been if neither
of us had helped the other. Evolutionary biologists
demonstrated that social exchange cannot evolve
in a species unless those who engage in it are able to
detect cheaters, that is, individuals who take benefits
from others without providing them in return. Inspired
by this finding, psychologists discovered a cheaterdetection
mechanism in the human brain: a program
that searches for information that could reveal whether
a given individual has cheated in a specific social
exchange.
Background
Wherever you find humans, you will find them engaging
in social exchange: It is as cross-culturally universal
and typical of the human species as are language
and tool use. Sometimes it is explicit and formal, as

when people agree to trade goods or services. Other
times it is implicit and informal, as when a woman living
in a hunter-gatherer band shares food she has gathered
with someone who has helped her in the past.
That people can make each other better off by
exchanging favors, goods, and help is so rational and
obvious to humans that they take it for granted. But
most species cannot engage in social exchange. Its
presence in some species but not others says something
about the programs that generate social exchange
behavior. Operant conditioning produces behavior
contingent on rewards received (like social exchange
does). But the programs causing this general form of
learning are found in all animal species and so cannot
be the cause of social exchange (if they were, many or
most species would engage in it). Some of our primate
relatives do engage in social exchange, so it must not
require the special forms of intelligence that humans
possess. Indeed, schizophrenia can impair general reasoning
and intellectual abilities without impairing
one’s ability to detect cheaters in social exchange.
Evidence from many reasoning experiments shows
that reasoning about social exchange is much better
than reasoning about other topics, and it activates
inferences not made about other topics. The patterns
found indicate that the human brain contains programs
that are specialized for reasoning about, and engaging
in, social exchange, including a subroutine for detecting
cheaters (the cheater-detection mechanism).
Evidence
Consider the following situation: Your mother knows
you want to borrow her car, so she says, “If you borrow
my car, then you must fill the tank with gas.” This
is a proposal to engage in social exchange because it
is an offer to provide a benefit conditionally (conditional
on your satisfying her requirement—what she
wants in return). Cheating is taking the benefit offered
without satisfying the requirement that provision of
this benefit was made contingent on. So you would
have cheated if you had borrowed the car without filling
the tank with gas.
Understanding this offer requires conditional
reasoning—the ability to draw appropriate inferences
about a conditional rule of the form “If P then Q.”
Psychologists interested in logical reasoning found
that when people are asked to look for violations of
conditional rules that do not involve social exchange,
performance is poor. But performance is excellent
when the conditional rule involves social exchange and
Cheater-Detection Mechanism———139
looking for violations corresponds to looking for
cheaters. Subsequent tests show that this is not because
social exchange activates logical reasoning abilities;
instead, it activates inferences that are adaptive when
applied to social exchange but not when applied to
conditional rules involving other topics.
The cheater-detection mechanism looks for cheaters,
not cheating; that is, it looks for people who have intentionally
taken the benefit specified in a social exchange
rule without satisfying the requirement. It is not good at
detecting violations caused by innocent mistakes, even
if they result in someone being cheated. Nor can it
detect violations of rules lacking a benefit: Conditional
rules specifying what a person is required to do, without
offering to provide a benefit in exchange for satisfying
this requirement, are not social exchanges and do
not elicit good violation detection.
Good performance in detecting cheaters does not
depend on experience with an advanced market economy:
Hunter-horticulturalists in the Amazonian rainforest
are as good at detecting cheaters as are college
students in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Familiarity
is irrelevant: Performance is excellent for novel,
culturally unfamiliar social exchange rules but poor
for familiar rules not involving social exchange. By
age 3, children understand what counts as cheating in
social exchange but not what counts as violating conditional
rules describing the world. That is, the cheaterdetection
mechanism develops early and across cultures.
Brain damage can impair cheater detection without
damaging one’s ability to detect violations of logically
identical social rules that do not involve social
exchange. Neuroimaging results show that reasoning
about cheaters in social exchange produces different
patterns of brain activation than reasoning about other
social rules. This is further evidence that cheater
detection is caused by a specialized mechanism in the
human mind/brain.
Importance
This research shows that evolutionary biology can
help one discover new mechanisms of the mind and
supports the idea that minds are composed of many
specialized programs.
Elsa Ermer
Leda Cosmides
John Tooby
See also Deception (Lying); Evolutionary Psychology; Social
Exchange Theory

140———Choking Under Pressure
Further Readings
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2005). Neurocognitive adaptations
designed for social exchange. In D. M. Buss (Ed.),
Handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 584–627).
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Ermer, E., Guerin, S., Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Miller, M.
(2006). Theory of mind broad and narrow: Reasoning
about social exchange engages TOM areas, precautionary
reasoning does not. Social Neuroscience, 1(3–4), 196–219.
CHOKING UNDER PRESSURE
We have all heard the term choking under pressure
before. In the sports arena we talk about the bricks in
basketball when the game-winning free throw is
missed. In academic domains, we refer to cracking in
important test taking situations. But what exactly do
these terms mean and why do less-than-optimal performances
occur—especially when incentives for optimal
performance are maximal?
Definition
The desire to perform as well as possible in situations
with a high degree of personally felt importance is
thought to create performance pressure. However,
despite the fact that performance pressure often results
from aspirations to function at one’s best, pressurepacked
situations are where suboptimal skill execution
may be most visible. The term choking under pressure
has been used to describe this phenomenon. Choking
is defined as performing more poorly than expected,
given one’s skill level, and is thought to occur in many
different tasks.
Analysis
Some of the first attempts to account for unwanted
skill decrements can be traced back to investigations of
the arousal–performance relationship. According to
models of this relationship (often termed drive theories
or the Yerkes–Dodson curve), an individual’s performance
level is determined by his or her current level of
arousal or drive. Too little arousal, and the basketball
player will not have the tools necessary to make the
shot. Too much arousal, and the shot will be missed
as well. Although drive theories have been useful in
accounting for some types of performance failures,
they fall short in a number of ways. First, drive theories
are mainly descriptive. That is, drive theories link
arousal and performance, but they do not explain how
arousal exerts its impact. Second, within drive theory
models, there are often debates concerning how the
notion of arousal should be conceptualized (e.g., as a
physiological construct, emotional construct, or both).
Third, there are situations in which certain types of
drive theories have trouble accounting for observed
behavior. For example, one derivation of drive theory
(i.e., social facilitation) predicts that one’s dominant
response will be exhibited in high-arousal or highdrive
situations. However, this does not always seem to
hold when the pressure is on.
Building on drive theory accounts of performance
failure, more recent work has attempted to understand
how pressure changes how one thinks about and
attends to the processes involved in skill performance.
These accounts are often termed attentional theories.
Two main attentional theories have been proposed to
explain choking under pressure.
First, distraction theories propose that pressure creates
a distracting environment that compromises working
memory (i.e., the short-term memory system that
maintains, in an active state, a limited amount of information
relevant to the task at hand). If the ability of
working memory to maintain task focus is disrupted,
performance may suffer. In essence, distraction-based
accounts of skill failure suggest that performance pressure
shifts attention from the primary task one is trying
to perform (e.g., math problem solving) to irrelevant
cues (e.g., worries about the situation and its consequences).
Under pressure then, there is not enough of
working memory’s limited resources to successfully
support both primary task performance and to entertain
worries about the pressure situation and its consequences.
As a result, skill failure ensues.
Although there is evidence that pressure can compromise
working memory resources, causing failure
in tasks that rely heavily on this short-term memory
system, not all tasks rely heavily on working memory
(and thus not all tasks should be harmed when working
memory is consumed). For example, well-learned
sensorimotor skills, which have been the subject of
the majority of choking research in sport (e.g., simple
golf putting, baseball batting, soccer dribbling), are
thought to become proceduralized with practice such
that they do not require constant attention and control—
that is, such skills are not thought to depend heavily

on working memory at high levels of learning. How
then do such skills fail, if not via the consumption of
working memory resources? A second class of theories,
generally known as explicit monitoring theories,
has been used to explain such failures.
Explicit monitoring theories suggest that pressure
situations raise self-consciousness and anxiety about
performing correctly. This focus on the self is thought
to prompt individuals to turn their attention inward on
the specific processes of performance in an attempt to
exert more explicit monitoring and control than would
be applied in a nonpressure situation. For example,
the basketball player who makes 85% of his or her
free throws in practice may miss the game-winning
foul shot because, to ensure an optimal outcome, the
player tried to monitor the angle of the wrist as he or
she shot the ball. This component of performance is
not something that the basketball player would normally
attend to. Paradoxically, such attention is thought to
disrupt well-learned or proceduralized performance
processes that normally run largely outside of conscious
awareness.
From the previous description of distraction and
explicit monitoring theories, one might conclude that
performance pressure exerts one kind of impact on
cognitive skill performance and another kind of impact
on sensorimotor skill performance. It seems more
likely, however, that pressure always exerts at least two
different effects: It populates working memory with
worries, and it entices the performer to try to pay more
attention to step-by-step control, resulting in a double
whammy. These two effects may be differentially relevant
to performance depending on the attentional
demands of the task being performed. If a task depends
heavily on working memory but does not involve much
in the way of proceduralized routines (e.g., difficult
and novel math problem solving), then it will suffer
from pressure-induced consumption of working memory,
but it will not be harmed by the attempt to focus
what attention remains on step-by-step control that is
also induced by pressure. Conversely, if a task relies
heavily on proceduralized routines but puts little stress
on working memory (e.g., a well-learned golf putt),
then that task will suffer from performance pressure
because of the shift of attention to step-by-step control
and not because the overall capacity of working memory
has been reduced.
In conclusion, research examining the choking
under pressure phenomenon does not seek merely to
catalogue instances of performance failure but also
attempts to shed light on the reasons why skills fail
in high-stakes situations. Such knowledge aids in the
development of training regiments and performance
strategies designed to alleviate these less-than-optimal
performances.
Sian L. Beilock
See also Arousal; Attention; Automatic Processes; Drive
Theory; Social Facilitation
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1984). Choking under pressure: Selfconsciousness
and paradoxical effects of incentives on
skillful performance. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 46, 610–620.
Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of
skilled performance: What governs choking under
pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
130, 701–725.
Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2005). When high-powered
people fail: Working memory and “choking under
pressure” in math. Psychological Science, 16, 101–105.
Gray, R. (2004). Attending to the execution of a complex
sensorimotor skill: Expertise differences, choking and
slumps. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,
10, 42–54.
CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS
Close Relationships———141
Definition
Why are we attracted to some people? How do people
know they are in good relationships? Why do people
fall in love? Does good communication really produce
successful relationships? Are men really from Mars
and women from Venus? These are just some of the
intriguing questions that social psychologists attempt
to answer. Indeed, the study of close relationships has
become one of the most important domains in social
psychology over the past several decades.
But what are close relationships? It turns out that
answering this question is not as easy as it seems. One
key concept, developed by Harold Kelley and John
Thibaut in the 1960s and 1970s, describes close relationships
in terms of interdependence. Close relationships
differ from having acquaintances by the profound
way in which the well-being and psychological

142———Close Relationships
processes of one individual resonate with, and are tied
to, the same processes in another person. Furthermore,
close relationships are characterized by relatively high
levels of trust, love, knowledge, commitment, and intimacy.
However, close relationships themselves divide
into two further categories: platonic friendships versus
romantic relationships. Romantic relationships differ
from close platonic friendships in two major ways.
First, romantic relationships contain the elements of
sex and passion, and second, individuals are typically
involved in just one romantic attachment at one time.
Friendships can be intense and are of enormous psychological
importance in our lives, but most research in
social psychology has been devoted toward understanding
romantic relationships. Accordingly, this entry
focuses on this domain in this synopsis.
A Brief History
A social psychological approach to close relationships
focuses on the interaction between two individuals,
paying close attention to both behavior and what goes
in people’s minds (emotions and cognitions). Within
social psychology, up to the late 1970s, research into
relationships concentrated on interpersonal attraction;
namely, what factors lead people to be attracted to one
another at the initial stages of relationship development?
This research tended to be atheoretical and
the results read like a shopping list of variables that
influence attraction, including similarity, proximity,
physical attractiveness, and so forth. In the 1980s the
psychological zeitgeist shifted toward the study of the
much greater complexity inherent in the development,
maintenance, and dissolution phases of dyadic romantic
relationships. This shift was prompted by several
key developments in the 1970s. First, John Gottman
and others in the clinical area began research that, for
the first time, observed and carefully measured the
dyadic interchanges of married couples in an attempt
to predict who would divorce. Second, Zick Rubin
and others became interested in love and devised reliable
scales that could measure the concept. Third,
Harold Kelley led a team of social psychologists in
producing a seminal book published in 1983 (Close
Relationships), which presented the first full-blooded
treatment of close relationships from an interactional,
social psychological perspective.
Social psychological research in psychology over
the past two decades has been marked by three major
developments. First, there has been an explosion of
work concerned with understanding the role that social
cognition (beliefs, cognitive processes, etc.) and emotions
play in intimate relationships. This work has borrowed
theories and methodologies from both social
and cognitive psychology. Second, there has been a
burgeoning interest in how attachment and bonding
processes contribute to adult romantic relationships.
Attachment research in adults appropriated the basic
theories from the work in the 1960s and 1970s by
John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth concerning infant–
caregiver attachment bonds. Third, the study of interpersonal
attraction (in the context of romantic relationships,
this is typically labeled mate selection) has once
again become a hot topic, but under the new banner of
evolutionary psychology. This approach is based on
the evolutionary work of Darwin, but it has been honed
into modern social psychological guise by figures such
as David Buss and Jeffry Simpson.
Thus, as can be seen, social psychologists have
freely borrowed from other domains in studying close
relationships. However, this process is a two-way street,
with social psychological research and theorizing
being imported back into and enriching these same
domains. Social psychologists have made important
contributions in four major domains: how people
choose their mates, love and commitment, communication
and relationship interaction, and gender differences
in the context if romantic relationships. Each of
these domains will be discussed here.
Searching for the “Ideal” Mate
In New Zealand, the United States, African hunter–
gatherer cultures, indeed around the world, people focus
on similar categories in evaluating potential mates:
personality factors related to warmth and intelligence,
cues related to attractiveness and health, and the
possession of status and resources. Moreover, there is
remarkable agreement across both gender and cultures
concerning which factors are most important in selecting
mates for long-term relationships: The winner is
warmth and loyalty, a close second is physical attractiveness
and general vitality, and down the track is status
and resources.
Research suggests that individuals do not differ
simply in whether they set their mate standards as
demanding or modest. Rather, they attach more or less
importance independently across these three categories.
Thus, some people (both men and women) are
essentially on the hunt for an exciting, passionate

elationship, whereas others care relatively little about
passion and are preoccupied with the search for intimacy,
warmth, and commitment. Yet still others are
prepared to sacrifice somewhat on the passion and
intimacy front, if they can obtain a partner with considerable
status and resources.
Why do people not want it all? Why is Jane’s ideal
partner not incredibly kind, handsome, remarkably fit
with a wonderful body—and rich? First, such people
might be plentiful in TV soap operas, but in real life
they are remarkably thin on the ground. Second, even
when Jane meets such a male paragon, he will probably
not be interested in Jane (who is not a perfect 10 in
every category). Third, even if Jane succeeds in striking
up a relationship with such a catch, he may be difficult
to retain, and Jane may find she needs to invest
an exhausting amount of time and resources in maintaining
the relationship.
The name of the mating game is to do the best one
can in light of the available pool of mates, one’s own
perceived mate value, and other prevailing circumstances.
What causes individuals to attach different
amounts of importance to different ideal categories?
Perhaps the major factor is self-perceived mate value.
For example, those who perceive themselves as more
attractive give more weight to this particular aspect in
choosing a mate. This is one major reason why people
are strongly similar with their mates on factors such as
physical appearance and education level.
Evolutionary-based models of mate selection typically
frame their predictions and explanations relative
to two different goals: the search for a short-term sexual
fling or the search for a mate who would make a
suitable partner in a long-term committed relationship.
It should be stressed that these goals are not necessarily
conscious and typically find their expression
in emotions and desires. This distinction in goals is
exploited by Steve Gangestad and Jeffry Simpson to
argue that humans can, and do, change their mating
aims depending on circumstances, but both men and
women may adopt a characteristic mate-selection
style as a function of their upbringing, personal experiences,
situational contingencies, and so forth.
In short-term sexual liaisons, women need to invest
heavily in any subsequent offspring resulting from
such a union but will not have the benefit of a lifelong
mate and father for the children. Thus, in this context,
women should be mainly on the hunt for an attractive
man (good genes) rather than for a sensitive and supportive
mate. In short-term settings, men also should
Close Relationships———143
not be much interested in their mate’s suitability as
a long-term partner, but, if they have a choice, they
should go for the best genes (e.g., the sexiest woman
in the bar). However, because the potential investment
in subsequent offspring for the woman is vast, compared
to the man flitting through town, the woman
should be even choosier than the man in this context.
Research has generally affirmed this theorizing.
Several studies have found that when men and women
are asked about their minimal requirements in a mate
for a one-night stand, men typically express more modest
requirements than do women on factors associated
with warmth, loyalty, intelligence, status, and so forth.
Given that men are generally more persuadable than
women when it comes to rapid sexual conquests,
women can afford to be much choosier than men in
such a context. In a famous study, Russell Clark and
Elaine Hatfield had (brave) male and female confederates
approach members of the opposite gender on the
campus at the Florida State University and ask them if
they would go to bed with them. Seventy-two percent
of the men agreed, whereas none of the women did.
The standards used in evaluating mates are also
influenced by local circumstances. James Pennebaker
and his colleagues found that, as the hours passed,
both men and women perceived potential mates in
bars as more attractive. Further research has replicated
the finding for both genders, confirmed that the effect
is not simply caused by people steadily getting drunk,
and shown that the effect only occurs for those who
are not involved in an intimate sexual relationship
(and who are thus more likely to be monitoring the bar
for potential mates).
Overall, however, the standards that are maintained
most steadfastly across short-term and long-term relationships
are concerned with physical attractiveness,
and this is true for both men and women. These findings
are consistent with the theory that physical attractiveness
and vitality form the primary “good genes”
factor: In a short-term relationship all one is getting
out of the deal (reproductively speaking) are (potentially)
the other person’s genes. In a long-term mating
scenario, women should be exceptionally picky about
the factors that make for a good parent and a supportive
mate, that is, warmth/loyalty and status/resources.
They should also be interested in good genes (attractiveness
and vitality), but they may be prepared to
trade such characteristics against the presence of personal
warmth and loyalty or money and status. Men
should certainly be more interested in the woman’s

144———Close Relationships
ability to be a supportive mate and parent than in the
short-term mating context, and they should also maintain
their search for a woman with good genes; after
all, men make substantial investments as a father and
partner in long-term relationships.
However, in evolutionary terms, the woman’s eggs
are more or less all in one basket: The success with
which she can pass her genes on is dependent on her
husband (and wider family). In contrast, the man has
more options. He can continue to spread his genes
around while he is married, and he will remain fertile
with the ability to father children for many more years
than women are able to muster. Thus, evolutionary
logic dictates that a high level of investment by the
man should be more important to the woman than vice
versa (although, in absolute terms, high levels of investment
should be important to both genders in long-term
relationships).
There is a wealth of research that supports the existence
of gender differences in what people want in a
partner and relationship. In long-term relationships,
men tend to attach more importance to attractiveness
and vitality than do women, and women tend to give
more weight to loyalty and warmth and to status and
resources than do men. These findings have been found
in many cultures and have been replicated consistently
within Western cultures by research using standard
rating scales or by analyzing the contents of personal
advertisements. An important caveat is that the size
and significance of such gender differences are sensitive
to the cultural context. Alice Eagly and Wendy
Wood found that as women’s empowerment (indexed
by their earnings, their representation in legislative
government, and their involvement in professional positions)
increased relative to men across cultures, women
placed increasingly less value on the status and earnings
of a mate.
Love and Commitment
One of the most important generalizations established
by social psychologists is that the way in which relationships
develop is profoundly linked to what people
bring with them into the relationship as mental dispositions,
that is, expectations, beliefs, and personality
traits. As noted previously, individuals select mates
(in part) by the extent to which they meet important
standards on dimensions such as warmth, attractiveness,
and status. Hence, there exist strong similarities
between partners on such factors. However, expectations
and standards never sleep. As knowledge of the
other develops, and individuals and perceptions
change, people continue to evaluate their partners and
relationships by how they meet expectations and standards.
The discrepancies between expectations or standards
and perceptions of reality are then used to
accomplish four pivotal major goals or functions in
intimate relationships: evaluation, explanation, prediction,
and control.
Take Fiona, who places huge importance on passion
and sex in relationships and, thus, places a premium
on vitality and attractiveness in evaluating a
mate. Fiona was very attracted to Charles initially,
mainly because he was athletic and attractive. Two
years into the relationship, Charles has gained a lot of
weight, and he has lost interest in going to the gym.
Fiona’s evaluations of Charles are, as a result, on the
slide, and she is having doubts about the long-term
future of the relationship (the evaluation function).
Fiona can use the gap between her ideals and perceptions
to help provide her with an explanation of why
she is dissatisfied with her relationship: Charles is letting
himself go (the explanation function). Fiona can
also use the gap between her ideals and perceptions to
predict the future of the relationship: Unless Charles
takes better care of himself, the relationship is doomed
(the prediction function). Finally, on the basis of her
evaluation, explanation, and prediction, Fiona may
actively attempt to change her partner’s behavior, for
example, by buying Charles a year’s subscription to a
health club for his birthday (the control function).
Research evidence suggests that this story about
Fiona and Charles accurately reflects the psychological
reality of relationships. Provided prior pivotal
expectations are reasonably met in close relationships,
the conditions are set for love, commitment, and trust
to flourish. However, another important determinant
of the capacity to trust and to form healthy adult intimate
relationships are what are termed working models,
which are composed of beliefs and expectations
concerning the behavior of both self and others in intimate
settings. This construct was initially developed
by John Bowlby in the 1970s (as a part of what is
termed attachment theory) as a tool to explain how
pivotal interactions that infants have with caregivers
continue to influence individuals as they develop into
adulthood.
The first application of attachment theory to adult
romantic relationships was published by Cindy Hazan
and Phillip Shaver in 1987, triggering a massive surge
of theorizing and research dealing with adult attachment.
Interestingly, there are many similarities between

the love that develops between parents and children and
adult romantic love. For example, lovers often use
favorite nicknames, slip into singsong cadences, have
strong needs to spend a lot of time together, often caress
and kiss one another, seem fascinated with each other’s
physical appearance, and engage in long bouts of prolonged
eye contact. Exactly the same is true of parent–
infant interactions. The underlying neurophysiological
processes are also similar, with the same “love” hormones,
such as oxytocin, involved in both adult–infant
attachment and adult–adult romantic love.
The similarity between adult–adult and child–parent
forms of attachment supports the argument that evolutionary
processes have lifted and reworked the ancient
mechanisms that promote mother–infant bonding in
mammals to promote pair-bonding between humans.
Thus, romantic love consists of an exceptionally strong
attachment that inspires strong emotional drives
toward commitment and caring, along with the passion
and excitement that derives from sexual activity.
Moreover, adult attachment working models come
in two broad dimensions or styles similar to those
found in infant attachment styles: secure versus
avoidant, and anxious or ambivalent. Those who possess
secure (nonavoidant) attachment working models
are comfortable with intimacy and closeness and
are happy to rely on others for support and succor.
Ambivalent individuals intensely desire closeness and
intimacy but are fearful of rejection and are constantly
vigilant for signs that their partners may betray them
or leave.
Adult attachment working models are relatively stable,
but they are also sensitive to experiences in intimate
relationships. Having a successful and happy
relationship pushes people into secure working models,
whereas relationship breakups move people in the
opposite direction. For example, Lee Kirkpatrick and
Cindy Hazan reported that 50% of a sample of 177
individuals who were originally secure, and who experienced
a relationship breakup, switched temporarily
to an avoidant style. Moreover, as infants develop into
adults, attachment working models become differentiated
across domains. Thus, research has found that an
individual may have an avoidant working model for
romantic relationships but a secure working model for
friends or family.
Working models have the same functions in social
interaction (as previously described) concerning discrepancies
between standards and perceptions of the
partner or relationship; namely, they help people to
evaluate, explain, predict, and control their relationships.
Close Relationships———145
For example, Nancy Collins has shown that when
secure individuals explain negative behaviors from
their partners (e.g., failing to comfort them when they
were depressed), they are inclined to produce charitable,
relationship-positive attributions (e.g., the partner
had a bad cold) apparently designed to retain their
belief in the essential warmth and trustworthiness of
their partner. In contrast, ambivalent individuals tend
to adopt a relationship-negative pattern and emphasize
their partner’s indifference to their needs and lack of
commitment.
In a pioneering piece of research, Simpson and colleagues
tested Bowlby’s hypothesis that attachment
systems should kick into action when individuals are
under stress. In this research, the female members of
dating couples were initially stressed (by being shown
some fearsome-looking apparatus they were supposedly
about to be hooked up to in an experiment). The
chilled women then returned to sit with their partners
in a waiting room, during which time the couple’s
behavior was surreptitiously videotaped. The more
stressed the individual women became, the more their
attachment styles (assessed prior to the experiment)
seemed to influence their behavior; secure women
sought support whereas avoidant women avoided seeking
support from their partner, to the point of expressing
irritation if their partners asked what was wrong or
proffered support. Moreover, secure men offered more
emotional and physical support the more anxiety their
partners displayed, whereas the avoidant men became
less helpful and, again, actually expressed irritation.
Finally, people enjoy thinking, analyzing, writing,
and talking about their own and others intimate relationships
in a thoroughly conscious fashion. However,
research carried out by Mario Mikulincer (and many
others) has demonstrated that relationship attachment
working models, beliefs, and expectations also automatically
and unconsciously influence everyday relationship
judgments, decisions, and emotions.
Communication and
Relationship Interaction
The belief that good communication produces successful
relationships seems close to self-evident. Yet,
such unadorned claims are problematic from a scientific
perspective, partly because defining and measuring
the nature of (good) communication is anything but
straightforward. However, there is general agreement
that the way in which couples deal with the inevitable
conflict or problems that crop up in relationships, and

146———Close Relationships
how they communicate their subsequent thoughts and
feelings to one another, is a critical element (many
have suggested the critical element) in determining
the success of intimate relationships. Almost everyone
experiences dark or uncharitable emotions and
thoughts in intimate relationships. Two general competing
accounts have been advanced specifying how
individuals should best deal with such mental events:
the good communication model and the good management
model.
The good communication model is based around
three empirical postulates, describing what couples in
successful relationships are supposed to do with their
negative thoughts and emotions. First, they frankly
express their negative feelings and cognitions (albeit
in a diplomatic fashion). Second, they deal openly with
conflict—they don’t stonewall, withdraw, or go shopping.
Third, they honestly attempt to solve their problems.
If the problems are not dealt with, then it is
believed they will stick around and eat away at the
foundations of the relationship over time, or return at a
later date possibly in a more corrosive and lethal form.
The good management model is also based around
three empirical postulates. First, the regular and open
expression of negative thoughts and feelings is posited
as corrosive for relationships. Second, it is proposed
that exercising good communication skills often
involves compromise and accommodation to the partner’s
behavior (and not shooting from the hip with
uncharitable emotions and cognitions). Third, relationships
always have problems or issues that cannot be
solved. People in successful relationships supposedly
recognize them, accept them as insoluble, and put them
on the cognitive backburner. They don’t get obsessive
about them or fruitlessly struggle to solve them.
Both models possess some intuitive plausibility.
Moreover, each has a body of research evidence to call
upon in support. Buttressing the good communication
model, studies by John Gottman and others have found
that avoidance of conflict and less frequent expression
of negative emotions and thoughts in problem-solving
discussions are associated with lower relationship satisfaction
and higher rates of dissolution. In support of
the good management model of relationship success,
research has shown that those in more successful relationships
tend to sacrifice their own personal interests
and needs, swallow hard, and ignore or respond positively
to their partner’s irritating or negative behaviors.
This apparent paradox can be solved in several
ways. First, extensive research has shown that the way
in which people interpret and explain negative relationship
behavior plays an important role. If Bill’s
partner is short with him, Bill’s causal attributions will
determine the end result. If Bill attributes insensitivity
to his partner and blames her, he may well yell at her.
On the other hand, if Bill attributes her remark to a
cold she is suffering from, he is more likely to forgive
her lapse and show solicitude. Second, it may depend
on the compatibility between partners rather than on
the style of communication itself. There is evidence
that relationships in which one individual is vainly
attempting to discuss a problem (most often the woman)
while the other partner withdraws and stonewalls
(most often the man) are associated with both shortterm
and long-term unhappiness. Third, a social psychological
approach would suggest that the ability
of individuals to adjust their expression of negative
thoughts and feelings as a function of the situational
requirements might also play a decisive role.
The last point cited (i.e., the ability to strategically
alter levels of honesty and expression) is nicely illustrated
in the research on anger in relationships. The
expression of anger (within bounds) seems to be
mildly beneficial for relationships when couples are in
conflict-resolution mode. In this context, anger communicates
to one’s partner that (a) I am not a doormat;
(b) this is important to me, so listen to what I am saying;
(c) I care enough about the relationship to bother
exhibiting my concerns; and (d) will you “please” alter
your behavior! On the other hand, the expression of
even mild anger when the partner needs support and
soothing is particularly corrosive for relationships. In
this context, the lack of support combined with the
expression of mild irritation communicates (a) I don’t
care for my partner, or (b) I do not love my partner, or
(c) I cannot be counted on when the chips are down.
Thus, it may well be the ability to adjust communication
strategies and behaviors according to the contextual
demands that is critical in maintaining close
and successful relationships. Partners who adopt
either the good communication or the good management
strategy as a consistent default option, across
time and across social contexts, will have fewer psychological
resources to cope with the inevitable relationship
hurdles thrown across their paths. Of course
there are two people to consider in intimate relationships,
so the way in which couples negotiate and harmonize
their individual communicative styles will be
an important ingredient in determining relationship
success. However, one relationship size does not fit

all. There exist a range of relationship communication
styles that all appear to be successful, but which are
strikingly different from one another.
Communication style is important in predicting relationship
success, but it is clearly not the only important
factor. A large body of research has accumulated that
documents the best predictors of relationship happiness
and longevity. Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence
that similarity is an important factor is mixed, with many
studies reporting null results, although (reflecting the
power of the relationship mind) a well-replicated finding
shows that couples who perceive themselves as more
similar are considerably happier with their relationships.
The two most powerful predictors of relationship
success are more positive perceptions of relationship
quality and more positive interactional behavior when
problems are being discussed or one partner needs help
or support. Measuring just these two factors enables
researchers to successfully predict from 80% to 90%
of couples who will stay together in marital or premarital
relationships.
Gender Differences
Well-documented gender differences in intimate relationships
can be summarized by four propositions.
First, women are more motivated and expert lay psychologists
than men in intimate relationships (e.g.,
women talk and think about relationships more than
men do and are more accurate at reading emotions and
thoughts in their partners than men are). Second, men
adopt a more proprietorial (ownership) attitude toward
women’s sexuality and reproductive behavior (e.g.,
men exhibit stronger sexual jealousy at hypothetical
or actual sexual infidelities). Third, men possess a
stronger and less malleable sex drive and a stronger
orientation toward short-term sexual liaisons than
do women (e.g., men masturbate more and have more
frequent sexual desires than do women). Fourth,
women are more focused on the level of investment in
intimate relationships than are men (e.g., women rate
status and resources in potential mates as more important
than do men).
The origin of these gender differences remains a
controversial issue. Evolutionary psychologists argue
that they are linked to biological adaptations derived
from gender differences in investment in children
(women invest more), differences in the opportunity
to pass on genes (men have greater opportunity),
and uncertainty about who is the biological parent of
Close Relationships———147
children (for men but obviously not for women). Some
theorists, in contrast, posit that culture is the main driving
force behind gender differences. Of course, these
are not either-or options, the most sensible conclusion
being that both factors are important in explaining gender
differences in intimate relationships.
Some caveats are in order. First, there are substantial
within-gender differences for all four of these
aspects that are typically greater than the betweengender
differences. This pattern typically produces massive
overlap in the distributions of men and women.
For example, Gangestad and Simpson estimated that
approximately 30% of men are more opposed to casual
sex than are average women (in spite of men overall
exhibiting more approval of casual sex than women).
Second, men and women are often strikingly similar in
their aspirations, beliefs, expectations, and behavior in
intimate relationships. And, finally, as previously
pointed out, gender differences come and go in magnitude
depending on the circumstances.
Conclusions
The public is sometimes derisive of social psychologists’
study of love and research questions like “Does
good communication make for successful relationships?”
They may believe that common sense already
provides what people need to know about love. Either
that, or they claim that romantic love is a mystery
nobody can explain. These common beliefs are false.
It does not pay to be overly confident about maxims
learned at one’s caregiver’s knee or garnered from the
latest column one has read about relationships in a magazine.
Some popular stereotypes about relationships are
true, others are false, and many are half-truths.
On the other hand, lay beliefs or lay theories
should not be dispensed with automatically as unscientific
rubbish. After all, laypeople share the same set
of aims with scientists, namely, to explain, predict,
and control their own relationships. Psychological
folk theories and aphorisms concerned with love and
relationships have developed over thousands of years.
Given that humans are still here and prospering, it is
unlikely, to say the least, that such lay theories should
turn out to be utterly false and therefore useless as
tools for people to use for predicting, explaining, and
controlling their own relationships. Moreover, even if
commonsense theories or maxims are false, this does
not mean that they are not worthy of scientific study.
False beliefs cause behavior every bit as much as true

148———Cognitive Consistency
beliefs do. Thus, (social) psychologists who wish to
explain relationship behavior or cognition are forced
to take the existence of commonsense beliefs and theories
into account, even if such beliefs are false.
The social psychology of close relationships has a
dual role. It increases understanding of intimate relationships
while simultaneously contributing to scientific
understanding of the basic building blocks of
psychology: cognition, affect, and behavior. And this
is simply because so much of human cognition, emotion,
and behavior is intensely interpersonal in nature.
Garth Fletcher
See also Attachment Styles; Attachment Theory; Attraction;
Evolutionary Psychology; Intimacy; Love; Triangular
Theory of Love
Further Readings
Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of
human mating. New York: Basic Books.
Fletcher, G. J. O. (2002). The new science of intimate
relationships. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Rholes, W. S., & Simpson, J. A. (Eds.). (2006). Attachment
theory and close relationships. New York: Guilford Press.
Vangelisti, A., & Perlman, D. (Eds.). (2006). The Cambridge
handbook of personal relationships. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY
Definition
1. You have a friend named Jeff who likes to smoke cigarettes
regularly. After attending a lecture on the
grave cause–effect relationship between smoking and
cancer, he quits. Why?
2. This evening, you will be meeting with two people,
Chris and Jean. You really like Chris, but you don’t
like Jean. However, Chris really likes Jean. Over the
course of the evening, do you think that your attitude
toward Jean will change?
3. About 50 years ago, a small group of people were told
by a spaceman that the world was going to end. They
were also told that at an appointed date and time
(December 21, at midnight), a “visitor” would come
and take them to a spaceship to be saved from the
pending cataclysm. The small group prepared for their
departure for many weeks. When midnight struck on
the December 21, nothing happened. Nobody came,
nor did the world come to an end. Do you think these
outcomes changed their beliefs?
In these three situations, the concept of cognitive
consistency may be used to predict and explain the
various outcomes. Given the assumption that pleasant
psychological states (i.e., balanced states) are preferred
over those that are unpleasant,
cognitive consistency can be defined as the concept
that individuals have a preference for their thoughts,
beliefs, knowledges, opinions, attitudes, and intents
to be congruent, which is to say that they don’t contradict
each other. Further, these facets should be
congruent with how individuals see themselves and
their subsequent behaviors. Incongruency or asymmetry
leads to tension and unpleasant psychological
states, and individuals will seek change in order to
reach congruency, reduce tension, and achieve psychological
balance.
Within this definition, the term cognitive refers to
“thoughts, beliefs, knowledges, opinions, attitudes,
and intents.” (The word cognitive is roughly equivalent
to the word mental.) Thus, the term is defined rather
broadly and encompasses almost anything that humans
hold consciously. The term consistency refers to consistency
across cognitions, meaning that cognitions
should be in agreement, symmetrical, balanced, or
congruent. Cognitions that are conflicting (asymmetrical)
place individuals in an unpleasant psychological
state. Since pleasant states are preferred, individuals
experience a pressure to have these conflicting cognitions
resolved, and they take action to reduce tension
and reach psychological balance.
Cognitive consistency is one of the earliest concepts
associated with social psychology. Fritz Heider
is typically credited with first noting, in 1946, the concept
within social psychological theory. However, in
the 1950s, a flurry of psychological theory incorporated
the term, with various applications and improvisations.
Pioneering social psychology figures such as
Leon Festinger, Fritz Heider, Theodore Newcomb,
and Charles Osgood all produced theories incorporating
cognitive consistency and supportive research.
It is these theorists and their work which form the
core group of cognitive consistency theories, including

cognitive dissonance (Festinger), balance or p-o-x
theory (Heider), the A-B-X system (Newcomb), and
the principle of congruity (Osgood). Beyond this core
group, a host of other theorists have continued to
incorporate the concept. Over the years, cognitive
consistency, especially Festinger’s theory of cognitive
dissonance, has produced a wide body of research in
both laboratory and applied settings, and has been
shown to be valid and robust. It is a key concept within
all social psychology textbooks, especially regarding
attitude change, and continues to be a studied commodity
within social psychology and related fields.
To help illustrate the concept, take a look at the
examples from the beginning of this section. Scenario
1 is one of the simplest applications of cognitive consistency.
Your friend Jeff likes to smoke, and prior to
attending the health lecture, this attitude was not in
conflict. However, after attending a lecture on the
health consequences of smoking, his enjoyment of
smoking and knowledge about the negative health
effects of smoking are now in conflict. Holding these
two contradictory beliefs creates tension, which leads
Jeff to want to reduce the tension. To do this, he quits
smoking, thereby regaining balance. You may be asking,
“Can’t Jeff choose to smoke anyway, and ignore
the health consequences?” That is indeed an option—to
reduce the tension between the conflicting cognitions,
Jeff could deny the validity of the health consequences
of smoking to reach balance.
Scenario 2 is an application of Heider’s balance
theory. Balance theory suggests that cognitive consistency
or balance is expected across the three entities
(viewed as a unit): the person (p), another person (o),
and an attitude object (x). Within Scenario 2, there is
a lack of consistency (i.e., the “unit” is out of balance).
You like Chris but dislike Jean. However, Chris
likes Jean. This tension must be resolved. You can
either (a) decide to dislike Chris, or (b) decide to like
Jean. Either choice will lead to balancing the system.
Ultimately, if Chris is a good friend, you may decide
to take a liking toward Jean at the end of the evening.
Scenario 3 is loosely based on a true story described
in the book When Prophecy Fails (by Leon Festinger
and colleagues). After the visitor fails to arrive at midnight,
the group does not abandon their beliefs.
Instead, they adopt various reasons for the person not
showing, and hence their beliefs stay in tact. From a
cognitive consistency standpoint, this makes sense.
The reality of the visitor failing to arrive conflicts with
what they had vehemently believed. The cognitive
discomfort (called dissonance, according to Festinger)
resulting from this conflict subsequently led to various
explanations being adopted by members of the
group to bolster their earlier beliefs. Even days afterward,
some members refused to accept the reality that
there was never going to be a visitor and that the
world was not going to end.
William D. Marelich
See also Balance Theory; Cognitive Dissonance Theory
Further Readings
Cognitive Dissonance Theory———149
Festinger, L., Rieken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When
prophecy fails: A social and psychological study of a
modern group that predicted the destruction of the world.
New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Oskamp, S. (1991). Attitudes and opinions (2nd ed.).
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Shaw, M. E., & Constanzo, P. R. (1982). Theories of social
psychology (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Simon, D., Snow, C. J., Read, S. J. (2004). The redux of
cognitive consistency theories: Evidence judgments by
constraint satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 86, 814–837.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE THEORY
Definition
Introduced by Leon Festinger in 1957—and since
that time debated, refined, and debated again by
psychologists—cognitive dissonance is defined as the
aversive state of arousal that occurs when a person
holds two or more cognitions that are inconsistent
with each other. The concept of dissonance was once
enormously controversial, but its support through five
decades of research has made it one of the most widely
accepted concepts in social psychology.
Cognitive dissonance can explain a variety of ordinary
and extraordinary events in our social lives.
Indeed, for a concept to have as long and active a “shelf
life” as dissonance, it must either help us see our social
world differently, help us to understand why certain
phenomena occur, or allow us to make (and confirm)
interesting and nonobvious predictions about human
nature. The theory of cognitive dissonance has accomplished
all three.

150———Cognitive Dissonance Theory
To break the definition into its components, let us
consider first what is meant by inconsistent cognitions,
for it is the simultaneous holding of inconsistent cognitions
that gives rise to the experience of dissonance.
Festinger thought of a cognition as any piece of knowledge
that we have. We can have knowledge about out
beliefs, our behavior, our feelings, or about the state of
the environment. We may have dozens of cognitions of
which we are at least dimly aware at any moment in
time and innumerable more of which we can become
aware, once our attention or memory is set in motion.
Most of the cognitions that we have are not related
to each other in any obvious way. For example, my
knowledge that I am hungry and my knowledge that
the Earth travels around the Sun are two cognitions,
but my hunger bears no relationship to the trajectory of
the planets. However, some cognitions are directly
related. My knowledge that I am hungry is very much
related to my behavior at the local restaurant in which
I am sitting. If I order a meal, the knowledge of that
behavior is related to my knowledge that I’m hungry.
In fact, it is quite consistent with my hunger. However,
if I decide to forego the meal, or simply order a cup of
coffee, my ordering behavior is again related to my
hunger, but this time it is inconsistent.
Cognitive dissonance is all about the consequences
of inconsistency. We prefer consistency to inconsistency
and work hard to maintain (or restore) consistency
among our cognitions. Failing to order food to
allay my hunger at the restaurant, I may convince
myself that I was not really that hungry, or that the
restaurant’s food was bad. In this way, the inconsistency
between my knowledge of my hunger and the
decision not to purchase food would seem more consistent.
In many ways, the need to restore consistency
is similar to the familiar concept of rationalization—
indeed, rationalization is one way to deal with the
dilemma posed by inconsistent cognitions.
Formally, the state of cognitive dissonance occurs
when a person holds one cognition that follows from
the obverse of another cognition. For example, not
ordering food at the restaurant would follow from the
obverse or opposite of being hungry. If I were full, I
would not be expected to order food. But I was not
full, and thus the decision to refrain from eating would
follow from the obverse of my knowledge that I was
hungry. The condition for dissonance is met.
How does cognitive dissonance feel? Dissonance is
experienced as an unpleasant emotion, akin to feeling
uncomfortable, bothered, or tense. In addition, dissonance
is motivational. When we experience dissonance,
we are motivated to reduce it, much like the way we
are motivated to reduce physical drives such as hunger
and thirst. The more dissonance we experience, the
more we are motivated to find a way to reduce it. This
need can lead to the kinds of rationalizing behaviors,
such as those encountered in the restaurant scenario.
Not ordering food when hungry creates a state of cognitive
dissonance. Rationalizing, by convincing ourselves
that we were not so hungry after all, reduces the
inconsistency and thereby reduces the unpleasant state
of dissonance.
The History of Dissonance Research:
Predictions and Findings
Choices, Choices
The occasions that cause us to experience dissonance
are ubiquitous. Whenever we make a choice,
there is the potential for dissonance. Imagine that you
are purchasing an automobile. It is a tough choice with
many alternatives from which to choose. Let’s say you
have narrowed the field to your two favorite options: a
slightly used BMW and a brand-new Neon. You consider
the pros and cons of each car. The BMW is fast,
gorgeous, and attracts positive attention. The Neon is
new, so you can get a full selection of colors and a multiyear
warranty. On the other hand, the BMW, being
old, is more likely to break down, the cost of repairs is
high, and you must take it in green. The downside of
the Neon, you believe, is that it is slow, less attractive,
and handles sluggishly. You choose the BMW, satisfied
that, on balance, it provided more of what you were
looking for than the Neon.
But wait...you have now selected a car that has
several negative features. What if it breaks down?
What if your friends hate the color green? And what do
you do about the features of the Neon that you are giving
up? You liked the warranty, and now you don’t
have it. You liked the price, but you’ve now spent more
money buying the BMW. All of these thoughts are
inconsistent with your decision to buy the BMW.
According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, you
experience an unpleasant tension. Each time you think
of a cognition that supported the Neon over the BMW,
your tension rises. You are driven to reduce it. What
can you do? Here are some possibilities: (a) You can

increase the importance of some of the factors that
caused you to like the BMW in the first place. Suddenly,
speed seems like the most important dimension
you can think of when it comes to buying a car. (b) You
can reduce the importance of some of the good features
of the Neon. For example, you decide that warranties
are often deceptive and the parts of cars that
break are usually not covered. (c) You can add cognitions
that support your choice that you hadn’t considered
previously. You may think about how many more
people will be friends with you when you drive the
BMW or how many people would have thought you
were dull if you had picked the Neon. In the end, you
may perform any or all of the cognitive changes that
help you reduce your dissonance. And there is a measurable
consequence to these cognitive changes. When
you made your choice, you liked the BMW a bit more
than you liked the Neon. By the time you are finished
with your rationalizations and distortions that have
been at the service of reducing cognitive dissonance,
you will like the BMW much better than the (now)
boring little Neon!
The predictions in the automobile purchasing scenario
were confirmed in the first reported laboratory
research on cognitive dissonance. In his 1956 study,
Jack W. Brehm asked consumers to rate a variety of
household items such as blenders and toasters. He told
the consumers that they would be able to take home
one of two items from the longer list of products. To
create a high degree of dissonance, similar to the automobile
example, Brehm asked the participants to
choose between two highly attractive, closely related
products. Brehm predicted that, just like the hypothetical
BMW example, the consumers would rate the
chosen product much more highly than they had rated
it previously, and that they would downgrade the
product that they did not choose. This is exactly what
happened.
Changing Your Attitudes for Less
Here is another “thought experiment”: Imagine that
a researcher asks you to write an essay in which you
argue that tuition rates at public and private colleges
should increase. The researcher tells you that the Dean
of your college is trying to understand the arguments
in favor of and against tuition increases, and you have
been asked to write in favor. You think to yourself that
this would be difficult because you do not want to see
Cognitive Dissonance Theory———151
tuition rates increase. The researcher tells you that you
can decide whether or not to write the essay, but he
would really appreciate your doing it. You think it
over and then agree. Now, you have a cognitive dissonance
dilemma. Writing an essay in favor of a tuition
increase is discrepant with your negative attitude
about tuition. But you agreed that you would write it.
This scenario should arouse dissonance. What can you
do? Among the alternatives at your disposal is to
decide that you really are not against tuition increases
after all. If you actually believe that it is okay to raise
tuition rates, then there will not be any cognitive dissonance
resulting from your writing the essay.
Similarly, it may be that politicians who are cajoled to
support issues that they initially do not believe suffer
the aversive state of dissonance and reduce it by coming
to believe the position that they had just advocated—
even though they did not believe it when they agreed
to make the speech.
Once again, research in the laboratory demonstrated
the truth of this prediction. Just as in the previous
scenario, Festinger and his student, J. Merrill
Carlsmith, showed that college students who agreed to
make a speech with which they initially disagreed
came to believe in the position they advocated following
the speech. But there was more to this scenario:
The students were given a monetary incentive to say
what they did not believe. Would the magnitude of the
incentive affect attitude change? Would speakers who
received a large reward for making such a statement
come to believe it more than students who received
only a small token? Such a prediction may seem reasonable
from what is known about the usual effects of
rewards. Pigeons, rodents, and even humans have been
shown to learn and act based on the magnitude of
reward they receive for their behavior. However, dissonance
theory makes a startling and nonobvious
prediction—the lower the reward, the greater will be
the attitude change. The magnitude of cognitive dissonance
is increased by the magnitude and importance
of the inconsistent cognitions a person holds, but it is
reduced by the magnitude and importance of the consistent
cognitions. Knowing that you made a speech
that is contrary to your opinion is a cognition inconsistent
with your opinion. On the other hand, receiving
a bundle of money as a reward for the speech is a
cognition quite consistent with giving the speech. The
higher the reward is, the more important consistent cognition
becomes. Therefore, making a counterattitudinal

152———Cognitive Dissonance Theory
speech for a large reward results in less overall dissonance
than making the same speech for a small reward.
This is what Festinger and Carlsmith found: The lower
the reward was for making the speech, the greater the
attitude change was in favor of tuition increase. The
notion that people change their attitude following
counterattitudinal behavior has become known as the
psychology of induced compliance. The finding that
attitude change increases as the magnitude of the
inducement decreases is perhaps the most telling signature
that cognitive dissonance has been aroused.
To Suffer Is to Love
Imagine that you have decided to join a sorority or
fraternity at your college. You know that you have to
undergo some form of pledging ritual to join. The
pledging will not be fun and may be uncomfortable
and embarrassing, but you decide to do it. Will the
pledging affect your view of how attractive the sorority
or fraternity is? The theory of cognitive dissonance
makes another bold and nonobvious prediction: The
greater is the suffering involved in the pledging, the
more you will be motivated to like the club you are trying
to enter. The knowledge that you chose to endure
some degree of discomfort and unpleasantness is discrepant
with your typical desire to have pleasant rather
than difficult experiences. However, in this scenario,
there is a reason that you engaged in a difficult, lessthan-pleasant
pledging ritual: You wanted to join the
group. Wanting to be a member of the group is the cognition
that makes your suffering seem to make sense.
Any dissonance created by your decision to endure the
pledging is explained or justified by how enjoyable it
will be to participate in the group. The more uncomfortable
the group’s pledging procedure is, the more
you need to find a reason for enduring it. And the justification
can be made very compelling by distorting
how good you think the group really is. Therefore, the
prediction from cognitive dissonance theory is that the
act of pledging will make the group seem attractive—
and the more difficult or noxious the pledging is, the
more attractive the group will seem. This phenomenon
has been called effort justification.
Two social psychologists, Elliot Aronson and
Judson Mills, tested the logic of effort justification in
an experiment in which they had students undergo a
screening test to join a group that was discussing the
topic of sex. For some students, the screening was
made avowedly difficult and embarrassing; for other
students, the screening was less so. Although the group
and the group members were precisely the same, those
students who had the more embarrassing and difficult
screening found the group discussion to be more interesting
and the group members to be more attractive.
By convincing themselves that the group was wonderful,
the students were able to reduce the dissonance
that had been aroused by their volunteering to engage
in a difficult, embarrassing screening.
Volunteering to engage in difficult, effortful tasks
happens frequently in our lives. Courses we choose to
take may require a great deal of preparation, reading,
and homework. Sports programs may require us to
spend considerable amounts of time in training and in
enduring the outbursts of demanding coaches. Yet, the
very act of agreeing to participate in such effort has a
positive consequence: It pushes us to like the activity
for which we suffered.
Cognitive Dissonance and Social Life
Cognitive dissonance is ubiquitous. We like to think
of ourselves as psychologically consistent human
beings—that we act in ways that are consistent with our
attitudes and that our attitudes are typically consistent
with each other. We like to think that we make good
choices and act in our own best interests. However, life
often throws us curves that create inconsistency. The
choices we make often lead us to dilemmas in which
we need to relinquish some aspects of a rejected alternative
that we would really like or to accept aspects of
our chosen alternative that we would rather not have
to accept. Sometimes, we find ourselves engaged in
effortful activities that make little sense or find that we
have to say or do things that do not quite fit with our
private attitudes. These occasions cause us to experience
dissonance—that uncomfortable state of tension
that Festinger introduced in 1957. We do not live with
the tension; rather, we take action to reduce it. And that
is what is so interesting about cognitive dissonance. In
our effort to reduce dissonance, we come to distort our
choices to make them seem better, we come to like
what we have suffered to attain, and we change our attitudes
to fit our behaviors. Discovering and explaining
the processes behind these occasions pervading our
social life has been the hallmark of research on the theory
of cognitive dissonance.
Joel Cooper
Amir Goren

See also Attitude Change; Attitudes; Cognitive Consistency;
Effort Justification
Further Readings
Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959). The effect of severity of
initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and
Social Psychology, 59, 177–181.
Brehm, J. W. (1956). Postdecision changes in the desirability
of alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 52, 384–389.
Cooper, J., & Fazio, R. H. (1984). A new look at dissonance
theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental
social psychology (Vol. 17, pp. 229–262). New York:
Academic Press.
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive
consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology, 58, 203–210.
COHESIVENESS, GROUP
Definition
Cohesiveness refers to the degree of unity or “we-ness”
in a group. More formally, cohesiveness denotes the
strength of all ties that link individuals to a group. These
ties can be social or task oriented in nature. Specifically,
a group that is tied together by mutual friendship, caring,
or personal liking is displaying social cohesiveness.
A group that is tied together by shared goals or responsibilities
is displaying task cohesiveness. Social and task
cohesiveness can occur at the same time, but they do not
have to. For example, a group of friends may be very
cohesive just because they enjoy spending time together,
regardless of whether or not they share similar goals.
Conversely, a hockey team may be very cohesive, without
liking each other personally, because the players
strongly pursue a common objective.
Consequences of Cohesiveness
A high degree of cohesiveness is a double-edged
sword. Positive consequences include higher commitment
to, and responsibility for, the group. Also, satisfaction
with the group is higher within cohesive groups.
Furthermore, there is a positive relationship between
the degree of cohesiveness and the performance of a
group. Although the direction of causality between
performance and cohesiveness is still disputed (in
fact, cohesiveness and performance seem to mutually
influence one another), cohesive groups are likely to
outperform noncohesive ones if the following two
preconditions are met: First, the group has to be tied
together by task (rather than social) cohesiveness.
Second, the norms and standards in the group have to
encourage excellence. Indeed, if the norm in a group
encourages low performance, increasing cohesiveness
will result in lower instead of higher performance.
Thus, depending on the norms present in a group,
the cohesiveness–performance link can be beneficial
or detrimental. Aside from potentially worse performance,
negative consequences of cohesiveness entail
increased conformity and pressure toward unanimity.
Cohesiveness may thus lead to avoidance of disagreement,
groupthink, and hence bad decision making.
Another negative consequence of particularly social
cohesiveness may be maladaptive behavior if the composition
of a group is changed. Indeed, in cases in
which cohesiveness is high and mainly due to personal
liking, changes in the group’s structure may
result in disengagement of group members.
Enhancing Group Cohesiveness
Social cohesiveness can be enhanced by increasing
liking and attraction among group members. Liking
can be enhanced, for example, by increasing similarity
of group members (people like those who are
similar to them or share similar experiences). Task
cohesiveness can be enhanced by emphasizing similar
goals and ensuring that the pursued goals are important
to all members. Both social and task cohesiveness
can be promoted by encouraging voluntary interaction
among group members or by creating a unique and
attractive identity of the group, for example, by introducing
a common logo or uniform. Finally, cohesiveness
is generally larger in small groups.
Rainer Greifeneder
Svenja K. Schattka
See also Conformity; Groupthink; Norms, Prescriptive and
Descriptive
Further Readings
Cohesiveness, Group———153
Hogg, M. A. (1992). The social psychology of group
cohesiveness: From attraction to social identity.
New York: Harvester.

154———Collective Self
Mullen, B., & Copper, C. (1994). The relation between group
cohesiveness and performance: An integration.
Psychological Bulletin, 115(2), 210–227.
COLLECTIVE SELF
Definition
The collective self consists of those aspects of the self
that are based on memberships in social groups or categories.
It refers to a perception of self as an interchangeable
exemplar of some social category rather
than a perception of self as a unique person. The collective
self is based on impersonal bonds to others that
are derived from the shared identification with a social
group. Those bonds do not necessarily require close
personal relationships between group members. The
collective self-concept is composed of attributes that
one shares with members of the group to which one
belongs (the ingroup). That is, it includes those aspects
of the self-concept that differentiate ingroup members
from members of relevant outgroups. Commonalities
with groups may be based on stable characteristics,
such as race or gender, or on achieved states, such as
occupation or party membership.
For example, a person may hold a self-definition of
being an environmentalist. When this collective selfaspect
becomes relevant, similarities with other environmentalists
(e.g., a sense of responsibility for the
environment) are emphasized, whereas unique characteristics
of the person (e.g., being honest) move to the
background. It is not essential for self-definition that
the individual has close personal relationships with
other environmentalists, as collective identity is based
on the common identification with the group of environmentalists.
The collective self-concept comprises
characteristics that the person shares with other environmentalists
and that differentiate environmentalists
from other people (e.g., relying on public transportation
vs. using cars, or voting behavior).
Background
Marilynn Brewer and Wendi Gardner suggested a theoretical
framework that encompasses three levels of
self-definition: personal self, relational self, and collective
self. The collective self refers to the representation
of self at the group level (e.g., “I am a student of
psychology”). It corresponds to the concept of “social
identity” as described in social identity theory and selfcategorization
theory. Recently the term collective self
has been preferred to the term social identity, as all
aspects of the self are socially influenced. The collective
self can be distinguished from the personal self
and the relational self. The personal self concerns the
definition of self at the individual level (e.g., “I am
smart”); it refers to characteristics of the self (e.g., traits
or behavior) that one believes to be unique to the self.
The relational self alludes to the interpersonal level; it
is derived from relationships with significant others
(e.g., “I am a daughter”). The term collective self corresponds
to the interdependent self as defined by Hazel
Markus and Shinobu Kitayama in their analysis of cultural
differences between self-concepts in Japan and
the United States. The relational self refers to people to
whom one feels emotionally attached, such as close
friends or family members. In contrast, the collective
self may include people whom one has never met
but with whom one shares a common attribute, such as
occupation or gender.
Richard Ashmore, Kay Deaux, and Tracy
McLaughlin-Volpe developed a framework which
distinguishes elements of collective identity: selfcategorization,
evaluation, importance, attachment,
social embeddedness, behavioral involvement, and content
and meaning. Self-categorization refers to identifying
the self as a member of a particular social group.
It is the basis for the other dimensions of collective
identity. Social categorization has been assumed to be
an automatic process that occurs as soon as people
have a basis for grouping individuals into categories.
But often there are many categories that may be used
in any given situation (e.g., “student,” “woman,”
“Democrat”). Relevant goals in a situation are among
the factors that determine the type of categorization
occurring.
The dimension of evaluation represents the positive
or negative attitude that a person has toward a social
category. Accordingly, collective self-esteem is the
extent to which individuals evaluate their social groups
positively. Rija Luhtanen and Jennifer Crocker developed
a collective self-esteem scale that comprises four
subscales: (1) private collective self-esteem (i.e., the
extent to which individuals feel positively about their
social groups), (2) public collective self-esteem (i.e.,
the extent to which individuals believe that others evaluate
their social groups positively), (3) membership
esteem (i.e., the extent to which individuals believe

they are worthy members of their social groups), and
(4) importance to identity (i.e., the extent to which
individuals believe their social groups are an important
part of their self-concept).
The framework includes further elements that cannot
be addressed in detail here, for example, the importance
of a particular group membership to a person’s
overall self-concept, or attachment, defined as a feeling
of affective involvement and belonging to a group.
Importance of Topic
A variety of behaviors and conditions can be predicted
from elements of collective identity. The collective self
has been linked to individuals’ reactions and behaviors
toward other people, especially toward members of
other groups. It plays an important role in group perception
and behavior, for example, prejudice, intergroup
stereotyping, and discrimination. According to
social identity theory, individuals seek to achieve and
maintain a positive social identity (i.e., collective selfesteem)
by establishing favorable comparisons between
their own groups and outgroups. To achieve this, people
discriminate against or derogate outgroup members relative
to ingroup members. It has been found that the
mere act of categorizing oneself as a group member is
sufficient to lead people to evaluate ingroup members
more positively than others and to allocate more rewards
to them than to members of other groups.
Elements of the collective self also predict outcomes
at the individual level. For example, collective
self-esteem is related to psychological well-being
(e.g., higher satisfaction with life, lower depression,
hopelessness, and burnout). Furthermore, there is evidence
for relationships between ethnic and more specific,
context-relevant identities and achievement.
Michela Schröder-Abé
Astrid Schütz
See also Independent Self-Construals; Interdependent Self-
Construals; Self; Self-Categorization Theory; Self-
Concept; Self-Esteem; Social Identity Theory
Further Readings
Ashmore, R. D., Deaux, K., & McLaughlin-Volpe, T. (2004).
An organizing framework for collective identity:
Articulation and significance of multidimensionality.
Psychological Bulletin, 130, 80–114.
Brewer, M. B., & Gardner, W. (1996). Who is this “we“?
Levels of collective identity and self-representations.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 83–93.
Sedikides, C., & Brewer, M. B. (Eds.). (2001). Individual
self, relational self, collective self. Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
COLLECTIVISTIC CULTURES
Collectivistic Cultures———155
Definition
Social psychology researchers tend to think about cultures
as shared meaning systems that provide the
knowledge people need to function effectively in their
social environment. To see the importance of shared
meaning systems, imagine that you were in a different
culture where you did not know the language or the
customs. It would be quite difficult for you to function
in such a culture, at least until you learned these things.
It is only when you share knowledge with others that
you can communicate and interact with them effectively.
Because of this shared knowledge, people in a
culture are likely to have some similar ways of thinking
about the world, to perceive things in a similar way,
to have similar values and attitudes, to want similar
things, to have similar ways of interpreting events, and
to perform similar behaviors. This does not mean that
all people in a culture will be the same, but they are
more likely to be similar to each other than to people
from other cultures.
Keeping in mind what a culture is, now consider
how to define collectivistic cultures. Usually, collectivistic
cultures are contrasted with individualistic
ones, but there is no single definition. Rather, there are
several characteristics that people from collectivistic
cultures tend to have in common. In general, people in
collectivistic cultures tend to think of themselves as
interdependent (as strongly valuing harmonious relations)
with their groups such as families, coworkers,
country, and others. They benefit from their group
memberships, and in turn, they have a desire to make
sure that they benefit their group members. Consequently,
they are likely to give priority to group goals
over their personal goals. In general, people in collectivistic
cultures are more likely than people who are
not in collectivistic cultures to think about their group
memberships and to consider them when making decisions.
Some examples of collectivistic cultures include

156———Collectivistic Cultures
East Asians (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and others) and
Arabs (e.g., Egyptians, Syrians, and others).
Much evidence has accumulated showing that
people in collectivistic cultures define their self-concepts
(their concepts of who they are) relative to their group
memberships. For example, when these people are
asked to complete sentences beginning with “I am,”
they are more likely than other people to respond with
group memberships such as “I am a member of my
family,” “I am a Chinese person,” and others. People
from collectivistic cultures are also more likely than
other people to say that their group memberships play
an important role in how they think about themselves.
Because people in collectivistic cultures are interdependent
with each other, that is, they have influence
over each other and are influenced by each other. In
other words, people have power over each other, but
others also have power over them. This reinforces the
tendency to prioritize group goals over personal goals
because failure to do so can result in punishments
from the other members of the group, whereas the
pursuit of group goals can result in approval. The
power issue is clarified when one considers that
wealthy people tend to be less collectivistic than other
people, even in collectivistic cultures. This is because
wealthy people, to a greater extent than those who
are not wealthy, can buy what they want, relocate to
another area, and pursue other relationships. In short,
wealth can provide some (but not complete) protection
against social sanctions and thereby reduce the
need for collectivism.
There are several factors that can affect the degree
of collectivism in a culture. One such factor is the
homogeneity (sameness) of the group. The more similar
people in a group are to each other, the easier it is
for them to agree on the proper norms, and so they
will tend toward collectivism.
A second factor is the degree to which people need
each other to accomplish the task at hand. Suppose
that the task at hand is to feed one’s family. A person
in a highly technological society may be able to make
a good living as a computer programmer and rarely
have to interact with other people. However, a person
in an agricultural society—especially one in which the
production of food is a group effort—must interact
effectively with others. Such cultures will tend toward
collectivism.
A third factor is that, in some cultures, people have
more access to alternative groups than in other cultures.
In a culture where access to alternative groups
is restricted, one’s group has a great deal of ability to
reward or punish behavior, thereby increasing the tendency
toward collectivism. In contrast, to the extent
that there is access to other groups, the ability of any
particular group to reward or punish behavior decreases,
and so collectivism likewise decreases.
A fourth, and subtler factor, is the ease with which
particular self-concepts can be brought into consciousness
(this is often called accessibility). Much evidence
demonstrates that people in a wide variety of cultures
have both a private self-concept (where thoughts
about their traits and behaviors are stored) and a collective
self-concept (where thoughts about group
memberships are stored), though these concepts may
not be equally likely to be accessed. It is quite easy to
perform experiments where one or the other of these
self-concepts is made more accessible by an experimental
manipulation. For example, the collective selfconcept
can be made more accessible by asking
people to think about how they are similar to their
family and friends. The result of making the collective
self-concept more accessible is that people behave in
a more collectivistic manner. Thus, if people in a culture
are exposed to stimuli that increase the accessibility
of their collective self-concepts, they will tend
toward collectivistic behaviors.
A fifth factor involves personality. Some people
tend to value group memberships more than others. If
there are many such people in a particular area, the
culture will tend toward collectivism. Similarly, some
people are more susceptible to social pressure than are
others, which again increases the tendency of the culture
toward collectivism.
Religion is sixth factor that has been shown to be
correlated with collectivism. As people become more
religious, they conform more to the practices of their
religious group and identify themselves more with
that group. In a word, they become more collectivistic.
But not all religions are the same in the extent to
which they promote conformity to religious prescriptions.
Also, some religions are more centralized than
others (e.g., Roman Catholics are more centralized
than Protestants), and more centralization of authority
leads to more collectivism. In religions where people
are encouraged to disagree (e.g., Reform Judaism), it
is less likely that religion will increase collectivism.
In summary, collectivism is a complicated idea that
can be affected by a variety of things and is correlated
with many other variables. In addition, there is no
single kind of collectivism; although many different

cultures are categorized as collectivistic, they differ
from each other in their degree of collectivism as well
as in many other ways. Despite these complications,
the notion of collectivism has been widely used in
social and cross-cultural psychology and is likely to
remain so for a long time to come.
David Trafimow
See also Accessibility; Conformity; Cultural Differences;
Culture; Independent Self-Construals; Interdependent
Self-Construals
Further Readings
Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1999). Social psychology
across cultures (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Trafimow, D., Triandis, H. C., & Goto, S. (1991). Some tests
of the distinction between the private self and the collective
self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
60, 649–655.
Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing
cultural contexts. Psychological Review, 96, 269–289.
COMMONS DILEMMA
See SOCIAL DILEMMAS
COMMUNAL RELATIONSHIPS
Definition
A communal relationship is one in which an individual
assumes responsibility for the welfare of his or her
partner. In these relationships, when the partner has a
specific need, wants support in striving toward a goal,
would enjoy being included in an activity, or simply
could use the reassurance of care, the other partner
strives to be responsive. Importantly, partners do so
with no strings attached. Common examples of communal
responsiveness are a mother providing lunch
to her child, a person providing encouragement to a
friend who is training to run in a marathon, or a person
giving his or her romantic partner a compliment. In
each case, the benefit enhances or maintains the welfare
of the recipient, and the recipient incurs no debt.
Communal Relationships———157
Communal relationships vary in strength. In very
strong communal relationships, one person assumes a
great deal of responsibility for the other person and
would do almost anything, unconditionally, to promote
his or her welfare. Parents often have very strong communal
relationships with their own children, putting their
child’s welfare above their own welfare and spending
years providing emotional and tangible support. In very
weak communal relationships, a person assumes just a
small amount of responsibility for another’s welfare;
yet, within the bounds of that small sense of responsibility,
the person is unconditionally responsive to the
other person. For instance, most people are willing to
tell even a stranger the time or give the stranger directions
with no expectation of repayment. Most communal
relationships, for instance those with friends, fall
somewhere in between these extremes of very high and
quite low communal strength.
People have implicit hierarchies of communal relationships
ordered according to the degree of communal
responsibility they feel for others. A person’s entire set
of hierarchically arranged communal relationships
may be shaped like a triangle with a wide base representing
the person’s many weak communal relationships
and a peak representing the person’s few very
strong ones. At the base are the many strangers and
passing acquaintances for whom small courtesies may
be provided without expecting a specific, precisely
equal repayment. Higher in the hierarchy, and fewer in
number, are relationships with colleagues and casual
friends, higher yet relationships with closer friends and
a variety of relatives. For many people, relationships
with best friends, immediate family members, and
romantic partners are near or at the top. The needs of
those higher in the hierarchy take precedence over the
needs of those lower in the hierarchy.
Although some communal relationships (e.g., that
with one’s own infant) may be universal and even dictated
by biology or social dictates, others are voluntary.
The exact nature of hierarchies will vary from person
to person and, certainly, from culture to culture.
Communal relationships can and often are symmetrical,
meaning that each person in the relationship
feels the same degree of communal responsibility
for the other. Friendships, sibling relationships, and
romantic relationships often (but not always) exemplify
symmetrical communal relationships. Other
communal relationships are asymmetrical, with one
member assuming more responsibility for the other
than vice versa. Perhaps the clearest example of an

158———Companionate Love
asymmetrical communal relationship is that which
exists between a parent and a newborn infant. The parent
typically assumes tremendous communal responsibility
for the infant; the infant assumes no communal
responsibility for the parent. As the child ages, the
asymmetry typically diminishes and, in the parent’s
old age, may reverse.
Although it might seem that a communal relationship
is necessarily an unselfish relationship, the basis
for communal relationships can be selfish as well. It is
the assumption of some degree of unconditional
responsibility for the welfare of another person that is
the marker of a communal relationship. However, one
can assume such responsibility for unselfish or selfish
reasons. For example, one may feel empathy for
another when needs arise and assume unconditional
responsibility for that person to alleviate their distress.
This is a seemingly unselfish reason for communal
responsiveness. However, one might assume communal
responsibility for rather selfish reasons as well.
For instance, one may be communally responsive to a
grumpy elderly relative because one fears criticism by
others if one does not do so. One may be unconditionally
responsive to a peer because one hopes (but cannot
require) that the peer will desire a symmetrical
communal relationships (friendship) and will be similarly
responsive to one’s own needs if and when such
needs arise. Such reasons are more selfish. It appears
likely that there is an evolutionary, as well as a cultural,
basis for the existence of communal relationships.
Communal relationships can be very short in duration,
such as when one gives a stranger directions with
no expectation of repayment, or very long term, as in
a typical parent’s relationship with his or her child. It
is, however, undoubtedly the case that the strength of
a communal relationship is positively correlated with
the length (and expected length) of that relationship.
Establishing and maintaining strong communal
relationships can be difficult. There is evidence that
people who are high in self-esteem and high in trust of
others are best able to sustain relationships that operate
primarily on a communal basis.
See also Exchange Relationships; Intimacy
Further Readings
Margaret Clark
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in
exchange and communal relationships. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 12–24.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between
communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is
not. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19,
684–691.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (2001). Behaving in such a way
as to maintain and enhance relationship satisfaction.
In J. H. Harvey & A. E. Wenzel (Eds.), Relationship
maintenance and enhancement (pp. 13–26). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Clark, M. S., & Monin, J. K. (2006). Giving and receiving
communal responsiveness as love. In R. J. Sternberg &
K. Weis (Eds.), The new psychology of love (pp. 200–223).
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
COMMUNAL SHARING
See RELATIONAL MODELS THEORY
COMPANIONATE LOVE
Definition
Companionate love refers to a variety of love that is
durable, fairly slow to develop, and characterized by
interdependence and feelings of affection, intimacy,
and commitment. Companionate love is also known
as affectionate love, friendship-based love, or attachment.
Because it requires time to develop fully, this
kind of love is often seen between very close friends
or romantic partners who have been together for a
long time.
Measurement
Researchers typically measure companionate love using
self-report methods, which involve asking people to
respond to questions about their feelings for a specific
other person (e.g., a friend, dating partner, or spouse).
People might simply rate their level of companionate
love for the other person: “How much warm, caring,
affectionate love do you feel for your partner?”
Alternately, people might report how much they
experience of the various components of companionate
love (affection, intimacy, commitment, etc.); in
this case, the researcher would add up their responses
and calculate a total love score.

Research
Research provides evidence that companionate love is
primarily a positive experience for both men and
women. For example, when people are asked to think
about companionate love and identify its important
features, they uniformly specify positive feelings like
“trust,” “caring,” “respect,” “tolerance,” “loyalty,” and
“friendship.” Similarly, research conducted with dating
couples reveals that positive emotions are strongly
associated with the amount of companionate love that
the couples experience. Specifically, the greater the
amount of companionate love that partners feel for
each other, the more they report liking and trusting
one another and the more satisfying they find their
relationship.
Scientists also have found evidence that companionate
love is strong and durable. Not only do companionate
lovers report feeling extremely committed to each
other and desirous of maintaining their relationships, but
levels of companionate love tend to remain stable over
time within dating couples. Companionate love may
even grow stronger over time because it is based on intimacy
processes (such as caring and attachment) that
require time to develop fully. The ability to withstand—
and perhaps grow stronger over—the passage of time is
one feature that distinguishes companionate love from
other, more fragile varieties of love, including passionate
or romantic love.
Current Directions
Researchers have begun to explore the biochemistry
of companionate love. Two peptide hormones have come
under scrutiny—oxytocin and vasopressin. Because
these hormones are associated with caregiving behavior
in nonhuman mammals, some scientists have
hypothesized that they are involved in the ability to
form attachments and experience companionate love.
As of yet, this supposition remains speculative.
See also Attachment Theory; Love
Further Readings
Pamela C. Regan
Regan, P. C. (2000). Love relationships. In L. T. Szuchman &
F. Muscarella (Eds.), Psychological perspectives on
human sexuality (pp. 232–282). New York: Wiley.
Sprecher, S., & Regan, P. C. (1998). Passionate and
companionate love in courting and young married
couples. Sociological Inquiry, 68, 163–185.
COMPASSION
Definition
Compassion is the emotion one experiences when
feeling concern for another’s suffering and desiring to
enhance that individual’s welfare. It is different from
empathy, which refers to the mirroring or understanding
of another’s response; from pity, which refers to
feelings of concern for someone weaker than the self;
and from agape, which refers to the love of humanity.
Analysis
Compassion———159
Across numerous ethical and spiritual traditions, compassion
is considered a cardinal virtue. During the age
of enlightenment, philosophers argued that some
force—compassion—bound people together in cooperative
communities. Social psychologists have largely
concerned themselves with a few questions concerning
compassion. A first occurs within the altruism debate:
Does compassion motivate altruistic behavior? A second
question finds its relevance within the study of
emotion: Is compassion an emotion? A third is within
evolutionary theory: Why does compassion exist?
How did it evolve? Answers to these three questions
paint a fascinating picture of the most social of
emotions—compassion.
The study of altruistic behavior has examined the
panoply of motives guiding altruistic and charitable
action. Several are self-serving, including the desire to
reduce personal distress in response to another’s suffering
or the goal of receiving social rewards for being
helpful. C. Daniel Batson has proposed that altruistic
behavior can also be motivated by an other-oriented
state called empathic concern, which closely resembles
the definition of compassion. Does this state
motivate altruistic behavior? Indeed it does.
Over the years, Batson has conducted several studies
using the easy escape paradigm. In this paradigm, a
participant witnesses another participant suffer (e.g.,
by receiving painful shocks) and is given the opportunity
to help. As the experiment unfolds, two motives
are pitted against one another: First the participant is
led to feel compassion for the suffering individual but
is also allowed to pursue the self-interested course of
action by simply leaving the study (hence the easy
escape name). If altruistic behavior is observed, one
can infer that compassion produces altruistic actions.
Indeed, several studies indicate that when in these

160———Compassion
circumstances, people feeling compassion will forego
the self-interested course of action and help, even
though they must endure shocks and even when their
altruistic acts will not be known by anyone. Compassion
is a proximal motive of altruistic action.
What, then, are the properties of the emotion compassion?
Guided by studies of emotion, which date
back to Darwin (who argued that sympathy, or compassion,
is the central moral emotion), researchers
have compared compassion with related emotions like
sadness, love, or distress. From these studies it is clear
that unintended suffering is an elicitor of emotion.
Compassion also produces a distinct orientation to
others. When feeling compassion, people are more
forgiving, they are less likely to punish perpetrators of
immoral acts with severe sentences, and they are more
likely to perceive similarities between themselves and
disparate social groups, in particular those who are
vulnerable and in need. In short, compassion amplifies
the sense of common humanity.
Does compassion have a distinct expression and
physiological signature? Several studies find that
when feeling compassion, people show two facial
muscle actions that produce the oblique eyebrows, but
observers do not readily judge this display as expressive
of compassion. Touch is a likely medium of the
communication of compassion given its central role
in affection, reward, and soothing. In several studies
conducted in different countries, it has been found that
individuals separated by a barrier and unable to see or
hear each other can communicate compassion (and
love and gratitude) reliably to one another with 1 to 2
second touches to the forearm.
And what of emotion-related physiology? One
promising candidate is the effects of activation of the
vagus nerve, which is controlled by the 10th cranial
nerve. This nerve complex begins at the top of the
spinal cord and influences facial muscle action, the
larynx, respiration, heart rate, and activity in the liver,
kidneys, and gall bladder. When active, the vagus
nerve produces sensations of the chest opening up.
Several studies suggest that vagal tone is associated
with compassion. Film clips that portray harm elicit
vagal tone response and helping behavior. Still slides
of harm (e.g., of babies crying or children suffering
from famine) and suffering do as well.
Finally, recent studies have compared the neural correlates
of compassion with those of love. When people
hear stories of others’ suffering, they tend to show activation
in parts of the frontal lobes that are associated
with empathy (e.g., the orbitofrontal cortex). They also
tend to show activation in the right hemisphere, which
is a region of the brain involved in negative emotions
like sadness. Taken together, these studies suggest that
compassion is quite distinct from distress, sadness, and
love. It is a fairly distinct emotion that motivates altruistic
action. The question, from a broader perspective,
then, is why did compassion evolve?
No species is more social than humans. Humans
raise offspring; gather, store, and prepare food; sleep;
create shelter; and defend themselves, socially. In the
thousands of generations that humans evolved in
hunter–gatherer groups of 50 to 100 individuals, they
did so in relationships, most typically, in profoundly
dependent bonds that required long-term commitment
and frequent self-sacrifice. Human offspring are born
prematurely and require years of devoted care. Studies
of hunter–gatherers find that parents cooperate with
kith and kin to raise offspring while meeting the
other demands of gathering and preparing food. Foodsharing
relationships require that in flush times
individuals share so that in times of dire need they will
be the recipients of others’ generosity. Theorists of
an evolutionary persuasion have begun to argue that
the extraordinary sociality of humans, and humans’
interdependence, set the stage for the emergence of
compassion.
In more specific terms, evolutionary theorists have
made two claims about compassion. The first claim is
that compassion reduces the costs of helping and
increases the benefits. Compassion overwhelms selfinterest
and prioritizes the needs of others. The second
is that compassion is likely to flourish in relationships
between cooperative (rather than competitive) individuals.
By implication, compassion, or kindness or
trustworthiness more generally, should be readily
identified in the nonverbal comportment of others.
These two claims help provide theoretical context for
the literatures reviewed earlier on the relationship
between compassion and helping, and the emotionlike
properties of compassion. They also raise interesting
questions that await empirical attention.
See also Altruism; Empathy; Helping Behavior
Further Readings
Dacher Keltner
Jennifer Goetz
Batson, C. D. (1998). Altruism and prosocial behavior: The
handbook of social psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Keltner, D. (2003). Expression and the course of life: Studies
of emotion, personality, and psychopathology from a
social-functional perspective. Annals of the New York
Academy of Science, 1000, 222–243.
COMPLEMENTARITY, OF
RELATIONSHIP PARTNERS
Definition
Do birds of a feather flock together? Do opposites
attract? These questions have been examined extensively
within the domain of attraction, but less emphasis
has been placed on the similarity versus complementarity
in ongoing relationships. Complementarity means
that partners are different in ways that enable them to
fit or work together well.
Many studies have supported the idea that we
are initially attracted to those who are similar to us in
personality, looks, and interests. The question then
becomes whether this desire for the other to be like us
would result in happier, more satisfying relationships
in the longer term. The answer to this question appears
to be “not always.” While we do appear to prefer those
with personality traits similar to ours, complementarity
between partners’ needs and roles within the relationship
also predict satisfaction in relationships.
Complementarity does not refer to opposites per se but
characteristics, needs, or roles that partners hold that
are different but work together to create a cohesive
whole.
Take the issue of roles. If both you and your partner
love to cook but refuse to clean (i.e., similarity in roles),
your quality of living may be compromised until such
time as one of you cannot take it anymore and cleans
up. If the same partner is left to deal with the mess each
time, this “giving in” may cause resentment to grow.
With complementarity, however, you could each specialize
in a unique role (e.g., if you enjoy cooking and
your partner enjoys housecleaning, you have unique
but complementary roles in the household, and everything
gets done by the person who enjoys it more), or
you could alternate roles over time (e.g., “I’ll cook if
you’ll wash the dishes, then tomorrow we’ll switch”).
Research has shown that these kinds of complementarity
increase satisfaction and lower conflict in both dating
and marital relationships.
What evidence do we have that this complementarity
actually exists in relationships? Individuals in both
dating and marital relationships report outperforming
their partners in areas that are important to their own
self-concept (e.g., “Sports are important to me. I play
better than my partner”) and underperforming in areas
that are not important to the self (e.g., “Sports are not
important to me. I do not play as well as my partner”).
These individuals also reported outperforming their
partner in areas that did not matter to the partner and
underperforming in areas that were relevant to the person
they were involved with.
This suggests that while similarity appears to play
a strong role in initial attraction generally and more
specifically in terms of personality traits, complementarity
of needs and roles also appear to play a strong
role in relationship continuation and success in ongoing
relationships.
Stacey L. Nairn
See also Roles and Role Theory; Similarity-Attraction Effect
Further Readings
Pilkington, C., Tesser, A., & Stephens, D. (1991).
Complementarity in romantic relationships: A selfevaluation
maintenance perspective. Journal of Social and
Personal Relationships, 8(4), 481–504.
Schmitt, D. (2002). Personality, attachment, and sexuality
related to dating relationship outcomes: Contrasting three
perspectives on personal attribute interaction. British
Journal of Social Psychology, 41, 589–610.
COMPLIANCE
Definition
Compliance———161
Compliance refers to an overt, public action performed
in accordance with a request from an external source.
The request can be from another person(s) or from
an object, such as an election billboard or marketing
advertisement. Thus, compliance can occur in response
to an explicit request, as in the former example, or an
implicit request, as in the latter example. Regardless of
the source of the request, if a person acts in line with
the request, he or she is said to be complying with the
request. Compliance does not refer to an inner state of
acceptance of the behavior performed nor does it refer
to an attitude change; rather, it simply refers to acting
in accordance with the request. If a person acts in

162———Confirmation Bias
accordance with a request that comes from an authority
figure, however, the person is demonstrating obedience.
History and Modern Usage
In psychology, compliance is typically studied as a
prosocial behavior or as a reaction to social influence.
Originally, researchers began studying compliance in
reaction to the events of World War II. They wondered
how humans could follow orders that led to terrible
crimes against humanity. Psychologists have studied
both the external factors that influence people’s levels
of compliance, as well as the internal, psychological
processes, that influence people’s levels of compliance.
Researchers have sought to demonstrate the situations
and circumstances under which people comply
with others’ requests. For example, we are more likely
to comply with a request that comes from a person we
are close to rather than a stranger. Researchers have
also examined explicit and implicit techniques that
increase a person’s chances of gaining compliance
from someone else. For example, door-to-door salespeople
quite often try a technique where they first ask
a person for a small favor, after which they will ask for
larger favors. If salespeople gain compliance for the
small favor, chances are people will comply for the
larger, later request. This phenomenon was coined
the foot-in-the-door technique.
Sometimes people are less likely to comply with
explicit requests from other people (especially
strangers). This can even lead to adverse effects, especially
if it limits people’s options or freedom. Infringing
on people’s choices or freedom can lead to people’s
engaging in the opposite behavior; this is termed
reactance.
People will also comply to gain acceptance or
approval from a group, especially if that group is similar
to the person or one to which they want to belong.
Compliance often serves the purpose of allowing people
to get along, cooperate, as well as build and maintain
relationships. Thus, compliance is generally a behavior
for the good of society, but at times our willingness
to comply can be misused to have us engage in behaviors
that neither for the greater good of society nor in
our best interests (such as purchasing things that we
do not need).
Nicole L. Mead
See also Conformity; Door-in-the-Face Technique; Foot-inthe-Door
Technique; Influence; Milgram’s Obedience to
Authority Studies
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence:
Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of
Psychology, 55, 591–621.
CONFIRMATION BIAS
Definition
Confirmation bias refers to processing information by
looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent
with one’s existing beliefs. This biased approach
to decision making is largely unintentional and often
results in ignoring inconsistent information. Existing
beliefs can include one’s expectations in a given situation
and predictions about a particular outcome. People
are especially likely to process information to support
their own beliefs when the issue is highly important or
self-relevant.
Background and History
The confirmation bias is one example of how humans
sometimes process information in an illogical, biased
manner. Many factors of which people are unaware
can influence information processing. Philosophers note
that humans have difficulty processing information in
a rational, unbiased manner once they have developed
an opinion about the issue. Humans are better able to
rationally process information, giving equal weight
to multiple viewpoints, if they are emotionally distant
from the issue.
One explanation for why humans are susceptible
to the confirmation bias is that it is an efficient way
to process information. Humans are bombarded with
information in the social world and cannot possibly
take the time to carefully process each piece of information
to form an unbiased conclusion. Human decision
making and information processing is often biased
because people are limited to interpreting information
from their own viewpoint. People need to process information
quickly to protect themselves from harm. It is
adaptive to rely on instinctive, automatic reflexes that
keep humans out of harm’s way.
Another reason people show the confirmation bias is
to protect their self-esteem. People like to feel good
about themselves, and discovering that a belief that they
highly value is incorrect makes people feel bad about
themselves. Therefore, people will seek information

that supports their existing beliefs. Another motive is
accuracy. People want to feel that they are intelligent,
and information that suggests one holds an inaccurate
belief or made a poor decision suggests one is lacking
intelligence.
Evidence
The confirmation bias is strong and widespread, occurring
in several contexts. In the context of decision
making, once an individual makes a decision, he or she
will look for information that supports the decision.
Information that conflicts with the decision may cause
discomfort and is therefore ignored or given little consideration.
People give special treatment to information
that supports their personal beliefs. In studies
examining the my-side bias, people were able to generate
and remember more reasons supporting their side
of a controversial issue than the opposing side. Only
when a researcher directly asked people to generate
arguments against their own beliefs were they able to
do so. Often when people generate arguments against
their beliefs, the arguments may be used selectively or
even distorted or misremembered to ultimately support
the existing belief. It is not that people are incapable of
generating arguments that are counter to their beliefs;
rather, people are not motivated to do so.
The confirmation bias also surfaces in people’s tendency
to look for positive instances. When seeking
information to support their hypotheses or expectations,
people tend to identify information that demonstrates
a hypothesis to be true rather than look for
information that the opposite view is false.
The confirmation bias also operates in impression
formation. If people are told what to expect from a
person they are about to meet, such as the person is
warm, friendly, and outgoing, people will look for
information that supports their expectations. When
interacting with people whom perceivers think have
certain personalities, the perceivers will ask questions
of those people that are biased toward supporting the
perceivers’ beliefs. For example, if Maria expects her
roommate to be friendly and outgoing, Maria may ask
her if she likes to go to parties rather than if she often
studies in the library.
Importance
The confirmation bias is important because it may lead
people to hold strongly to false beliefs or to give more
weight to information that supports their beliefs than is
warranted by the evidence. People may be overconfident
in their beliefs because they have accumulated
evidence to support them, when in reality much evidence
refuting their beliefs was overlooked or ignored,
which, if considered, would lead to less confidence in
one’s beliefs. These factors may lead to risky decision
making and lead people to overlook warning signs and
other important information.
Implications
The confirmation bias has important implications in the
real world, including in medicine, law, and interpersonal
relationships. Research has shown that medical
doctors are just as likely to have confirmation biases as
everyone else. Doctors often have a preliminary hunch
regarding the diagnosis of a medical condition early in
the treatment process. This hunch often interferes with
considering information that may indicate an alternative
diagnosis is more likely. Another related outcome
is how patients react to diagnoses. Patients are more
likely to agree with a diagnosis that supports their preferred
outcome than a diagnosis that goes against their
preferred outcome. Both of these examples demonstrate
that the confirmation bias has implications for
individuals’ health and well-being. In the context of
law, judges and jurors often form an opinion about a
defendant’s guilt or innocence before all of the evidence
is known. Once an opinion is formed, new information
obtained during a trial is likely to be processed
according to the confirmation bias, which may lead to
unjust verdicts. In interpersonal relations, the confirmation
bias can be problematic because it may lead to
forming inaccurate and biased impressions of others.
This may result in miscommunication and conflict in
intergroup settings. In addition, by treating someone
according to expectations, that someone may unintentionally
change his or her behavior to conform to the
expectations, thereby providing further support for the
perceiver’s confirmation bias.
Bettina J. Casad
See also Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; Self-Reference Effect;
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Confirmation Bias———163
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition
(2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

164———Conflict Resolution
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning.
Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480–498.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous
phenomenon in many guises. Review of General
Psychology, 2, 175–220.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Definition
Social conflict emerges when the aspirations, beliefs,
or values held by one individual or group are frustrated
by another individual or group. It emerges
between parents and their children, between friends
on a weekend outing, between colleagues at work,
between groups from adjacent neighborhoods, or
between rivaling teams within an organization. In fact,
social conflict is part and parcel of any relationship
and any social interaction between individuals or groups
around the globe.
Conflict resolution refers to the process geared
toward reaching an agreement in a dispute, debate, or
any other form of conflict between two or more parties.
It can take different forms: Participants may negotiate
and attempt to solve their problems to mutual
satisfaction, they may withdraw from the situation and
avoid interacting with each other, they may fight and
try to dominate their counterpart, or they may yield
and give in to their adversary’s position.
Conflict resolution is important because conflict
can be very costly as well as very beneficial. Enduring
hostility between parents damages their offspring’s
development, conflict in the workplace is estimated
to absorb valuable time and energy, and ethnic conflict
between groups or communities halts economic
prosperity and may lead to famine, disease, and environmental
disaster. But conflict can have positive
consequences also: Adversaries may become more
creative, and teams in organizations have been found
to be more innovative when they have conflict. In addition,
conflict can clear the air, clarify territorial boundaries,
and increase mutual understanding. However,
these positive outcomes emerge when conflict is relatively
mild and managed in a constructive, businesslike
manner. All too often and all too quickly, conflict
escalates to exceedingly intense levels, and negative
outcomes dominate—hence the importance of understanding
and applying conflict resolution.
History and Background
The study of conflict and conflict resolution is broad
and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Conflict resolution
is studied in economics, law, business studies, sociology,
psychology, communication sciences, and political
sciences. It is part of the curriculum in biology, in history,
and in theology. This multidisciplinary aspect
makes it somewhat difficult to identify “the history”
of conflict studies in social psychology. Nevertheless,
three important developments serve as key sources of
inspiration.
In 1954, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and
his colleagues published a study that later became
known as the Robbers Cave experiment. At a Boys
Scout of America camp held in Robbers Cave
National Park (Oklahoma, United States), he allocated
22 normal, healthy boys unknown to each other into
two subgroups. Over the course of several days, the
two subgroups became increasingly hostile and competitive
with one another. Apparently, simply dividing
people into subgroups, in and of itself, induced competition
and conflict. Furthermore, when the two subgroups
needed each other—a delivery truck got stuck
and only with the force of all the boys together was
the truck pulled free—hostility reduced and more
cooperative relationships between the two subgroups
developed. Apparently, the presence of common goals
reduced competitiveness between the two groups and
facilitated conflict resolution. This insight formed the
basis of ongoing research into intergroup relations and
conflict resolution through the development of shared
goals and social identity.
A second important source of inspiration formed
the (changing) labor relations in the late 1950s and
early 1960s of the past century. Employees organized
themselves in unions, and unions used their increasing
power to negotiate with management for better labor
contracts. Among other things, the insight formed that
(collective) negotiation helped resolving social conflict
in creative ways so that all parties benefited more
than they would have in a 50–50 compromise or in a
victory-for-one solution. This discovery formed the
foundation for contemporary research into integrative
negotiation.
The third source of inspiration came from microeconomics
and decision-making research. During the
Cold War both the United States and the former Soviet
Union built up an impressive arsenal of (nuclear) missiles,
enough to fully destroy each other up to 60 times.

This immensely frightening and unbelievably expensive
arms race triggered a host of important questions
like “Should you attack before the other does?” “What
happens if you unilaterally reduce the number of
nuclear missiles?” “What is the most effective way
of responding to the adversary’s power-play?” and
“How can violated trust be repaired and cooperation be
maintained?”
To answer these questions, researchers designed
laboratory games that simulated core aspects of the
conflict-related choice dilemmas their nations were
involved in. A famous example of such a game is the
Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. Within the hypothetical
situation of an arms race issue, the game involves two
players, A and B, who individually and independently
can decide to make a noncooperate move (buy more
nuclear missiles) or a cooperative move (destroy
nuclear missiles and use the money to fight famine). If
player A decides to buy nuclear missiles when player
B decides to destroy missiles, player A gets the upper
hand in the conflict and settles on a victory-for-one. If
both decide to buy missiles, famine continues to exist
and the conflict lingers on—this is better for both A
and B than losing the conflict and therefore a relatively
attractive outcome. Nevertheless, it is worse than if
both decide to destroy missiles, in which case the conflict
is resolved and famine effectively banned. Thus,
what should one do—buy missiles, or destroy them?
The answer depends in part on one’s own values and in
part on the (expected) behavior of one’s counterpart.
No single right answer is possible, however, and this
intriguing dilemma has inspired over 1,000 studies
looking at issues of trust, the cooperative history between
the players, the number of decision rounds to be played,
and so on.
Psychological Processes
in Conflict Resolution
Motivation and Thought Processes
Thomas Schelling, an economist, and Morton
Deutsch, a social psychologist, were the first to recognize
that most conflict situations are “mixed-motive”
interactions, because disputants simultaneously experience
the motivation to cooperate and compete with
each other. For example, someone may prefer an
agreement that satisfies his or her interests over one
that favors the adversary’s interests (an incentive to
compete), while also preferring any agreement over no
agreement (an incentive to cooperate). Cooperative
versus competitive motivation is part of a broader category
of social motives that also includes fairness considerations
and concern preferences for the way
outcomes are distributed. In addition to these, disputants
have goals and aspirations—preferences for a
particular level of benefit to achieve (e.g., “I hope to
get $10,000 for my used car”) or the amount of losses
to avoid. They also have identity concerns, seeking a
particular image of self or of the group they represent
and belong to, and they have epistemic needs to understand
the conflict situation and their counterpart.
The motives underlying conflict resolution come
hand in hand with roughly two cognitive tendencies,
that is, ways of processing and searching for information.
The first is ego defensiveness. Because individuals
have a desire to develop and maintain a positive
self-view, they quickly come to see themselves as
benevolent and constructive and their counterparts as
malevolent and competitive. When the positive selfview
is threatened, people tend to become hostile and
aggressive. Because social conflict inherently involves
opposition and threat, disputants’ self-views are threatened
continuously, and escalating spirals of increasingly
hostile exchange are the rule rather than the
exception.
The second cognitive tendency is called naive realism
and rooted in the fact that conflicts are taxing
because information is incomplete and uncertain.
A common strategy for people to reduce informational
complexities is to act as naive realists: They assume
that the world is as they perceive it; that other people
view the world in that very same way; and that if their
counterparts don’t, it must reflect lack of information,
lack of intelligence, or ulterior motives on their part.
In the past few years, social psychologists have
started to integrate their work on motivation and cognitions.
This integration shows that ego-defensiveness
is less of an issue when disputants have cooperative
motivation. Likewise, disputants with high epistemic
motivation, who seek deep and accurate understanding,
are less likely to fall prey to naive realism.
Moods and Emotions
Conflict Resolution———165
Achieving desired goals in conflict elicits all kinds
of emotions, like happiness, elation, pride, and satisfaction,
but also perhaps negative mood states, like
guilt and shame. Likewise, not achieving desired goals

166———Conflict Resolution
or being blocked in pursuing these goals elicits anger
and frustration, disappointment, disgust, and perhaps
regret. When parties feel anger, fear, and disgust, they
tend to become increasingly hostile and competitive,
both in their thinking and in their behavior. When they
experience guilt, regret, and shame, however, disputants
become evasive and avoid interaction. Experiencing
positive emotions like happiness and satisfaction makes
disputants more conciliatory and, to some extent, more
creative in resolving the conflict.
Emotions not only influence the thoughts and
actions of the conflict party having them. Many emotions
have a social function and communicate something
to one’s counterpart, thereby influencing the
counterpart’s thoughts and actions as well. For example,
anger communicates both dissatisfaction with the
situation and the desire for change. Although anger
sometimes evokes anger (“Who do you think you
are!?”), it may also lead one’s counterpart to give in
and to make concessions (“All right, relax, I see your
point”). Or consider guilt and shame, which communicate
that one has taken or received more than
deserved. Indeed, disputants who see their counterpart
to be guilty and ashamed stop making concessions
and wait for the other to give in, to repair damage.
Strategies and Interaction Patterns
How motives, emotions, and cognitive tendencies conspire
to influence conflict management has received a
great deal of attention. In fact, it seems safe to say that
this part of the conflict process is the most widely studied
and best understood area in the conflict literature.
Whereas an infinite number of conflict tactics and
strategies may be conceived of, conflict research and
theory tends to converge on the idea that parties to a
conflict can (1) ask for third party intervention (i.e.,
ask a judge, an arbitrator, their manager, or fate to
make a decision); (2) engage in unilateral decision
making by trying to impose one’s will on the other side
(forcing), by accepting and incorporating the other’s
will (yielding), or by withdrawing from the situation or
by remaining inactive (avoiding); or (3) engage in joint
decision making (i.e., seek a compromise, engage in
problem solving, try negotiation, ask a mediator for
help). Sometimes, different conflict management strategies
are used sequentially, for example, when mediation
is followed by arbitration or when a hostile and
competitive (forcing) approach is followed by a friendly
and soft approach (problem solving, as in a good cop/
bad cop strategy).
Dual Concern Theory
Developed by Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin, dual
concern theory focuses on when and why individuals
engage in unilateral decision making (forcing, yielding,
inaction) or joint decision making (problem solving,
negotiation). The basic idea is that parties have
high or low aspirations and, independently, a high or
low concern for their counterpart’s interests. Aspiration
motivation is most often high. But it can be low, for
example, when getting the desired share of the budget
is unlikely given the way it is traditionally distributed.
Concern for the other is high when realizing the
other’s interests is positively valued (e.g., one likes the
other), instrumental (e.g., one needs one’s counterpart
in future interaction, for example at work), and feasible.
Thus, concern for the other may be rooted in genuinely
prosocial motives or in enlightened self-interest
(i.e., by helping the other one serve one’s own best
interests).
When aspiration motivation is high and the concern
for other is low, parties engage in forcing, that is,
attempting to impose their goals upon the other party.
When aspirations are low and concern for other is
high, parties engage in yielding, giving in to their
opponent’s demands and desires. When both aspirations
and concern for other is low, parties engage in
inaction and are predicted to remain passive. When
both aspirations and concern for other is high, parties
collaborate and engage in negotiation and problem
solving. Ample work has revealed that problem solving
is associated with more integrative agreements,
reduced probability of future conflict, and enhanced
interpersonal liking.
Interaction Patterns
Dual concern theory is fairly static and does not
deal with the way disputants respond to each other’s
behavior. Thus, how does Party B react when Party A
remains passive and avoids interaction? Or what does
Party A do when Party B suggests they sit down and
find a mutually satisfying solution? Social psychologists
have uncovered two principal interaction tendencies.
The most powerful tendency is to reciprocate
one’s counterpart’s behavior. When one takes a cooperative
stance and wants to negotiate a mutually
acceptable solution, the counterpart most likely reciprocates
with cooperative behavior. This tendency is
even stronger when one performs competitive, hostile
behavior like forcing. This is because people may be

tempted to exploit the other’s cooperation and thus
respond to the other’s cooperative behavior with competitiveness.
However, even when one is not greedy
and basically inclined to cooperate, the desire not
to be exploited requires one to match the other’s
competitiveness.
Sometimes disputants perform complementary
reactions. Powerful individuals, or those with high status,
who engage in forcing trigger yielding rather than
forcing in their powerless counterparts. In negotiation,
making lots of concessions may lead one’s counterpart
to stop making concessions and to wait for you to
come down even further (a strategy called mismatching).
Finally, conflict interaction may take a demand–
withdrawal pattern. This happens when one party
desires change, whereas the counterpart desires to
maintain the status quo (e.g., a traditional husband
who refuses to do household chores facing his liberated
wife who wants him to do an equal share). In such
situations, Party A (the wife) demands and Party B (the
husband) withdraws, so that the A demands with
greater persistence and perseverance, whereupon B
withdraws even further, and so on. Alternative forms
of conflict resolution exist and clearly would serve
them well.
A Note on Generality
Whereas much of the previous discussion applies to
interpersonal as well as intergroup conflicts, and
applies as much to marital as to workplace conflicts,
caution is needed when attempting to generalize across
cultures. Growing evidence indicates that important
differences exist between individualistic cultures,
found in Western societies, and collectivist cultures,
found in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example,
disputants rely on forms of mediation and thirdparty
decision making much more in collectivist
cultures than in individualist cultures. Also, groups as
a psychological unit are more important in collectivist
cultures, and this has important consequences for the
ways people think about conflicts and for their strategic
choices. Understanding cross-cultural differences
in conflict resolution and its underlying psychological
processes is one of the key challenges for future
researchers, as globalization continues and crosscultural
encounters—and conflicts—will become more
frequent.
Carsten K. W. de Dreu
See also Emotion; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Robbers Cave
Experiment
Further Readings
de Dreu, C. K. W., Beersma, B., Steinel, W., & Van Kleef, G.
A. (2007). The psychology of negotiation: Basic processes
and principles. In A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins
(Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles
(2nd ed., pp. 608–629). New York: Guilford Press.
Deutsch, M., Coleman, P., & Marcus, E. C. (Eds.). (2007).
Handbook of conflict resolution (2nd ed.). San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
Gelfand, M. J., & Brett, J. M. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook
of negotiation and culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Pruitt, D. G. (1998). Social conflict. In D. Gilbert,
S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 89–150). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
CONFORMITY
Conformity———167
President John F. Kennedy and several of his key
advisers met in March 1961 to discuss a Central
Intelligence Agency plan for the invasion of Cuba.
The consensus of the group was to proceed with the
invasion. At least one adviser, Arthur Schleshinger,
had serious doubts about the wisdom of the plan, but
he did not argue strongly for his position.
In a laboratory experiment, Solomon Asch brought
together groups of college students and told them they
would be participating in a study on visual perception.
Their task was to match the length of a standard line
against three comparison lines. This was easy to do, as
only one of the comparison lines was the same length
as the standard. Each group actually contained only
one real participant. The other group members were
confederates who had been instructed to give unanimously
incorrect responses on most of the trials. The
real participant responded next-to-last and hence was
exposed to group pressure when the other members
chose an incorrect comparison line. Asch also included
a control condition in which participants made judgments
privately, without any group pressure. He found
that participants exposed to group pressure agreed
with the erroneous majority approximately 33% of
the time, whereas control participants made errors less
than 1% of the time.

168———Conformity
Both Schlesinger and the participants in Asch’s
experiment found themselves opposed by a unanimous
group of peers. They were placed in a conflict between
saying what they really believed and agreeing with the
other members of the group. They resolved this conflict
by conforming to the group.
Definition
Conformity occurs when a person changes his or her
behavior or attitude to make it more similar to the
behavior or attitude of a group. It is important to note
that conformity can occur without the group desiring
to exert influence on, or monitor, the individual, as
long as the person knows the group position and wants
to agree with it. In fact, it is not even necessary that
the group be aware of the individual’s existence. (For
these reasons, the term group pressure is used to mean
only that an individual perceives that a group disagrees
with his or her position).
Types of Conformity
and Nonconformity
Defining conformity as change toward a group is useful,
because it implies that group influence has indeed
occurred. That is, we would probably feel sure that a
person was influenced by a group if he or she initially
disagreed with the group and then shifted toward it.
This would be particularly true if other people who held
the same initial position, but who were not exposed to
group pressure, did not move toward the group position.
In contrast, if we knew only that an individual currently
agrees with a group, we would not be sure that
group influence was the reason. The individual might
have independently arrived at the group’s position without
knowing what group members thought or desiring
to be similar to them. Clearly, we would not want to
define the widespread practice of wearing coats in winter
as conformity, if, as seems more likely, people independently
decide to wear coats to keep warm.
Although it is generally a good idea to define conformity
in terms of change, this criterion can cause
problems in certain cases. For example, a person might
independently agree with a group position, be tempted
to abandon this position, but maintain it because of
group pressure. Here, conformity would be manifested
by refusal to change. The change criterion is also problematical
when people show delayed conformity (moving
toward a group position long after group pressure
occurs). In this case, it is hard to detect the relationship
between group pressure and response to this pressure,
even though the relationship exists.
Another important issue in defining conformity
concerns the distinction between public and private
agreement. Public agreement (or compliance) refers
to the individual’s behavioral change toward the group
position. For example, if the individual initially
opposed abortion rights, learned that the group advocated
abortion rights, and publicly went along with
the group, the person would be showing compliance.
Private agreement (or acceptance) refers to the individual’s
attitudinal change toward the group’s position.
For example, if the person’s private opinion
toward abortion rights became more favorable after
learning the group’s position, the person would be
showing acceptance.
The distinction between public and private agreement
is important, because it has implications for how
a person will behave if the group is not present to monitor
his or her behavior. Consider the case of an individual
who conforms to the group at the public level
but disagrees with its position at the private level.
Because this response pattern is often produced by the
desire for group acceptance, we would not expect the
person to continue endorsing the group’s position if it
were not present to monitor his or her behavior. In contrast,
consider the case of an individual who conforms
at both the public and private levels. This person, who
apparently really believes in the position he or she is
endorsing, would be expected to continue endorsing
this position even if the group were not present.
Just as there are different forms of conformity, so
there are different forms of nonconformity. Two of
the most important are independence and anticonformity.
Independence occurs when a person perceives
group pressure but does not respond to it at either
the public or the private level. Thus, an independent
person “stands fast” when faced with disagreement,
moving neither toward nor away from the group’s
position. In contrast, anticonformity occurs when a
person perceives group pressure and responds by
moving away from it (at the public level, the private
level, or both). Thus, an anticonformer becomes more
extreme in his or her initial position when faced with
disagreement. In a real sense, then, the anticonformer
is just as susceptible to group pressure as is the conformer.
The only difference is that the anticonformer
moves away from the group, whereas the conformer
moves toward it.

Motives Underlying Conformity
Why do people succumb to group pressure? Two
major reasons have been proposed. The first is based
on people’s desire to hold correct beliefs. Certain
beliefs can be verified by comparing them against an
objective physical standard. For example, we can verify
our belief that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius
by placing a thermometer in a pan of water, heating
the water, and reading the thermometer when the
water begins to boil. In contrast, other beliefs (e.g., the
United States should reduce its nuclear stockpile) cannot
be verified against objective physical standards.
To determine the validity of such beliefs, we must
compare our beliefs with those of other people. If others
agree with us, we gain confidence in the validity
of our beliefs; if others disagree, we lose confidence.
Because disagreement frustrates our desire to verify
our beliefs, we are motivated to eliminate it whenever
it occurs. One way to do so is to change our position
toward the others’ position, that is, to conform.
This analysis suggests that when people are unsure
about the validity of their beliefs and think the group
is more likely to be correct than they are, they will
conform to reduce uncertainty. In so doing, they will
exhibit informational influence, which is generally
assumed to produce private acceptance as well as public
compliance. Informational influence is more common
under some conditions than others. For example,
people show more conformity when they are working
on a difficult or ambiguous task, when they have
doubts about their task competence, and when they
think other group members are highly competent on
the task. In such cases, it is not surprising that people
feel dependent on others to validate their beliefs and
conform as a result.
A second goal underlying conformity is the desire
to be accepted by other group members. When people
want to be liked and believe that other members will
respond favorably to conformity (and unfavorably to
nonconformity), they will conform to win approval. In
so doing, they will exhibit normative influence, which
is generally assumed to produce public compliance but
not private acceptance. Consistent with this idea, evidence
indicates that people who deviate from group
consensus generally anticipate rejection from other
group members. And they are often right. Group members
do indeed dislike and reject people who refuse
to conform. Not all deviates elicit the same amount
of hostility, however. The amount of such hostility
Conformity———169
depends on several factors, including the extremity and
content of the deviate’s position, the reasons that presumably
underlie the deviate’s behavior, the deviate’s
status, and group norms concerning how deviates
should be treated.
Like informational influence, normative influence
is more common under some conditions than others.
For example, conformity is generally higher when
group members are working for a common goal than
when they are working for individual goals. This presumably
occurs because people working for a common
goal fear that deviance on their part will be seen
as a threat to the entire group and hence will be
severely punished. In contrast, people working for
individual goals are less likely to assume that other
members will be angered by (and hence punish) their
deviance. It should be noted, however, that if members
of common goal groups believe that conformity will
hurt their group’s chances of reaching its goal, they
conform very little.
A second factor that increases normative influence
is surveillance by other group members. Because others
can only deliver rewards and punishments based
on one’s behavior if they observe this behavior, people
ought to be more concerned about others’ reactions
(and hence more likely to show normative influence)
when their behavior is public rather than private.
Consistent with this reasoning, people conform more
when their responses are known to other group members
than when they are not known.
Reducing Conformity:
The Role of Social Support
Asch found that he could dramatically reduce conformity
(i.e., increase independence) in his experimental
situation with a simple change in procedure—namely,
by having a single confederate, who answered before
the naive participant, dissent from the erroneous majority
by giving correct responses. The presence of this
social supporter reduced the total number of yielding
responses from 33% to 6%. Additional research by
Asch indicated that participants were far more independent
when they were opposed by an eight-person
majority and had a supporter than when they were
opposed by a three-person majority and did not have a
supporter. Later work by others showed that social
support reduces conformity for many different kinds of
people, including male and female adults and normal
and mentally retarded children. Moreover, a social

170———Conformity
supporter’s ability to reduce conformity to group pressure
continues even after the person leaves the situation,
as long as participants judge the same type of
stimulus after the supporter leaves and this person does
not explicitly repudiate his or her dissenting position.
Why are social supporters so effective in conferring
resistance to group pressure? The answer seems to be
that they reduce the likelihood of informational and/or
normative influence. Regarding informational influence,
social supporters can lower participants’ dependence
on the group for validating their beliefs. Thus, a
supporter who is allegedly competent on the group
task is more effective in reducing conformity than is a
supporter who is allegedly incompetent. This presumably
occurs because the competent supporter provides
more credible support for the participant’s position.
Regarding normative influence, social supporters can
lower participants’ fear that they will be punished for
deviance. As noted previously, people who dissent
from group consensus alone (i.e., without a supporter)
expect to be rejected. This fear is reduced, however, by
the presence of a supporter who publicly agrees with
their position. Fear of retaliation may decline because
participants believe that the supporter will absorb
some of the hostility that would otherwise be directed
solely at them. A caveat is in order, however. If participants
believe that group members are hostile to the
supporter (e.g., because they are prejudiced against
members of his or her race), they may be reluctant to
“accept” his or her support and may continue to conform
at a high level. This presumably occurs because
participants expect that an alliance with a stigmatized
supporter will elicit more, rather than less, punishment
from the group.
Individual Differences:
The Role of Culture
This discussion so far has implicitly assumed that a
given group pressure situation has roughly the same
impact on everyone who encounters the situation.
That is, it has assumed that people who differ on such
dimensions as age, race, sex, and cultural background
respond similarly when facing group pressure. In fact,
this is not the case, and individual differences can
sometimes have powerful effects on the amount and
type of conformity that people exhibit. To illustrate
these effects, let’s consider how people’s cultural background
affects their responses to group pressure.
People who grow up in different cultures have different
socialization experiences, which may influence
how they respond to group pressure. Researchers interested
in the impact of culture on behavior often distinguish
between two types of cultures: those that stress
individualism and those that stress collectivism. Individualistic
cultures emphasize independence, autonomy,
and self-reliance. Collectivistic cultures emphasize
interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony.
In regard to the impact of culture on conformity, evidence
indicates that people in collectivistic cultures
conform more on Asch’s line judgment task than do
people in individualistic cultures. This presumably
occurs because people in collectivistic cultures place
more emphasis on joint goals and are more concerned
and affected by how others view their behavior than
are people in individualistic cultures.
Conformity: Bad or Good?
The consequences of conforming to group pressure
are worth considering, in light of the common belief
that conformity is invariably harmful. In fact, however,
conformity can have positive as well as negative
consequences for the individual and the group.
From the perspective of the individual, conformity
is often a rational and adaptive response. A person who
desires to respond accurately to a complex and changing
environment may be wise to rely on the judgments
of others, particularly when they are more knowledgeable
about the issue in question. Similarly, a person
who desires to be liked and accepted (surely not an
unusual goal for most people) will often find that conformity
is a useful tactic for gaining acceptance.
Of course, conformity can have negative consequences
for the individual as well. In some circumstances,
the individual is more likely to be correct by
maintaining his or her position than by going along
with the group. Moreover, even though conformers
are generally liked better than deviates, conformers
may be rejected if they are viewed as slavishly agreeing
to gain acceptance, and deviates may be respected
for their courage in dissenting from group consensus.
Conformity may also be maladaptive if the individual
wishes to differentiate him- or herself from others to
feel unique. Finally, a person who succumbs to group
pressure may come to believe that he or she is weak
and spineless, which in turn may reduce the person’s
self-esteem.

Not only from the individual’s but also from the
group’s standpoint, conformity can have both advantages
and disadvantages. All groups develop norms, or
rules of proper behavior. Although the content of these
norms varies across groups, no group can tolerate routine
violation of its norms. Conformity to at least basic
norms is essential if group members are to interact in a
predictable manner and if the group is to survive and
attain its goals. As in the case of the individual, however,
conformity is not always advantageous for the
group. Sometimes the norms that a group embraces do
not change even though the circumstances that originally
produced the norms have changed. In such cases,
continued conformity can be harmful to the group,
reducing its ability to attain its goals and even threatening
its existence. In circumstances such as these, the
group is better served by deviance directed toward satisfying
its real needs than by conformity to outdated
norms. Consistent with this reasoning, groups sometimes
recognize the utility of deviance and reward
“innovators,” who seem motivated to help the group
and who facilitate the attainment of group goals.
As this discussion suggests, the question of
whether conformity is bad or good is complex. The
answer depends on knowledge of many specific factors
that may vary from situation to situation, as well
as value judgments about the relative importance of
conflicting and often equally valid goals. Research on
conformity is not sufficient by itself to resolve value
questions. Nevertheless, such research provides information
that helps us to pose these questions in an
intelligent manner.
John M. Levine
See also Brainwashing; Bystander Effect; Collectivistic Cultures;
Compliance; Deindividuation; Group Cohesiveness;
Group Decision Making; Groups, Characteristics of;
Informational Influence; Intergroup Relations; Leadership;
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory; Power; Roles and Role
Theory; Social Dominance Orientation
Further Readings
Allen, V. L. (1965). Situational factors in conformity.
In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 133–175). New York: Academic
Press.
Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and submission
to group pressure: I. A minority of one against a
unanimous majority. Psychological Monographs,
70 (9, Whole No. 416).
Cialdini, R. B., & Goldstein, N. J. (2004). Social influence:
Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of
Psychology, 55, 591–621.
Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative
and informational social influences upon individual
judgment. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
51, 629–636.
Levine, J. M., & Russo, E. (1987). Majority and minority
influence. In C. Hendrick (Ed.), Review of personality and
social psychology: Group processes (Vol. 8, pp. 13–54).
Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Definition
Consciousness———171
Consciousness refers to the subjective experience
of oneself and one’s environment. This experience
includes the awareness of one’s feelings and emotions
and the awareness of, and perceived control over,
one’s thoughts and behaviors. Conscious processes
stand in contrast to subconscious (or nonconscious)
processes, which occur outside of awareness and without
intentional control.
Background and History
Consciousness is the familiar lens through which
humans view their day-to-day worlds, yet no concept
has proven more difficult for people to explain or
understand. How do thoughts arise? How does subjective
experience relate to, or come out of, physical
processes in the brain? Such questions are often referred
to as the hard problem of consciousness. It is these
questions that challenged thinkers like René Descartes
many centuries ago (he suggested that the mind is of a
nonphysical substance separate from the brain), and it
is these same issues that continue to puzzle countless
scientists and philosophers in the present day. In contrast,
psychologists and other academics have been
slightly more successful in addressing the so-called
easy problem of consciousness, which refers to questions
of how cognitive processes influence behavior
and how people react to their subjective experiences.
With regard to consciousness, these are the questions
that social psychologists are most concerned with today.

172———Consciousness
Early ideas about the easy problem of consciousness
were somewhat scattered in the field of psychology
as not all psychologists found conscious processes
to be an important phenomenon. Sigmund Freud was
famous for addressing the easy problem of consciousness
by proposing the conscious ego and superego as
functioning separately from the unconscious id, which
he described as a reservoir of instincts and desires.
However, despite the early emphasis by Freud and others
like him on the interaction between conscious and
unconscious sections of the mind, a full understanding
of conscious processes was delayed by scientists like
B. F. Skinner, who emphasized the utilization of observable
behavior in the study of psychology. For decades,
psychology was dominated by a view of the mind as a
black box that receives input and exhibits output but
whose contents are irrelevant to scientific study.
Debating the Utility of Consciousness
When social psychologists started to focus more and
more on thought processes in the latter decades of the
20th century, many of their surprising findings pointed
to a conscious system rife with flaws and inaccuracies.
Researchers demonstrated that people are unable
through introspection to accurately describe the causation
behind their judgments, decisions, and behaviors.
In addition, people often misattribute the driving
forces behind their current emotions, and in some
cases, they mislabel their emotions altogether. Recent
research on consciousness has demonstrated that conscious
thought can actually be a hindrance to decisionmaking
processes, and furthermore, people have been
found to misperceive whether their actions did or did
not occur under their conscious control. Together, these
results paint consciousness as a poor tool for doing the
one thing that everyday experience would suggest it
does well, which is provide an individual with the
awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
In response to these findings, many psychologists have
questioned exactly what function consciousness serves.
Research on automatic behaviors has added to the
confusion over the utility of consciousness. Social
psychologists continue to accrue evidence that most
human behaviors can be explained by automatic, nonconscious
processes. Social psychologists have shown
that people move, process information, and even
engage in complex, goal-driven behaviors in automatic
ways independent of conscious thought or conscious
awareness. Such findings have caused many of
today’s thinkers to propose that consciousness may in
fact be a functionless side effect of other processes in
the brain.
Despite the flaws inherent to conscious processes,
consciousness does play an important role in various
lines of research in social psychology. Many researchers
study the use of conscious control in overriding automatic
thoughts, impulses, and behaviors. This work
has led to a better understanding of self-regulatory
processes in which impulsive desires can be suppressed
in favor of delayed rewards and long-term goals.
Similarly, conscious control has also been shown to
allow for more desirable interpersonal behaviors as in
the case of stereotype suppression. Stereotypes of others
have been found to arise quite automatically in the
brain when people encounter individuals of particular
groups. However, these stereotypes can be consciously
overridden in favor of more accurate, more acceptable,
and less stereotypic types of responding. In addition,
conscious processes are often credited with allowing
humans the unique ability to integrate different types
of information, think symbolically, and use logical reasoning.
Thus, the research supporting the utility of
consciousness is considerable, and trends suggest that
it will continue to grow. Still, exactly what consciousness
is or isn’t useful for is a very much debated topic
in social psychology today.
Dual Processes
An understanding of conscious processes has benefited
from the commonly held view of the mind as
containing two primary components, an idea referred
to as the duplex mind. This idea holds that one of the
mind’s components, the automatic system, is marked
by fast, efficient, and uncontrolled processing that
typically occurs outside of awareness. The second
component, the conscious system, is marked by slow,
effortful, rule-based processing that typically occupies
the contents of awareness. Dual process models
of social psychological phenomena take into account
how the two components of the duplex mind interact
to create thoughts and behavior. These models generally
describe the automatic system as doing the bulk
of the work, processing large amounts of information,
and allowing for quick, automatic, and habitual responding.
The conscious system monitors the output of the
automatic system, integrates important bits of information,
and overrides or changes the output of the
automatic system when necessary. The automatic system
is what allows a person to drive home while talking
on the phone or thinking about other plans; the

conscious system is what kicks in when the driver has
to pull over for an ambulance or break for an unexpected
pedestrian.
E. J. Masicampo
See also Controlled Processes; Dual Process Theories; Ego
Depletion; Executive Function of Self
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M.
(1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited
resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
74, 1252–1265.
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual-process models in
social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and
choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American
Psychologist, 58, 697–720.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
CONSENSUS, IN ATTRIBUTION THEORY
See KELLEY’S COVARIATION MODEL
CONSISTENCY, IN ATTRIBUTIONS
See KELLEY’S COVARIATION MODEL
CONSTRUAL LEVEL THEORY
See TEMPORAL CONSTRUAL THEORY
CONSUMER BEHAVIOR
The general study of factors associated with the acquisition,
use, and disposal of goods and services is called
consumer behavior. Decisions regarding consumption
and the social and environmental issues associated
with consumption are common aspects of humans’
daily lives. Consider the last 48 hours of your life. If
Consumer Behavior———173
you are a typical U.S. citizen, you will have been
exposed to at least 3,000 marketing efforts. You may
have visited a wide array of physical retail locations
in addition to having visited Internet-based retailers
and unique auction and exchange sites. You may have
posted information about a movie or a book you
recently experienced or sought advice from other consumers
about a future purchase.
The formal study of consumer behavior began
shortly after World War II when businesses discovered
that theories and research methods of the behavioral sciences
could be used to develop products and services
desired by individuals. The theories and methods are
also used to help divide populations of consumers into
segments that desire different types of products and prefer
different types of media. Although the formal study
of consumer behavior is linked to post–WWII changes
in the economy, interest in understanding factors that
influence the attractiveness of various choice options
and ways of communicating information about products
and services are perhaps as old as human civilization.
Persons identifying themselves as consumer
behavior researchers are employed by corporations,
government agencies, and various academic departments
in universities. Most have completed significant
coursework in social–behavioral sciences such as psychology,
sociology, anthropology, and economics.
Some researchers focus on predicting trends in purchase
behavior in the short and long term, whereas
others may be interested in diverse issues, such as the
interpersonal aspects of purchase decisions, the role
of brands in self-identity and goal attainment, how
advertising can serve to create or maintain stereotypes
of people, and so forth. One group of researchers may
be interested in increasing the effectiveness of marketing
communication, whereas another group might
focus on ways to educate consumers to resist the influence
of commercial communications. Ph.D. degrees
are required for the academic positions, and specialized
or M.B.A., M.S., or M.A. degrees are typical
backgrounds for corporate research positions.
Major outlets for consumer behavior research are
the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of
Consumer Psychology. Journals in psychology, sociology,
communication, marketing, and human ecology
also include articles relevant to consumer behavior.
Academic courses in consumer behavior are often
available in schools of business, departments of human
ecology, and colleges of communication.
Major organizations and academic conferences
focusing on consumer behavior research issues include

174———Contact Hypothesis
the Society for Consumer Psychology, the Association
for Consumer Research, the American Academy of
Advertising, the American Marketing Association, and
the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
All social science research methods are employed
in the study of consumer behavior, but it is fair to say
that laboratory-based experimental research is the
most common method in the published academic
studies. Overall, the discipline of consumer behavior
rests at the interface of basic and applied research
issues. Some studies show that basic theoretical propositions
from psychology and other disciplines can be
used to understand and predict the behavior of individuals
in consumption situations in which other
studies serve to challenge the boundaries of understanding
from extant theories by examining behavior
in situations different from those in the basic research.
Just like many areas, consumer behavior research
can be viewed as a fundamental topic worthy of study
for a variety of reasons. The results and insights from
such research efforts can be employed to increase the
efficiency of marketing communication and product
development efforts. The same insights can also be
used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of
communication efforts and programs designed to reduce
prejudice, increase the likelihood of healthy lifestyle
choices, reduce energy consumption, and protect the
environment. Ever-changing political, business, social,
and environmental climates will provide the basis for
the relevance and excitement of studying the behavior
of humans as consumers.
Curtis Haugtvedt
See also Behavioral Economics; Decision Making; Research
Methods
Further Readings
Kardes, F. R. (2002). Consumer behavior and managerial
decision making. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall.
CONTACT HYPOTHESIS
Definition
The contact hypothesis lies at the center of social
psychological research on prejudice reduction. The
effort to understand if contact between groups would
facilitate intergroup relations was triggered after
World War II by the human relations movement. In its
simplest form, the contact hypothesis proposes that
contact between individuals of different groups will
improve relations between them. Over the years since
the introduction of the contact hypothesis by Gordon
Allport, a long list of optimal conditions to yield
improved relations has been forwarded. However,
most of the empirical findings from studies focusing
on the contact hypothesis suggest that the optimal
conditions can be narrowed down to four essential
factors.
Essential Conditions of
the Contact Hypothesis
One essential factor in order for contact to facilitate
harmonious intergroup relations is that the different
groups must be of equal status within the situation.
Oftentimes prejudiced beliefs consist of stereotypes
that outgroup members are inferior to ingroup members
in their ability to perform different tasks. For
example, Whites believe that Blacks are less intelligent
and thus are unable to perform well on academic tasks.
If contact between Whites and Blacks involves an
unequal-status situation, with the White person in the
dominant role and the Black person in the subordinate
role, then the existing prejudiced beliefs are likely to
be reinforced. By contrast, if both Whites and Blacks
are treated as equals, then individuals are seen outside
of their normal status group, allowing for prejudiced
beliefs to be disconfirmed. A second essential factor is
that the contact must have acquaintance potential, suggesting
that the contact should occur frequently and be
close enough to permit the development of meaningful
relationships between individuals of the different
groups. A third essential factor of the contact hypothesis
is that there must be active attainment of a common
goal that involves intergroup cooperation without competition.
That is, individuals of the different groups
must have a superordinate goal that cannot be achieved
without the full cooperation of both groups. Finally,
the fourth essential condition necessary for contact to
be successful is that there must be explicit, unambiguous
support for intergroup contact from authorities.
The support fosters social norms of tolerance and
acceptance of cultural diversity.
Thus, according to the contact hypothesis, it is not
enough to merely bring people of different groups
together. In fact, research shows that such an approach

may actually worsen the tension between the groups.
It is contact that involves the essential four conditions
(described in the previous paragraph) that will facilitate
positive intergroup relations.
Empirical Evidence
The contact hypothesis has sparked extensive research
for over 50 years. Empirical support that contact
under optimal conditions reduces prejudice and fosters
intergroup harmony has been found using various
methodologies, including laboratory studies, field
studies, and survey studies. An extensive analysis of
studies conducted on the contact hypothesis revealed
that 94% of more than 500 studies found that
increased intergroup contact predicted decreased prejudice.
These studies focused on contact between various
social groups, including contact between Whites
and racial/ethnic minorities, heterosexual and gays/
lesbians, non–mentally ill and mentally ill individuals,
and younger adults and elderly individuals.
Applications of the
Contact Hypothesis
Increasing contact between members of different groups
has been the basis of many policy decisions advocating
racial integration in contexts such as schools,
housing, workplaces, and the military. In addition, the
contact hypothesis has been used to create programs
to improve race relations.
School Integration
The contact hypothesis influenced the 1954 U.S.
Supreme Court’s (Brown v. Board of Education) decision
to desegregate schools. The contact hypothesis
was used to show that desegregation would increase the
self-esteem of racial minorities and decrease the prejudice
of Whites. Unfortunately, studies of the effects of
school desegregation have not always produced encouraging
findings. Some studies conducted during and
immediately following the court’s decision showed that
desegregation actually increased Whites’ prejudice
toward Blacks and had little effect on the self-esteem of
Black children. Several reasons for these findings is
that interracial contact in desegregated schools was not
always equal nor was it implemented with full social
support, two essential conditions for improving intergroup
relations.
In addition to helping integrate American’s education
system, the contact hypothesis was used in the
2003 U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding the use
of race as a criterion in college admission. The research
presented in this case, which was based on the contact
hypothesis, suggested that interracial contact on college
campuses fosters tolerance and is intellectually
stimulating.
Cooperative Learning
The contact hypothesis has been used in creating
cooperative learning programs to improve intergroup
relations. The most famous type of cooperative learning
program is referred to as the jigsaw classroom
method. The jigsaw classroom refers to a technique
that creates a classroom atmosphere in which students
of different racial and ethnic groups are placed in
pursuit of a common goal. Specifically, students are
placed in diverse six-person learning groups. The lesson
is divided into six segments, and each student is
assigned one segment of the lesson. In essence, each
student holds, so to speak, one piece of the jigsaw. To
complete the entire lesson, the students must rely on
the knowledge of the other individuals in their group,
thereby facilitating the interdependence that is needed
to improve intergroup relations. In the jigsaw classroom,
students are working cooperatively toward a
common goal in a context where there is implicit
institutional support given by the teacher. Students in
jigsaw classrooms, compared to those in traditional
classrooms, show decreased prejudice and stereotyping,
and minority students show an increase in
self-esteem. Moreover, students in jigsaw classrooms
show a genuine display of integration even outside of
the classroom, such as on the playground, by their
willingness to interact with members outside of their
racial and ethnic group.
J. Nicole Shelton
Jennifer A. Richeson
See also Confirmation Bias; Jigsaw Classroom; Prejudice
Further Readings
Contact Hypothesis———175
Allport, G. (1979). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA:
Perseus Books. (Original work published 1954)
Pettigrew, T. F. (1998). Integroup contact theory. Annual
Review of Psychology, 49, 65–85.

176———Content Analysis
CONTENT ANALYSIS
Definition
Content analysis involves the systematic coding of
information in archival records. It is a research tool
used to determine the presence of certain words or
concepts within a set of texts. The process of content
analysis involves first selecting the texts from which
the information will be gathered and then deriving the
coding categories that will be used. The coding categories
must be objectively defined to ensure reliability
and consistency across various texts and different coders.
Content analysis is most often used in exploratory and
descriptive research.
Background
Historically, content analysis was a time-consuming
process. Analysis was done manually, or slow mainframe
computers were used to analyze punch cards
containing data punched in by human coders. Single
studies could employ thousands of these cards. Human
error and time constraints made this method impractical
for large texts. Due to technological advances and
increased use of the Internet, researchers today are able
to analyze large bodies of text, focusing on concepts
rather than single words, and on semantic relationships
rather than just frequency counts.
Evidence
There are many types of data suitable for content analysis.
It could be used to study the use of negative political
messages in television advertisements or to analyze
personality characteristics of U.S. presidents based on
information provided in biographies. One particularly
influential content analysis conducted in the 1970s analyzed
popular children’s books and showed how different
and stereotypical the roles played by boys and girls
were. The analysis was useful because it highlighted
important trends that had been overlooked.
Content analysis is primarily useful for three types
of research problems. First, it is helpful in analyzing
large volumes of text. Researchers today can rely on
either technological advances, such as Internet searches,
or multiple, trained coders to perform the task. Second,
it is helpful when a topic must necessarily be studied
“at a distance,” as is the case in analyzing historical
documents or television broadcasts from a hostile country.
Finally, it can reveal evidence and patterns that are
difficult to notice through casual observations. The
authors or readers of the children’s books mentioned
above may not have been consciously aware of the
themes and biases present in the works, but content
analysis research has revealed these trends.
Implications
What content analysis does, then, is turn verbal information
into numerical data. In doing so, it not only
describes the information, but it also opens the way
for a researcher to perform additional statistical tests
on the material. One problem in content analysis is
that researchers must be sure that the categories that
are chosen are appropriate for the data. Generally, this
means researchers need to spend a lot of time examining
the data and their research interests to be sure
that the categories accurately reflect what they are
interested in.
Charlene Christie
See also Discursive Psychology; Research Methods
Further Readings
Simonton, D. K. (1988). Presidential style: Personality,
biography, and performance. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 55, 928–936.
CONTINGENCIES OF SELF-WORTH
Definition
The work of theorists like William James, Charles
Cooley, and G. H. Mead suggests that self-esteem,
because it is a judgment about the self, must be based
on some sort of criteria. These criteria can be called
contingencies of self-worth. William James suggested
that everyone’s self-esteem is a result of how competent
they feel. Cooley and Mead suggested that everyone’s
self-esteem is a result of being viewed positively
by other people. Contingencies of self-worth theory
also emphasizes looking at the bases of self-esteem,
but it proposes that people may base judgments about
their worth on outcomes in any number of different

areas or domains. Some people may have contingencies
of worth in domains like competency or approval,
whereas others may base their worth on outcomes,
such as being powerful, physically attractive, or virtuous.
Good outcomes in contingent domains lead to
high self-esteem, and bad outcomes in contingent
domains lead to low self-esteem. For example, some
people may have self-esteem that is contingent upon
getting good grades in school. For such people, getting
a bad grade does more than just put them in a bad
mood, it also makes them question whether they are
worthy human beings. Someone who is not contingent
on academic outcomes would certainly be upset by a
bad grade, but his or her self-esteem would not be
affected by the grade. The theory allows people to hold
more than one contingency of worth, and it allows
people to hold some contingencies very strongly and
others less strongly. The theory also suggests that some
contingencies of self-worth are more adaptive than
others. In addition, the theory proposes that people’s
contingencies of worth reveal their areas of vulnerability
and guide their actions and motivations.
Background
Until recently, most researchers only looked at one
dimension of self-esteem: whether it was high or low.
Many people in the Western Hemisphere (especially
America) believe that having high self-esteem should
lead to all sorts of positive outcomes. Researchers,
thus, anticipated that high self-esteem would play a
role in a variety of positive outcomes like good grades,
prosocial behavior, popularity, and a generally happy
life. Similarly, they predicted that low self-esteem
would play a role in a variety of problems, including
eating disorders, antisocial behavior, drug abuse, and
a generally unhappy life. Consistent with intuition,
self-esteem does play in role in how happy or sad
Americans and people from other Western cultures
feel. And initially, simple comparisons between selfesteem
and variables like drug abuse or grades in
school did sometimes show a relationship—although
it was always unclear whether self-esteem caused the
outcome or vice versa. But, as researchers did more
sophisticated analyses, they began to find that the
relationships weren’t as strong as originally thought
and that self-esteem and some outcomes weren’t
causally related to each other at all. For example, they
found that self-esteem doesn’t have nearly as much of
a relationship with a child’s grades in school as was
Contingencies of Self-Worth———177
originally thought. Similarly, factors other than selfesteem
seemed to be at the root of problems like drug
abuse. Counterintuitive research also suggests that
feeling an unwarranted sense of high self-esteem may
underlie some antisocial behavior. When challenged,
people with this inflated, fragile, and egotistical sort
of high self-esteem may become aggressive or violent.
In all, the research findings began to suggest that
whether self-esteem is high or low doesn’t have much
of anything to do with material, tangible life outcomes.
In sum, researchers were becoming confused about
the importance of level of self-esteem.
Contingencies of self-worth theory propose that
self-esteem is important and that we may just need to
look at it from a more complex perspective. The theory
asserts that simply looking at one dimension of selfesteem
(high vs. low) isn’t sufficient. In addition to
looking at level of self-esteem, we also need to consider
another dimension: contingency of self-esteem.
Knowing an individual’s contingencies of worth would
provide researchers with a more complete picture of
how life events are related to self-esteem. Only events
that are relevant to an individual’s contingencies of
worth will be related to self-esteem. For example, a
child’s grades in school may be very closely related to
their self-esteem, if that child holds academics as a
contingency of worth. High self-esteem people may,
indeed, respond aggressively to challenges—if those
challenges are related to their contingencies and if
those contingencies involve power or dominance over
others.
Evidence
Researchers determine which contingencies of selfworth
a person holds by administering a questionnaire.
Participants indicate degrees of agreement or disagreement
to statements on the questionnaire. For example,
one item that measures the academic contingency states:
“My self-esteem is influenced by my academic performance.”
If we are to rely on participant responses,
researchers must provide evidence that the questionnaire
is measuring what it claims to measure. Jennifer
Crocker and colleagues have done numerous largescale
surveys and smaller studies that have provided
just such evidence. For example, how a person scores
on the questionnaire has been shown to predict reactions
to actual life events. In one study, college seniors
were asked to fill out a contingencies of self-esteem
scale. Next, they were asked to complete a level of

178———Contingency Model of Leadership
self-esteem scale every time they got either an acceptance
or a rejection letter from a graduate school. Not
surprisingly, self-esteem increased relative to a baseline
score when they received acceptance letters and
decreased when they received rejection letters.
However, these fluctuations in self-esteem were predicted
by the academic contingency. The students who
most strongly based their self-esteem on good academic
outcomes had the greatest self-esteem reactions to
news from the graduate schools. Additional research
has demonstrated that grades in college classes affect
the self-esteem of those who base their worth on academics
more so than those who do not.
Moving beyond simple validation of the concept,
additional research is finding that contingencies of selfworth
are related to a number of other psychological
and behavioral variables. Researchers have studied the
role contingencies may play in areas as diverse as sexual
pleasure, alcohol consumption, eating disorders,
gender role beliefs, ideas about how rigid or changeable
intelligence is, attachment styles, academic problems,
and financial difficulties. It is important to note that
most of this research is correlational in nature, and most
of it was conducting using college students as participants.
Thus, much more work remains to be done, particularly
outside of college student samples.
Implications
This theory complements other researchers’ ideas
about self-esteem. For example, Michael Kernis and
his colleagues have suggested that the extent to which
a person’s self-esteem fluctuates is highly predictive
of his or her tendency to be depressed or aggressive.
Contingencies of self-worth theory agrees with that
perspective and notes that it will probably be harder to
achieve consistently positive results in some contingencies
(e.g., approval from others) compared to others
(e.g., being a virtuous person). Crocker and her
colleagues are, indeed, finding evidence that basing
one’s worth on contingencies that depend on external
feedback (e.g., approval from others or physical appearance)
is related to negative outcomes, such as stress,
eating disorders, drug use, and aggression. These findings
are quite consistent with the suggestion from selfdetermination
theory that “contingent” self-esteem, in
general, is problematic.
Crocker and her colleagues contend that contingencies
of self-worth theory can help advance the
study of self-esteem by resolving many contradictions
in the field (e.g., whether self-esteem is a state of
being or a stable trait) and by explaining previously
puzzling findings (e.g., the self-esteem of stigmatized
individuals).
Connie Wolfe
See also Need to Belong; Self-Determination Theory; Self-
Esteem; Self-Esteem Stability; Stigma; Threatened
Egotism Theory of Aggression
Further Readings
Crocker, J., & Knight, K. M. (2005). Contingencies of selfworth.
Current Directions in Psychological Science,
14(4), 200–203.
Wolfe, C., & Crocker, J. (2003). What does the self want?
Contingencies of self-worth and goals. In S. J. Spencer,
S. Fein, M. P. Zanna, & J. M. Olson (Eds.), Motivated
social perception: The ninth Ontario Symposium
(pp. 147–170). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
CONTINGENCY MODEL
OF LEADERSHIP
Definition
The contingency model of leadership is a model of
leadership effectiveness that predicts group performance
will be based on the interplay between leadership
style and various situational factors. Because
different leadership styles work more effectively in
certain situations than in others, the model predicts
optimal group performance will result when a leadership
style accords with the situational contexts it is
best suited to handle.
Four Elements of the Model
Depending on the situation and their personalities,
leaders use different tactics to plan, coordinate, and
oversee group activities. Certain personalities will
better fit certain contexts than others, and conversely,
certain contexts will better accommodate certain personalities.
One could imagine the mismatch of a drill
sergeant berating a symphony orchestra or an orchestra
conductor silently coordinating military operations
with a baton. This basic premise of the interplay between

person and situation underlies the logic of the contingency
model of leadership.
There are four elements of the model. The first concerns
the personality of the leader. Broadly, a leader
may be classified as either task-oriented or as relationship-oriented.
Task-oriented leaders care primarily
about the bottom line (i.e., whether the job gets done),
whereas relationship-oriented leaders care primarily
about establishing pleasant interpersonal relationships
with coworkers. One commonly used approach for
assessing leadership orientation asks the leader to recall
and identify the person with whom he or she has had
the most trouble working. This person may or may not
be the most disliked person, but he or she must be
the person with whom it is (or has been) particularly
difficult to accomplish various work-related tasks.
Next, the leader rates this person on various dimensions,
such as pleasant–unpleasant, cooperative–
uncooperative, and efficient–inefficient. Some leaders
tend to rate this coworker negatively across all possible
dimensions, whereas others tend to find in this coworker
at least some positive qualities. These tendencies signify
different leadership orientations: Across the board,
negative evaluations indicate a more task-oriented leadership
style, whereas a blend of positive and negative
ratings indicates a more relationship-oriented leadership
style. This measure, called the least preferred
coworker (LPC) scale, has inspired a wealth of
research but to this day remains controversial.
The other three elements of the model concern a
leader’s situational control. Broadly, situational control
refers to the leader’s sense of influence and control
over the situation. Each element of the model
corresponds to a different aspect of situational control
and will be dealt with in order of importance. The first
element, leader–member relations, refers to how
cohesive the group is and how much the group supports
the leader. Without good leader–member relations,
all group energy becomes bound up in
controlling the group rather than on work productivity.
Furthermore, a respected leader better influences
the group than a leader with poor relationships with
his or her coworkers. The second element, task structure,
refers to the clarity of task goals. Leaders usually
prefer clearly defined tasks with clearly defined
requirements (i.e., structured tasks) because they can
then more effectively guide their coworkers. The third
element, position power, refers to the official authority
accorded to the leader by the group or by the
leader’s supervisor. A leader with high power has the
Contingency Model of Leadership———179
capacity to reward and punish workers, a desired commodity
for most leaders. Overall, good leader–member
relations, a highly structured task, and high position
power represent the most positive situation for a
leader; conversely, poor leader–member relations, a
highly unstructured task, and low position power represent
the least favorable situation.
Predictions of the Model
Overall, the contingency model of leadership stipulates
that group performance cannot be predicted by
either the characteristics of the leader alone or by the
characteristics of the situation alone; only their interaction
can adequately predict group performance.
More specifically, the model makes clear predictions
about which leadership styles are most effective under
which situations. The model predicts task-oriented
leaders are most effective under either highly favorable
or highly unfavorable situations; relationship-oriented
leaders, on the other hand, are most effective in reasonably
favorable situations. Task-oriented leaders
succeed under highly unfavorable situations because
they are willing to forego congenial relationships with
coworkers to accomplish a goal. They also succeed in
highly favorable conditions because they are able to
relax, assured the team will most likely accomplish the
desired goal. Relationship-oriented leaders, however,
flourish in conditions of moderate favorability. In situations
of moderate favorability, both positive and negative
events will likely occur. With positive and negative
events essentially balanced, interpersonal problems
become the prominent source of reduced productivity.
The relationship-oriented leader can sooth these relational
problems, allowing team members to refocus on
the task at hand. On the extremes of favorability, the
relationship-oriented leader struggles. The relationshiporiented
leader has difficulty sacrificing interpersonal
relationships for a task goal (extremely unfavorable
situation), and (interestingly) becomes antsy and overbearing
when things are going too well (extremely
favorable situation).
Evidence
The criteria for determining the predictive value of the
contingency model of leadership has overwhelmingly
focused on work group performance or productivity.
Whenever possible, tests of the model have employed

180———Contrast Effects
objective outcome measures that can be unambiguously
quantified, such as win–loss records for sports
teams or tons of steel produced per worker. Outcome
measures have always been assessed by individuals
unconnected to the work group to avoid bias in measurement.
A typical study might manipulate various
elements of the model and evaluate the extent to which
the data agree with what the model would predict. For
example, researchers have created experimental conditions
where the task is either structured or unstructured
or where the leader has either high power or low
power. The researchers can then examine the group’s
productivity and see which leaders perform better in
which situations. Most of these studies come from the
1970s and early 1980s; not much research about the
model has been done recently.
Although exceptions exist, data collected by various
researchers generally tend to support the contingency
model of leadership. A statistical technique
known as meta-analysis, which allows researchers to
combine results from previous studies, has helped settle
some of these debates. However, critics continue to
question the model’s merit, mostly with respect to
how some of the variables are measured and interpreted.
The LPC scale has been by far the most heavily
scrutinized, perhaps for good reason. At face value,
it is not unequivocally clear that the LPC scale in fact
measures leadership orientation; it might instead measure
something else, such as the extent to which one
feels psychological distance toward one’s disliked
coworkers. Indeed, these measurement issues cannot
be taken lightly. Researchers must always be painstakingly
clear about what they are measuring in their
experiments; otherwise, drawing sound conclusions
from their data becomes impossible.
Implications
The contingency model of leadership was an important
breakthrough in predicting group performance. It
is theoretically compelling (incorporating both the
person and the situation), clearly testable, and widely
applicable. (In fact, training programs based on the
model have been implemented in business.) Most
importantly, in most cases the model appears to work.
Although researchers have not published much about
the model recently, proponents still argue there are
theoretical issues that need to be clarified and
resolved. If these gaps in the model are adequately
addressed, the model might still uncover novel, interesting
phenomena about group behavior and performance
previously unknown.
Scott J. Moeller
Brad J. Bushman
See also Group Performance and Productivity; Leadership
Further Readings
Chemers, M. M., & Skrzypek, G. J. (1972). Experimental test
of the contingency model of leadership effectiveness.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 172–177.
Strube, M. J., & Garcia, J. E. (1981). A meta-analytic
investigation of Fiedler’s contingency model of leadership
effectiveness. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 307–321.
CONTRAST EFFECTS
Definition
Most judgments in everyday life are evaluative in
nature. People may want to know whether a particular
grade is good or bad, whether a person is trustworthy,
how well someone performed on a test, or what a person’s
athletic abilities are like. Rarely can such questions
be answered in absolute terms (e.g., running
1 mile in 5 minutes). Rather than absolute, judgments
are usually relative and result from comparisons. That
is, judgments are mostly evaluations of a target with
respect to some comparison standard. For example,
having a C in a class is considered very differently
depending on whether everybody else has an A or
whether all others failed. Moreover, the C is evaluated
very differently depending on whether an A or a D was
expected. Or, consider a temporary headache that feels
quite bad—in comparison to a chronic migraine, it probably
appears less severe. As these examples demonstrate,
judgments may differ significantly depending on
the comparison standard they are contrasted to, a phenomenon
that social psychologists refer to as contrast
effects. More formally, a contrast effect reflects a negative
relation between the implications of a standard and
the resulting evaluation of a target, that is, the more positive
(negative) the standard, the more negative (positive)
the evaluation of the target.

Comparison Standards
Standards Are Not Fixed
Comparison standards are not fixed but rather are
highly flexible. They may vary from one situation to
another and due to a mere change of the standard, things
appear differently although they factually haven’t
changed at all. For example, in job interviews the interviewer
may evaluate the candidates in relation to an
ideal perfectly fitting the job. Alternatively, in the
course of several interviews, the interviewees could be
compared to prior candidates, presumably resulting in
very different evaluations. Or, as in the above example,
grades can be evaluated referring to the performance of
others, one’s own expectations, and so forth.
Selection of Standards
If comparison standards are not fixed, a crucial
question pertains to what influences their selection.
First, relative accessibility of standards determines the
likelihood of a comparison standard to be selected.
Accessibility means how easily something comes to
mind. Imagine you are watching a model contest on
television and are suddenly asked to evaluate a partner’s
or friend’s attractiveness. As research has shown,
it is likely that your friend would score badly in this
situation, just because a particularly high standard (a
model) was made accessible through the television
show. In most other situations, you would probably
rely on more average, less attractive comparison standards
(like people on the street or in your class). In
more general terms, the likelihood of any piece of
information to serve as a comparison standard depends
on how easily it comes to mind; that is, how accessible
it is in a given situation.
Second, the applicability of a comparison standard
also determines its likelihood of selection. For example,
imagine you evaluate the size of a person, asking
yourself whether this person is tall or small. Obviously,
you could apply many different comparison
standards, for instance, depending on the person’s sex.
If the person being evaluated is a female, the average
height of the general population is not really meaningful;
what would be more meaningful is to refer to
the average height of females. But what would happen
if the person being evaluated is a professional basketball
player? These examples demonstrate that to be
used as a comparison standard, the respective piece
Contrast Effects———181
of information has to be applicable, or meaningful.
Interestingly, individuals apply different standards to
the social behavior of different groups. As a result, the
mildly aggressive behavior of a female is evaluated
as more aggressive than the same behavior of a male
because, based on existing stereotypes, a higher standard
for aggressiveness is applied to men than to women.
Note, however, that in many situations, the selection
based upon accessibility and applicability is quite useful.
Malleability of evaluative judgments, therefore, is
not a bad thing, but rather a highly adaptive feature.
Social Comparison
Judging something with respect to some comparison
standard is a common phenomenon in daily life, regardless
of whether situations, objects, or persons are evaluated.
Nevertheless, comparisons of yourself to other
people (social comparisons) are a special case, because
at least one other prominent criterion is available: the
similarity between you and the comparison standard. In
general, similar people are more likely to be used as
comparison standards than are dissimilar people, supposedly
because comparisons to similar people convey
more valid information. For example, comparing your
own running speed to a person 20 years younger or
older may be less informative than comparing it to
someone of your own age. Importantly, whether the
contrast resulting from your comparison will be positive
or negative depends on whether you choose a worse
or better standard, a phenomenon termed downward
(standard is worse) or upward (standard is better) social
comparison.
Practical Implications
Just as evaluations are predominant in people’s lives,
so too are contrast effects. Apart from their occurring
in many judgments people make, contrast effects also
are used to influence our judgments. For example, a
reduced price looks much cheaper than it actually is
only because the cancelled original price tag is still
clearly visible. Compared to the original price, the new
one is cheaper—regardless of whether it is actually
cheap. Or assume you just decided to buy a new suit.
Quickly, the smart salesperson offers you a somewhat
expensive tie that goes nicely with the suit. In comparison
with the price of the suit, the tie does not seem
too expensive, but without the comparison standard

182———Control
elicited by the suit, you may never have considered
buying such an expensive tie.
Herbert Bless
Rainer Greifeneder
See also Accessibility; Assimilation Processes; Social
Comparison
Further Readings
Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory:
Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological
Review, 93, 136–153.
Schwarz, N., & Bless, H. (1992). Constructing reality and its
alternatives: An inclusion/exclusion model of assimilation
and contrast effects in social judgment. In L. Martin &
A. Tesser (Eds.), The construction of social judgment
(pp. 217–245). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
CONTROL
Definition
The term control has a long history in social psychology
and has been used in a variety of ways. At the
most general level, control can be understood as influence,
whether it be over internal states (as in emotional
control or self-control) or over external aspects
of the environment, including control over outcomes
(i.e., being able to attain outcomes you desire) or over
other people (i.e., making them do what you want
them to do). Psychologists from different perspectives
have focused on this basic construct in a multitude
of ways. Some have focused on understanding the
effects of changing circumstances in the environment
to permit different degrees of control to individuals.
Research also has focused on the subjective experience
of feeling like you have control over outcomes
you attain. Others have focused on the antecedents
and consequences of feeling like you are being
controlled—typically by other people. Still others have
used the term control (or controlled) to help differentiate
between those aspects of cognition and behavior
that are consciously, as opposed to nonconsciously,
determined. Each of these instantiations of the term
control has its own nuanced meaning and place in the
history of social psychology.
On Being and Feeling in Control
Among the earliest authors to use the term control as
a central construct was Julian Rotter in the 1950s.
Rotter’s social learning theory asserted that behavior
is a function of one’s expectations about future reinforcement.
Specifically, Rotter differentiated between
two sorts of expectations, which he referred to as loci
of control. When people expect that they can control
the procurement of desired outcomes (i.e., that their
behavior will lead to the outcomes), they are said to
have an internal locus of control. People with an internal
locus of control are expected to be more motivated
to behave in an attempt to attain the desired reinforcements.
By contrast, when people expect that they cannot
control the attainment of desired outcomes (i.e.,
that the outcomes are controlled by fate or chance),
they are said to have an external locus of control. In
other words, the outcomes are controlled by forces
external to them. People with an external locus of control
are hypothesized to be unmotivated to act,
because they believe their actions will not lead to the
outcomes they desire.
Subsequently, in the 1970s, Martin Seligman used
the concept of having control over outcomes as the centerpiece
for his theory of helplessness and depression.
Seligman speculated that when people experience lack
of control over outcomes in their environments, they
tend to develop a chronic condition, referred to as learned
helplessness, which he suggested was closely related to
depression. Having an external locus of control thus
bears similarity to being helpless, although the concept
of locus of control was viewed as a personality variable
(i.e., something that is differentially strong from one
person to another), whereas the experience of helplessness
was understood as a phenomenon caused by objective
lack of control in the environment.
In a series of poignant studies that illustrated the
helplessness phenomenon, animals would be placed
in a small cage with two compartments. The floor in
one was covered with an electrified grid. This half of
the cage was separated from the “safe” compartment
by a wall, the height of which could be manipulated
by the experimenter. Early on, the animals were positioned
on the side of the cage with the electrified grid
beneath them, and over the course of several trials,
they learned that they could escape the unpleasant
(though nonlethal) shocks by jumping over the dividing
wall. However, when the height of this dividing
wall was varied randomly, in such a way that escaping

the shocks became something that the animal could no
longer control (i.e., could no longer escape reliably),
the animals gradually learned to stop trying. Further,
the impact of this experience was chronic and emotionally
charged. The animals refused food and water,
and their health deteriorated. This illustration is
thought to mirror the development of severe depression
in people and serves to demonstrate the consequences
of lacking objective control over the desired
outcomes in one’s environment.
The concept of control over outcomes is also
central to self-efficacy theory as outlined by Albert
Bandura. Bandura maintained that being motivated
required people to expect that they can obtain desired
outcomes, but he said that there are two key components
to expectations of control. The first is the belief
that there is a contingency or link between a particular
behavior and a desired outcome; the second is the
belief that one is competent to do that requisite behavior.
Bandura’s theory focuses much more on the
expectancies about efficacy or competence than about
the contingencies, essentially assuming that the contingencies
do typically exist.
More recently, the term perceived control has been
adopted as the most common way of talking about
having an internal locus of control or expecting to
have control over outcomes. Studies have now shown
that perceived control tends to be adaptive and is
linked to a number of positive outcomes, including
better performance and well-being. For example,
those with higher perceived control tend to perform
and learn more effectively. They experience crowded
spaces as less aversive. In general, they report fewer
physical health symptoms (such as headaches), and
in the case of institutionalized aged people, studies
have linked lower perceived control to an increased
rate of mortality.
Researchers have argued that human beings have a
strong desire to perceive that they have control over
outcomes. A line of research by Ellen Langer and her
colleagues helped illustrate this point by demonstrating
that this desire is so strong that people tend to perceive
that they have more control than they actually do.
Langer dubbed this phenomenon the illusion of control.
On Being and Feeling Controlled
A number of researchers have focused on a related,
but distinct aspect of control, that is, the experience
of being or feeling controlled—particularly by other
Control———183
people—as opposed to feeling a sense of autonomy or
freedom. Among the first researchers to identify this
area as important for social psychology was Richard
deCharms in the 1960s. DeCharms speculated that
many of the positive outcomes that had previously
been linked to an internal locus of control were, more
precisely, a function of feeling free rather than controlled.
In so doing, he was changing the focus from
control over outcomes to the control of behavior,
essentially asking whether people were controlling
their own behavior or whether it was being controlled
by others.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, in their selfdetermination
theory, identified this experience of
freedom as a basic psychological need. They referred
to this experience as the need for autonomy, which is
the opposite of feeling controlled. Stated differently,
this perspective suggests that it is important for
people’s well-being not to be controlled by others;
they need to feel a sense of regulating their own
behavior. The theory therefore characterizes social
environments relative to the degree to which they support
people’s autonomy versus control people’s behavior.
Considerable research has identified aspects of
environments that contribute to their being supportive
of autonomy versus controlling. Experiments have
shown, for example, that offering people choice about
what they do and how they do it, providing people
with a meaningful explanation for why they are being
asked to do something, and avoiding the use of words
and phrases that imply control (e.g., should, must,
have to) all contribute to people experiencing a situation
as being supportive of autonomy. In contrast,
many factors have been identified that tend to leave
people feeling controlled. Perhaps the most surprising
is that people tend to feel controlled when they are
offered a reward for doing something. It seems that
tangible rewards are frequently used to get people to
do things they would not otherwise do, so people
come to associate the rewards with being controlled
and they tend to feel controlled when they do something
to get a reward. Other factors that are controlling
include threats of punishment, surveillance, deadlines,
critical evaluations, goal imposition, and pressure to
win a competition.
Overall, a great deal of research has shown that
when parents, teachers, managers, coaches, and physicians
are supportive of autonomy rather than controlling,
their children, students, employees, athletes, and
patients tend to do better in many ways. They learn

184———Control
better, perform better, persist longer at various tasks,
experience greater job satisfaction, behave in healthier
ways, and feel better about themselves.
Automatic Versus Controlled Processes
In a literature that developed quite independently
of the research cited earlier in this entry, cognitively
oriented social psychologists have drawn an important
distinction between what they call automatic and controlled
mental processes. Automatic processes are
characterized as operating without awareness, effort,
or intention. Have you ever noticed how you sometimes
eat something without even realizing you are
doing it? You probably also shift your car automatically
without giving it any attention or thought. Such
behaviors can be caused by processes that operate out
of your conscious experience. In other words, you are
not really controlling your own behaviors; some nonconscious
process is controlling you. In contrast, controlled
processes are characterized by the opposite set
of features. They require more effort and conscious
awareness. You are making the decision to do the
behaviors, so you are more in control of yourself and
your behaviors. Because such behaviors use people’s
limited attention, they tend to interfere with doing
other controlled behaviors. In other words, if you are
engaged in one activity that requires controlled mental
processes, your performance on a second concurrent
task that requires controlled processing is likely
to be impaired.
One of the most interesting features of the research
in this area is that, in general, one type of mental processing
(i.e., automatic or controlled) does not appear
to be more adaptive than the other. Under different circumstances,
each has its advantages and disadvantages.
For example, in general, when it comes to novel
situations that require consideration of a variety of
factors, the controlled processing system seems to be
significantly more flexible and effective. Careful,
deliberate consideration of different courses of action
usually results in the most effective behaviors. Often,
however, behaving more quickly or with less attention
may be advantageous. In such cases, the automatic
processing system tends to be preferable. Further, the
automatic processing system requires less energy, so
there may be circumstances where converting to the
automatic system—through habituation or practice—
would free up psychic energy to address more complex
problems. The drawback that accompanies faster
and less effortful processing, however, is the decreased
flexibility.
Many researchers have argued that most of everyday
life, much more than we intuitively imagine, is
dictated by the automatic processing system. They
suggest not only that the processing capacity of the
controlled system is limited but also that the frequency
with which it can be employed in everyday
life is quite limited. For instance, Roy Baumeister and
colleagues have speculated that the controlled processing
system may play a casual role in our actions
as little as 5% of the time, although this point is still
debatable.
One interesting phenomenon that has emerged from
this literature is that, often, attempting to exert deliberate,
conscious control over activities that are typically
automatic results not only in decreased efficiency but
also in decreased quality of performance. Take, for
example, the coordination of movements required for
jogging; this complex sequence of actions is normally
managed by the automatic processing system, resulting
in a series of fluid decisions. If, however, people
were asked to consciously and deliberately consider
their actions as they jogged, the result would be slower,
more awkward, movement. In this case, attempting to
use the controlled processing system to manage decisions
formerly ascribed to the automatic system is
clearly disadvantageous.
Finally, it is important to note that most researchers
do not see the distinction between controlled (i.e., conscious)
and automatic (i.e., nonconscious) processes as
black and white. Although it was originally believed that
these two categories were relatively distinct, researchers
now believe that the two categories are often blurred.
John Bargh, for instance, has argued that most processes
of interest to social psychologists are actually best
defined by a mix of features traditionally ascribed to the
automatic and controlled categories.
Summary
The term control has taken on a variety of different
meanings in social psychology. Despite the common
thread of all the work on control relating to the degree
to which people control their own behaviors or outcomes,
each use of this term has its own history and
corresponding literature. Some work has focused on
the degree to which people feel able to control (i.e.,
attain) the outcomes they receive. Some has focused on
whether people’s behavior is autonomously regulated

or is controlled by others. And some has focused on
how much of people’s behavior is regulated automatically,
out of their awareness, and how much is controlled
by conscious, more deliberative processes.
Arlen C. Moller
Edward L. Deci
See also Automatic Processes; Controlled Processes; Control
Motivation; Learned Helplessness; Locus of Control; Self-
Determination Theory; Self-Efficacy
Further Readings
Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive
theory. American Psychologist, 44, 1175–1184.
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable
automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–439.
DeCharms, R. (1968). Personal causation: The internal affective
determinants of behavior. New York: Academic Press.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and the “why”
of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination
of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 227–268.
Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311–329.
Rotter, J. B. (1954). Social learning and clinical psychology.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression,
development, and death. San Francisco: Freeman.
CONTROL CONDITION
Definition
The control condition in an experimental design lacks
any treatment or manipulation of the independent
variable. People assigned to the control group serve as
the basis of comparison for the people in the experimental
condition. Everything in a control condition is
the same as the experimental conditions except that
the independent variable is absent or held constant.
Assuming that the groups were equivalent prior to the
treatment, any differences between the control condition
and the experimental condition can be attributed
to the effect of the independent variable.
Evidence and Implications
The control condition is designed to be equivalent to
the experimental condition except for the independent
Control Condition———185
variable, which is absent or held constant under its normal
circumstances. Thus, the control condition provides
a basis for comparison. The researcher assesses
the influence of the independent variable by comparing
the outcomes under the experimental and control
conditions. For example, if researchers were to design
an experimental study to test the effect of loud music
on test performance, students who did not listen to loud
music would be in the control group. The researchers
could compare the test score of the students who did
listen to loud music with the students in the control
group to determine whether loud music had an impact
on test scores.
Not all experimental designs have a control condition.
However, it is useful to include a control condition
to determine the effect of the procedure outside
the effect of the independent variable. Consider the
design of an experiment in which researchers are testing
the effectiveness of two different types of medicine
on headache relief. Participants with headaches
would be divided into two groups, with each group
getting one type of medicine. After an hour, researcher
would ask participants to rate the effectiveness of the
headache medicine. From this design, researchers could
determine if one of the medicines was more effective
that the other. They could not determine, however, if
either of these medicines was more effective than no
medicine at all. It is possible that simply believing you
are taking headache medicine can lessen the pain. If
the researchers included a control condition in this
experimental design, they could make this comparison.
Participants could be divided into three groups,
with two groups receiving different headache medicines
and one group receiving a placebo. Then,
researchers could compare the effectiveness ratings of
the two real headache medicines with the ratings from
the control group. If the effectiveness ratings provided
by participants receiving actual medicine were greater
than those provided by participants in the control
group, researchers could conclude that taking a
headache medicine was more effective than taking no
medicine. Thus, including a control condition allows
researchers to compare the way things are in the presence
of an independent variable with the way things
would have been in the absence of an independent
variable.
Charlene Christie
See also Experimental Condition; Placebo Effect; Research
Methods

186———Controlled Processes
Further Readings
Pelham, B. W., & Blanton, H. (2002). Conducting
experiments in psychology: Measuring the weight of
smoke (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
CONTROLLED PROCESSES
Definition
Recall the last time you drove a car. For most people,
driving is fairly automatic. People do not have to think
about their driving but can instead allow their minds to
ponder other issues, such as what to eat for dinner or
what to do later. Controlled processes occur when drivers
must pay active attention to the road and their driving,
such as when a light suddenly turns red, another
car cuts into traffic, or when they must figure out where
to go.
Controlled processes are mental operations that are
intentional, effortful, inefficient, and flexible. That they
are intentional means they are under one’s deliberate
control. A love-struck student, for example, might intentionally
choose to stay focused on his or her course
readings rather than daydream about his or her lover.
Controlled processes are effortful in the sense that they
require a relatively large amount of one’s attention,
and are tiring and taxing. Playing chess, for example,
requires controlled processing for most people because
they cannot attend to other events around them (e.g.,
watch a movie, carry on a complex conversation) while
simultaneously thinking about the chess game. Likewise,
after playing a chess game, most people probably feel
somewhat mentally drained or fatigued. This indicates
that the chess game probably required effortful controlled
processing and drained the chess player’s mental
energy as a result.
Controlled processes are inefficient because they
are slow and cumbersome. Taking a test of analytical
reasoning, for example, requires controlled processing
because one must take the time to reason through each
problem on the test, step by step, until one derives the
correct solution. Like solving a math problem, controlled
processing requires multiple steps, and each
step must be finished before the next one can begin.
Though controlled processes are costly in the sense
that they are effortful and inefficient, controlled
processes are highly beneficial because of their flexibility.
Instead of doing what a person typically does, for
instance, he or she can change his or her routine. Rather
than go to the pizzeria across the street for lunch every
day, a hungry student could deliberately choose to stay
home and make a sandwich.
One of the most frequent tests used to examine
controlled processes is the Stroop task (named for
John Riley Stroop). In one version of this task, people
are presented with the words red, blue, and green.
Each word appears in red, blue, or green colored ink,
and the color ink the word appears in is different from
the word’s meaning. So, for example, the word red
might be shown in blue ink, or the word green might
be shown in red ink. For the task, people are asked to
state aloud the color that the word appears in and to
ignore the meaning of the word. As you can probably
imagine, this task is very difficult because it requires
a large amount of controlled processing. One must
deliberately choose to say the color of the ink and
ignore the words’ meaning. Among literate individuals,
the natural tendency is to read a word immediately
upon seeing it (indeed, try to look at a word and not
know its meaning immediately), and so it is effortful
to refrain from doing so. Performance on the Stroop
task is largely inefficient too— people perform the
task relatively slowly and cannot perform other tasks
(e.g., understand a conversation) while they are doing
it. Last, the Stroop task illustrates the flexibility of
controlled processing because people can deliberately
choose to ignore the meaning of the words. The
Stroop task is similar to trying to watch a movie that
has subtitles in one’s natural language—it oftentimes
requires a large amount of controlled effort to ignore
the subtitles and pay attention to the movie.
Controlled processing underlies many important
abilities of the human psyche. First, controlled processing
enables choice and decision making. It allows
people to consider multiple options when making a
decision, imagine possible outcomes, and choose
which path to take. It enables people to weigh the costs
and benefits of their decisions, such as the costs and
benefits of studying rather than partying. Second, controlled
processing allows people to exert self-control
and reprogram the self. Self-control is the ability to
control one’s thoughts, emotions, urges, and behaviors,
and this ability relies extensively on controlled processing.
A person might have a negative or disturbing
thought, for instance, but deliberately and effortfully
control his or her thoughts to focus on more positive
and pleasant topics. Likewise, a dieter would use controlled
processing to decide to eat healthier and then

later pass up a delicious desert after dinner. Controlled
processing also allows people to combine and synthesize
different sorts of information. For example, a
spouse might be told by her husband that he was out
with friends one night, only to discover later that he
was shopping at the mall. These two pieces of information
could be synthesized with the fact that the
spouse’s birthday is approaching, and she would then
realize that her husband was probably buying her a terrific
birthday present.
Other capacities that controlled processes underlie
include using rules to figure out solutions to problems
(e.g., algebra problems), thinking logically (e.g., on
the Scholastic Aptitude Test), planning ahead (e.g.,
“Which college should I attend?”), and being creative.
Controlled processes also play a vital role in acquiring
new skills. When learning to play tennis, for instance,
people must actively and effortfully pay attention to
their motor movements so as to hit the tennis ball
properly, and they must also consider all of the rules
while playing.
In sum, controlled processing is essential to function
successfully in the modern world. It allows people to
think in complex ways and make important decisions
and sets humans apart from other animals that merely
react automatically to the surrounding environment.
Matthew T. Gailliot
See also Automatic Processes; Auto-Motive Model; Dual
Process Theories; Ego Depletion
Further Readings
Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and
automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual
learning, automatic attending and a general theory.
Psychological Review, 84, 127–190.
CONTROL MOTIVATION
Definition
Control motivation refers to the motive to exercise at
least some control over important events in our lives.
The extent to which control motivation is innate or
learned remains a point of discussion. But many psychologists
argue that virtually all people are motivated
to establish a sense of mastery, that is, to see themselves
Control Motivation———187
as capable individuals who can exert some influence
over events and outcomes. This motive is also sometimes
referred to as effectance motivation.
Positive Aspects of Personal Control
An abundance of research suggests that people generally
prefer to control the events in their lives and that
exercising control is good for people’s well-being.
Even in situations in which individuals exercise little
control, simply believing that they could exert control
usually causes people to feel better, cope with adversity
better, and work more efficiently. In fact, a case
can be made that feeling in control is a critical component
of well-being.
Participants typically have adverse reactions when
researchers take control away from them or place them
in situations in which they have little or no control.
Psychologists studying learned helplessness often present
participants with an unpleasant stimulus, such as
loud noise. Whereas some participants find they can
turn the noise off by solving simple problems, such as
anagrams, others are given problems that are impossible
to solve. Participants who learn they can control the
noise have little difficulty when later working on unrelated
tasks. However, participants exposed to uncontrollable
noise do poorly on subsequent tasks, even
when they have received the same amount of noise as
the other participants. Many psychologists point to similarities
between participants in these laboratory studies
and people suffering from depression. Studies find that
a perceived lack of control over important events often
triggers the onset of depression, and that depressed
individuals frequently believe they are unable to exercise
control over important aspects of their lives.
Developing or maintaining a sense of personal control
also is beneficial when attempting to cope with
many of the sad, stressful, and tragic events in life.
Even when people face circumstances clearly out of
their control, focusing on what they can control typically
helps them cope with their problems and return to
a positive state of mind. In one study, women with
breast cancer who believed they could control their
emotional reactions, aspects of their treatment regimen,
and some of their physical symptoms showed better
emotional adjustment than women who felt they had
little ability to control what was happening to them.
Although none of the women could directly control the
course of the disease, those who focused on what they
could control fared better than those who did not.

188———Cooperation
Negative Aspects of Personal Control
There is little doubt that feeling in control goes hand
in hand with positive adjustment and well-being. But
this does not mean that people want to control everything
or that control is always desirable. People sometimes
relinquish control because they don’t want the
responsibility that comes with being in charge. This is
particularly true if individuals feel they lack the skills
necessary to do the job well. Often the fear of looking
foolish in case of a poor performance keeps people
from accepting assignments or positions of responsibility.
Participants in one study experienced higher levels
of anxiety when given the opportunity to choose
which of three tasks they were to work on, but only
when they thought the experimenter would know how
well or poorly they performed. In extreme cases, people
engage in self-handicapping, in which they take steps
to ensure a poor performance, such as not studying for
a test, rather than acknowledge that they gave it their
best and failed.
Sometimes people simply don’t want the extra
work that comes with increased control. Thus, in some
situations people actually prefer fewer rather than
more choices. When shoppers in one study were given
the opportunity to sample from six types of jam on
display at their local supermarket, they were 10 times
more likely to purchase jam than shoppers who were
shown 24 flavors they could sample from. Tasting
more jams no doubt gave the participants a better
chance of choosing just the right one, but the extra
effort made the task undesirable.
People often relinquish control to more qualified
individuals, thereby increasing the chances of a good
outcome for themselves. This is why patients frequently
rely on doctors to make medical decisions for
them. Although many people prefer to play a role in
their health care, when given responsibility for decisions
they feel unqualified to make, patients often
experience anxiety and depression.
Individual Differences
Although all people are motivated to control the events
in their lives, psychologists also can identify individual
differences in this motive. Psychologists can place
people along a continuum from those with a high desire
for control to those who are low on this trait. Knowing
a person’s desire for control score allows psychologists
to predict behavior in a large number of settings. For
example, people high in desire for control are more
likely than lows to assume leadership roles, control the
flow of a conversation, work harder on challenging
tasks, and attempt to influence the people they work
with. Consistent with research on learned helplessness,
highs also may be more vulnerable to depression,
because life is not always arranged to satisfy their high
need for control. People high in desire for control tend
to react more strongly to stress than do lows, but they
also cope better because they typically take steps to do
something about the problem.
Jerry M. Burger
See also Control; Coping; Depression; Learned Helplessness;
Self-Determination Theory; Self-Handicapping; Stress and
Coping
Further Readings
Burger, J. M. (1989). Negative reactions to increases in
perceived personal control. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 56, 246–256.
Shapiro, D. H., Schwartz, C. E., & Astin, J. A. (1996).
Controlling ourselves, controlling our world:
Psychology’s role in understanding positive and negative
consequences of seeking and gaining control. American
Psychologist, 51, 1213–1230.
COOPERATION
The theme of cooperation has been a prominent domain
of theory and research within a variety of disciplines,
including philosophy, political science, economics,
sociology, biology, and psychology. The broad interest
in cooperation is not surprising. This theme is intimately
linked to the basic views and assumptions regarding
human nature and relevant to the functioning of dyads,
groups or organizations, and even societies. Although
it is often assumed that humankind is rationally selfinterested,
more recent theorizing and research reveals
that human nature is far richer than the concept of selfishness
is able to capture.
Definition
Cooperation is formally defined by the tendency to
maximize outcomes for self and others (“doing well

together”). It is often contrasted to competition, the
tendency to maximize relative advantage over others
(“doing better than others”), and to individualism, the
tendency to maximize own outcomes with no or very
little regard for others’ outcomes (“doing well for
yourself”).
Analysis
Cooperation and competition have been examined in
several paradigms, although such issues have received
most direct attention in so-called experimental games,
such as the well-known Prisoner’s Dilemma Game.
This is a situation in which people often face two
choices—a cooperative choice, which helps others at
some cost to self, and a selfish choice, which harms
others but serves self-interest. Cooperation has also
been studied in the context of other experimental
game situations as well as in real-life contexts. In all
of this research, the key question is: How can we promote
cooperative behavior that benefits outcomes for
all individuals involved? Research has indeed indicates
several personality variables and situational variables
that affect cooperative behavior.
To begin with, people differ in their tendency to
cooperate or not. Some people (prosocials) are simply
more strongly inclined to make a cooperative choice
than are others (individualists and competitors), who
may more likely to make a selfish choice. This variable,
called social value orientation, is also relevant to
understanding cooperation in everyday life. For example,
prosocials are more likely to engage in self-sacrifices
in their close relationships, are more likely to
help others, and are more likely to make donations to
noble causes, such as helping the ill and the poor. Also,
prosocials have a greater number of siblings, especially
sisters, than people who are more self-oriented.
Older people are more likely than younger people to be
prosocial. Another personality variable is trust, or differences
in the degree to which one believes others are
honest and cooperative. People with high trust tend to
cooperate more than those with low trust. One reason
to do so is because of self-protection. If you do not
trust others, you think that you will be the only one to
cooperate—which means that the other will indeed
take advantage of you. When people with low trust
think that they can make a contribution (and know for
sure that they will not be exploited or lose their contribution
if others do not cooperate), then they tend to be
as cooperative as those with high trust.
Cooperation———189
Clearly, the situation matters a lot too. Generally,
people are much more likely to cooperate if the reward
for cooperation is greater, or if the costs for noncooperation
are greater. Thus, interventions by which cooperation
becomes structurally more attractive (reward)
and noncooperation less attractive (punishment) are
effective means to promoting cooperation. These are
policies that governments often adopt to enhance collectively
desired behavior (cooperation)—by rewarding
cooperative behavior (e.g., subsidizing the use of
public transportation to decrease traffic jams) or punishing
noncooperative behavior (e.g., penalizing those
who use too much water during a water draught).
Cooperation may also be rooted in powerful norms
that prescribe rules for dealing with specific interdependence
problems and opportunities. Although often
implicit, norms tend to exert fairly strong influences,
in that they often prescribe choices that protect or
enhance group outcomes, which are applicable to a
great variety of situations and, when violated, tend to
result in disapproval by the observers and guilt in the
actor. Also, norms tend to play a somewhat different
role in different cultures. For example, in collectivistic
cultures one may witness cooperation in response
to one another’s needs (e.g., communal relationships),
whereas in individualistic cultures one is more likely
to witness cooperation through the norm of reciprocity
(e.g., exchange relationships).
Tendencies toward cooperation or competition are
often inspired by beliefs or actual observations of others’
behaviors. The general rule is that cooperation
tends to evoke some cooperation, whereas competition
evokes competition. Beliefs regarding others’
cooperation and competition are strongly interrelated
with one’s own inclination to cooperate or compete. In
the context of dyadic relationships, there is a social–
evolutionary basis for the functionality of the so-called
tit-for-tat strategy. This strategy, which commences a
cooperative choice and subsequently imitates the other
person’s previous choice, is one of the most effective
means for eliciting stable patterns of mutual cooperation).
Indeed, tit-for-tat effectively rewards cooperation
by acting cooperatively in turn and punishes
noncooperation or competition by acting noncooperatively
in turn.
There are important psychological differences
between dyadic relationships and larger group relations.
To begin with, anonymity increases with group
size. That is, unlike dyadic relationships, in larger
groups one can almost never be sure who was making

190———Coping
a cooperative or competitive choice. Also, with
increasing group size, individuals tend to become substantially
more pessimistic about the efficacy of their
efforts to promote collective outcomes. And individuals
tend to feel lower levels of personal responsibility
for collective outcomes with increasing group size.
For these reasons, individuals tend to exhibit lower
levels of cooperation, as groups are larger in size. If
groups involve more than eight or ten people, then
group size does not seem to matter so much anymore.
Paul A. M. Van Lange
See also Communal Relationships; Prisoner’s Dilemma;
Prosocial Behavior; Social Value Orientation
Further Readings
Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York:
Basic Books.
Caporael, L. R., Dawes, R. M., Orbell, J. M., & Van de
Kragt, A. J. C. (1990). Selfishness examined: Cooperation
in the absence of egoistic incentives. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 12, 683–699.
Kelley, H. H., & Stahelski, A. J. (1970). Social interaction
basis of cooperators’ and competitors’ beliefs about others.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16, 66–91.
Komorita, S. S., & Parks, C. D. (1995). Interpersonal
relations: Mixed-motive interaction. Annual Review of
Psychology, 46, 183–207.
COPING
Definition
Coping refers to the thoughts and behaviors that people
use to deal with stressful situations. Although most psychologists
limit the concept of coping to conscious and
intentional efforts to manage stressful encounters, some
theorists have argued that more automatic and unintentional
ways of dealing with stressful circumstances
should be included within the coping rubric.
History and Background
The history of coping as a psychological construct
mirrors the history of academic psychology since the
mid-20th century. Three streams of thought during
the 1940s and 1950s converged to herald the study of
coping: the psychoanalytic notion of defense mechanisms,
the concept of stress, and experimental psychology’s
return from its exclusive focus on observable
behavior to the study of mental processes.
Freud’s concept of defense—the mind’s way of
keeping out of awareness unpleasant thoughts and
feelings—was popularized by his daughter, Anna
Freud, who described various defense mechanisms in
detail. According to Anna Freud, some defense mechanisms
are more effective or adaptive than others,
an idea that foreshadowed current thinking regarding
the relative effectiveness of various coping strategies.
Anna Freud also observed that although there are
many defense mechanisms, people tend to have preferred
defenses for dealing with threatening situations,
an idea that anticipated current thinking about
“coping styles.” But the most direct way in which the
notion of defense mechanisms influenced the development
of the coping field is through its focus on the
mind’s ability to respond to threatening experiences in
an effort to reduce the experienced threat.
At the same time—during and soon after World War
II—there was keen interest in how soldiers dealt with
the demands of combat and why some soldiers handled
combat better than others. Hans Selye had introduced
the concept of biological stress, including the
body’s response to such stress. Selye’s 1950 address at
the American Psychological Association meeting
prompted psychologists to consider whether the psychological
stress of combat might be met with mental
efforts to reduce the threatening experience.
The third precursor of coping as a focus of study
was the “cognitive revolution” in psychology. As
George Miller has noted, this was actually a counterrevolution.
The original revolution came earlier in the
20th century when an influential group of experimental
psychologists, most notably B. F. Skinner, shifted
psychology’s focus from the science of mind to the
science of behavior. In their effort to focus exclusively
on observable behavior, these experimental psychologists
viewed people’s thoughts and feelings as irrelevant
to psychological science. Although social and
clinical psychology had never abandoned mental
constructs, the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and
1960s was psychology’s enthusiastic return to the
study of how people think about themselves and their
world.
The concepts of defense mechanisms and psychological
stress—and psychology’s renewed efforts to
understand mental mechanisms—set the stage for

Richard Lazarus’s pioneering studies of coping. In the
1950s and 1960s, Lazarus conducted a series of now
classic studies to determine whether people’s ways of
thinking about a stressor affected their reactions to the
stressor. Lazarus and his colleagues showed threatening
films to research participants while recording their
heart rate and sampling reports of their subjective
stress. One film captured a series of subincision operations
performed on a young man’s genitals. The other
film depicted bloody woodshop accidents.
Study participants were exposed to orienting statements
designed to influence how they interpreted the
film’s events. One statement, designed to help participants
deny the severity of what they were about to
see, asserted that the accidents were staged for effect.
Another statement, designed to help participants distance
themselves from the action, declared that the
study was focused on aboriginal customs. Yet a third
orienting statement drew attention to the threat by
affirming that several of people depicted in the film
suffered severe pain and infection from the rituals.
Lazarus found that participants’ reports of subjective
stress and their heart rate were influenced by the various
orienting statements: Individuals who received
denial or distancing statements had a lower heart rate
and reported less stress than their counterparts who
received no orienting statement. People whose orienting
statement highlighted the threat had a higher heart
rate and reported more stress compared to individuals
who received no orienting statement. These studies,
demonstrating that the way people think about a
stressful encounter affects their emotional and physiological
reaction to the encounter, were the experimental
precursors of coping research over the past
50 years.
Importance of Coping
Coping plays a central role in psychological theory,
and it has significant implications for public health
and health-related interventions. Its relevance to theory
is exemplified in the understanding of how people
adjust to uncontrollable stress. Several major theories
of how people respond to uncontrollable stress have
been described in social and experimental psychology,
including the learned helplessness model of depression.
These theories originally asserted that after exposure
to uncontrollable outcomes, people try to regain
personal control. If control is beyond their reach, they
were portrayed in these theories as feeling hopeless
and giving up. But coping research demonstrated that
even when people cannot control an aversive outcome,
by using certain cognitive coping strategies
(described later in this entry) they can avoid a sense of
hopeless despair and perhaps even gain strength from
exposure to the stressful encounter. Coping also plays
an important role in theories of human vulnerability
and resilience: Why does adversity lead some people
to become depressed, whereas others seem to weather
the same adversity or perhaps even thrive in its aftermath?
Although certain biological predispositions
may play a role, it has become increasingly clear that
coping is related to both psychological vulnerability
and resilience.
Coping is also an important aspect of personality,
an area of psychology that is closely linked to social
psychology. Niall Bolger and others have depicted
coping as personality under stress. Finally, coping
is intimately related to theories of emotion, particularly
how people regulate their emotions. Since one
goal of coping efforts is to alleviate negative emotions
and promote positive emotions in the face of
stress, this aspect of coping can be thought of as
emotion regulation in stressful circumstances. Some
psychologists have suggested that both coping
and emotion regulation are components of the selfregulation
construct.
The practical importance of coping includes its
potential (as yet largely unfulfilled) to foster interventions
designed to help people adapt to serious illness,
chronic pain, or significant loss. Coping research also
holds the promise of guiding public health interventions
for people exposed to extreme stress or traumatic
events.
Unresolved Issues in
the Study of Coping
Coping———191
Several scholars have lamented that although coping
may be the most widely studied topic in psychology,
the yield from this vast area of inquiry has been somewhat
disappointing. For example, social psychologists
still do not really know how coping operates, and
for quite a few coping strategies they don’t know if
or when coping is helpful. And although,, in principle
coping theory and research should inform interventions
for people facing threatening experiences such
as serious illness, chronic incapacitating pain, or natural
disaster, with few exceptions, coping interventions
do not draw on coping theory or research.

192———Coping
In part, the relatively meager yield from coping
research reflects the field’s excessive reliance on coping
questionnaires, which require individuals to recall
how they coped with a particular stressor. It is now
clear that recalled coping bears only a modest resemblance
to coping as it actually occurs. Another problem
is that relatively few research investigations
have examined coping repeatedly as coping strategies
unfold over longer periods of time. And coping as it is
now studied involves people’s efforts to deal with
events that have already occurred or that are now
occurring. With few exceptions, the coping literature
has been silent regarding people’s coping efforts to
prevent or anticipate stressors. These so-called proactive
coping strategies may explain in part why some
people experience fewer stressors than others.
Even if coping research began to remedy each of
these problems of measurement and method, the field
would still have to deal with several conflicting theoretical
approaches. Some psychologists group various
coping strategies based on logic. Perhaps the most
popular approach, proposed by Susan Folkman and
Lazarus, distinguishes two forms of coping. Problemfocused
coping attempts to alter the problem that produces
the experienced stress. Following through on a
plan of action to change a threatening situation is an
example of problem-focused coping. Folkman and
Lazarus’s second form of coping is emotion-focused
coping, which attempts to reduce the negative emotions
generated by the stressor by, for example,
distracting oneself from the problem. But other psychologists,
most notably Rudolf Moos, prefer a threefactor
categorization of coping: active behavioral
coping, which is the same as problem-focused coping;
active cognitive coping, for example, trying to find
some benefit or positive feature of an otherwise negative
experience; and avoidance, a decidedly emotionfocused
category, for example, reducing tension
through alcohol use. Still other theoretical models are
based on statistical analyses of people’s coping scale
responses rather than on a logical grouping of coping
strategies. These statistically derived models typically
yield some variation of four coping categories: problemfocused,
emotion-focused or avoidance coping, coping
through social engagement or support from others,
and coping by creating positive meaning from the
stressful encounter. Several carefully designed studies
of individuals facing their own or a loved one’s life
threatening medical condition or a disaster have
demonstrated that coping through creating positive
meaning/active cognitive coping rather consistently
leads to better psychological and health outcomes.
These studies, which capture the promise of studying
coping during threatening encounters, are described
later in this entry.
The “Fit” Between the Situation
and the Coping Strategy
Common sense suggests that dealing with a problem
directly by using problem-focused coping should be
associated with better psychological and health outcomes,
whereas emotion-focused coping should be
associated with less favorable outcomes. This intuitively
appealing prediction is complicated by two
issues. First, some emotion-focused coping strategies,
particularly active cognitive coping or creating positive
meaning, have been rather consistently linked to
favorable outcomes. Second, if the stressful situation
one is facing is actually uncontrollable, why should
trying to change the situation through problem-focused
coping result in better outcomes? In the face of an
uncontrollable situation, a more effective strategy might
be emotion-focused.
This line of reasoning has led to the idea that certain
types of coping are more effective for certain stressors.
Specifically, problem-focused coping should be more
effective in more controllable situations where the situation
can actually be altered, whereas emotionfocused
coping should be more effective in situations
that cannot be changed. This connection between types
of coping and types of situations has been referred to
as the coping–environment fit or the goodness-of-fit
hypothesis. Although there is some evidence supporting
this hypothesis, the evidence is stronger for the
benefits of problem-focused coping in controllable
situations than for the benefits of emotion-focused
coping in uncontrollable situations. Nonetheless, the
goodness-of-fit hypothesis underscores the benefits of
coping flexibility, that is, the individual’s capacity to
modify preferred coping strategies to accommodate to
the demands of the situation.
Stress, Coping, and Positive Emotions
Coping theory and research have focused primarily on
coping in relation to negative emotional states. But as
psychologists have become increasingly interested in
positive emotions, including positive emotional experiences
during highly stressful life experiences, they

have found that certain coping strategies may help
individuals maintain positive emotions during a prolonged
stressful encounter. At first blush it may be
difficult to imagine that people undergoing serious illness
or loss can experience positive emotions. Yet
studies of individuals with debilitating illnesses, people
who have recently lost a loved one, and caregivers of
chronically ill partners or family members reveal that
despite the experience of painful negative emotions,
positive emotions actually prevail, and certain coping
strategies, such as trying to relax, appear to be more
closely related to positive emotions than to negative
emotions.
Creating Positive Meaning
as a Way of Coping
Several studies have demonstrated that people who
cope with serious illness and other major life challenges
by creating positive meaning or by construing
benefits from the threatening situation go on to adjust
effectively and to have positive health outcomes. In
one study, individuals who lost a family member in the
previous 6 months and who discovered something positive
from the loss—such as personal growth, a new
life perspective, or the strengthening family bonds—
were less distressed during the next year than people
who did not cope by finding benefits. In another study,
mothers of acutely ill newborns who found some benefit
in the experience of their child’s hospitalization
experienced brighter mood that persisted over the subsequent
18 months. And the infants of mothers who
found benefits achieved higher developmental test
scores as toddlers. In a long-term study of men who
had a first heart attack, those who found some benefit
in the attack 7 weeks after it occurred were in better
cardiac health 8 years later and were less likely to suffer
a second heart attack. Among individuals who had
survived a disaster involving extensive property damage
and loss of life, individuals who, soon after the
event, derived something positive from the incident,
such as personal growth or increased closeness with
others, were less likely to evidence post-traumatic
stress disorder three years later. Finally, HIV-positive
men who had lost a close friend or partner to AIDS and
who now discovered positive meaning, such as experiencing
life as more precious, showed a lower rate of
AIDS-related mortality over the following 4 to 9 years.
These studies are important because they link the
creation of positive meaning and benefit finding in
adversity with objective health markers. Because coping
was measured in these studies long before the
objective health outcome, it is reasonable to infer that
how people cope with adversity may play a causal role
in their subsequent health. It remains for investigators
to distinguish positive meaning and benefit finding
as a spontaneous response from the more intentional
efforts most theorists view as the hallmark of coping.
Promising Interventions Based
on Positive Meaning Coping
Psychologists have just begun to apply findings from
the coping literature to create interventions designed
to help people deal with threatening life events, particularly
serious illness. One recent study demonstrated
that certain interventions aimed at reducing stress
among women with breast cancer led these women to
find more benefits in their illness experience, which in
turn led to a reduction in a biological marker of stress
level. Another study found that when women with
breast cancer who preferred to avoid thinking about
their illness participated in a brief intervention in
which they wrote about the benefits of their illness,
they subsequently had fewer medical appointments
for cancer-related health problems compared to
women who simply wrote about the facts of their illness.
Together, these studies point to the possibility of
developing evidence-based psychological interventions
that are grounded in coping theory and that can
positively affect people’s emotional well-being and
physical health.
Howard Tennen
See also Control; Learned Helplessness; Self-Regulation;
Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Folkman, S., & Moskowitz, J. T. (2004). Coping: Pitfalls and
promise. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 745–774.
CORRECTNESS OF PERSONALITY
JUDGMENTS
Coping———193
See PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS,ACCURACY OF

194———Correspondence Bias
CORRESPONDENCE BIAS
Definition
The term correspondence bias describes perceivers’
tendency to infer stable personality characteristics
from other people’s behavior even when this behavior
was caused by situational factors. For example,
students may infer a high level of dispositional (trait)
anxiety from a fellow student’s nervous behavior during
a class presentation, even though such nervous
behavior may simply be the result of the anxietyprovoking
situation. The correspondence bias is an
important phenomenon in research on impression formation,
as it can lead to systematic errors in first
impressions of other individuals.
History
Research on the correspondence bias has its roots in
the works of social psychologists Fritz Heider and
Gustav Ichheiser in the 1950s and experienced a rapid
increase in the 1970s. However, it wasn’t until 1986
that the term correspondence bias was proposed by
social psychologists Edward E. Jones and Daniel
Gilbert. To date, the correspondence bias is considered
one of the most robust findings (that means that many
researchers have found it in many different experiments
and contexts) in social psychological research.
Causes
One reason why the correspondence bias is such a
robust phenomenon is that it has multiple causes. First,
perceivers commit the correspondence bias when they
do not believe that a given situational factor influences
the observed behavior. In the example outlined
earlier, some students in the audience may not believe
that giving a class presentation is anxiety provoking.
As such, they will infer that the presenter must be an
anxious person, even though everyone might show the
same level of behavioral anxiety in this situation.
Many social psychologists assume that this cause is
responsible for cultural differences in the correspondence
bias, as individuals in East Asian cultures tend
to attribute a greater impact to situational factors than
do individuals in Western cultures.
Second, perceivers commit the correspondence
bias when they do not think about the presence of situational
factors. In this case, perceivers may actually
believe that a given situational factor has a strong
impact on people’s behavior, but they may fail to consider
this situational factor when they make inferences
from situationally provoked behaviors. Such inferences
are particularly likely when people are either
not motivated to think about situational influences on
other people’s behavior or when they are too involved
with other activities that keep their attention. For
instance, in the earlier example, students may infer
that their fellow student is highly anxious either when
they are not motivated to think about the presenter’s
situation or when they are distracted by taking notes
or listening to the person sitting next to them.
Third, perceivers often commit the correspondence
bias when they apply their beliefs about situational
influences in a manner that promotes rather than
reduces the correspondence bias. This can be the case
when beliefs about situational factors influence the
interpretation of the observed behavior. For instance,
people may believe that giving a presentation in front
of scientists at a conference is more anxiety provoking
than giving a lecture in front of students in class. This
assumption, in turn, can lead perceivers to “see” more
anxiety in the presenter’s behavior when the presentation
is in front of scientists at a conference than when
it is in front of students in class. Importantly, this can
be the case even when the presenter’s behavior is
exactly the same. As higher levels of perceived anxiety
in the behavior usually result in higher levels of
anxiety attributed to person (i.e., as a stable personality
characteristic), such biases in the interpretation of
behavior can promote the correspondence bias even
when perceivers believe that situational factors have a
strong impact on people’s behavior and even when
they are motivated and able to pay attention these
factors.
Fourth, perceivers commit the correspondence bias
when they believe that the behavior is highly informative
for the actor’s personality irrespective of whether
or not it was provoked by the situation. Consistent with
this notion, several studies have shown that people
consider immoral behavior as highly informative for
inferring immoral personality characteristics. In contrast,
moral behavior is considered much less informative
for inferring moral personality characteristics. For
example, stealing an old woman’s purse may be considered
highly informative for inferring an immoral
personality. However, helping an old woman across the
street does not necessarily imply a moral character. In
a similar vein, research has shown that people consider
high-level performances as highly informative for

inferring high-ability levels, whereas low-level performances
are considered much less informative for inferring
low-ability levels. For instance, if a chess player
beats the current world champion, people are likely to
think of this person as a chess talent. However, if the
same person loses a game against some other player,
perceivers may think that this person simply had a bad
day. Applied to the correspondence bias, such differences
in the perceived informative value of other
people’s behavior can lead perceivers to deliberately
reject situational factors as viable explanations for this
behavior. Thus, they will infer stable personality characteristics
from this behavior even when it was provoked
by situational factors (e.g., that a person who
stole an old woman’s purse has an immoral personality,
even when this person did not have anything to eat
for several days).
Bertram Gawronski
See also Attributions; Attribution Theory; Correspondent
Inference Theory; Fundamental Attribution Error
Further Readings
Gawronski, B. (2004). Theory-based bias correction in
dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error
is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European
Review of Social Psychology, 15, 183–217.
Gilbert, D. T., & Malone, P. S. (1995). The correspondence
bias. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 21–38.
CORRESPONDENT INFERENCE THEORY
Definition
A correspondent inference, sometimes also called a
correspondent trait inference, is a judgment that a person’s
personality matches or corresponds to his or her
behavior. For example, if we notice that Taliyah is
behaving in a friendly manner and we infer that she
has a friendly personality, we have made, or drawn, a
correspondent inference. Or, if we notice that Carl is
behaving in an aggressive manner and we conclude
that he is an aggressive sort of person, we have drawn
a correspondent inference. Sometimes it is reasonable
to infer that people’s personalities correspond to
their behavior and sometimes it is not reasonable.
Correspondent inference theory outlines when it is
Correspondent Inference Theory———195
appropriate to infer that a person’s personality corresponds
to his or her behavior.
Background
Correspondent inference theory was developed by
E. E. Jones (often called Ned Jones) and his colleagues.
It falls into the domain of social psychology known as
attribution theory, which is the study of judgments
that people draw from behavior. Correspondent inference
theory has been revised over the years, but the
original formulation of the theory was published by
Jones and Keith Davis in 1965. The 1960s through
most of the 1970s was a period of time in social psychology
when logic and rationality were emphasized.
As such, it is not surprising that correspondent inference
theory has a very logical flavor. Jones and Daniel
McGillis later said that the theory described a rational
model for how correspondent inferences could be
drawn but did not necessarily describe how people
actually draw correspondent inferences.
Explanation of the Theory
According to correspondent inference theory, two factors
are important to consider in determining when it is
appropriate to infer that a person’s personality corresponds
to his or her behavior. One, if the person’s
behavior is what most people would be expected to do
in that situation, then it is not reasonable to infer that
the person’s personality corresponds to his or her behavior.
This is the same as Harold Kelley’s discounting
principle, which suggests that we should not consider a
person’s behavior to be informative about personality
when the situation would cause most people to behave
that way. For example, suppose you turn on the television
and a game show is on. The contestant answers a
question and wins a new BMW Mini Cooper. She
smiles, jumps up and down, and looks very happy.
Would you infer that because she looks really happy
she must have a happy personality? Obviously not.
Most people, whether they have happy personalities or
not, would behave in a happy manner after winning a
new car. So, when people behave just how we would
expect most people to behave in that situation, correspondent
inference theory suggests that we should not
infer that personality corresponds to behavior.
Two, if it is not clear what trait the behavior
suggests, then it is also not reasonable to draw a correspondent
inference. For example, suppose the

196———Counterfactual Thinking
contestant goes on to win a $650 mountain bike, a
laptop computer, $25,000 in cash, and a Caribbean
cruise. Mysteriously, the contestant tells the host that
she will not go on the cruise. That is probably not how
most people would behave, so it would be reasonable
to infer something. But, it is not clear what trait to
infer. Is the contestant afraid of the ocean? Does the
contestant not like hot weather? Could there be some
medical reason? Family? School? Work? So, even if
the person’s behavior is not expected in that situation,
correspondent inference theory suggests that it is not
reasonable to draw a correspondent inference if we do
not know what trait to infer. However, when people do
not behave as most people would in a certain situation,
and when it is clear what inference to draw, correspondent
inference theory suggests that we should
infer that personality corresponds to behavior. For
example, suppose at a party you see a person named
Stan. You notice that Stan easily meets new people,
tells jokes, seems very comfortable in interpersonal
situations, and generally behaves in an outgoing manner.
Not everyone behaves this way, and it is clear
what trait to infer. Therefore, correspondent inference
theory suggests that we should infer that Stan’s personality
corresponds to his behavior. Stan probably
has an outgoing, sociable, extraverted personality.
Evidence
There is some evidence consistent with correspondent
inference theory. However, what has captured the
attention of social psychologists is the fact that people
often deviate from the theory. For example, although
people recognize to some degree that when a situation
tends to make people behave a certain way, that
behavior is not very informative about personality,
people still tend to infer that personality corresponds
somewhat to behavior. So, if people see a contestant
behave in a happy manner after winning a car, they
might conclude that the contestant has a somewhat
happy personality, even though they know that winning
a car tends to make people happy. This tendency
to infer that personality corresponds to behavior even
when the situation seems to explain the behavior is
called the correspondence bias. A good example of
the correspondence bias is the tendency to infer that
the personalities of actors and actresses correspond to
the roles they play. Even though we know that Arnold
Schwarzenegger is playing a role that calls for him to
behave aggressively, we still might infer that he is a
somewhat aggressive person.
Importance and Implications
Correspondent inference theory helped to launch the
study of how people draw inferences from behavior.
We often draw inferences about other people, such as
students, professors, coworkers, neighbors, salespeople,
politicians, and friends, based on their behavior.
The inferences we draw can affect our safety, our
future friendships, whom we might date or marry,
whether we choose to help someone, whether we
might choose a particular college or a particular job,
and many other important decisions.
Doug Krull
See also Attributions; Attribution Theory; Correspondence
Bias; Discounting, in Attribution
Further Readings
Jones, E. E. (1990). Interpersonal perception. New York:
Macmillan.
COUNTERFACTUAL THINKING
Definition
Counterfactual thoughts focus on how the past might
have been, or the present could be, different. These
thoughts are usually triggered by negative events that
block one’s goals and desires. Counterfactual thoughts
have a variety of effects on emotions, beliefs, and
behavior, with regret being the most common resulting
emotion.
Counterfactual means, literally, contrary to the
facts. Sometimes counterfactuals revolve around how
the present could be different (“I could be at the
movies instead of studying for this exam”). More frequent,
however, are counterfactual thoughts of what
might have been, of what could have happened had
some detail, or action, or outcome been different in the
past. Whenever we say “if only” or “almost,” or use
words like “could,” “would,” or “should,” we may be
expressing a counterfactual thought (If only I were
taller; I almost won that hand, etc.). Sometimes counterfactuals
are used as an argument in a speech (“If
Kennedy had decided to attack Cuba during the Cuban
missile crisis, it would have ended in nuclear war”) or
to speculate or evaluate (“What if the 9/11 terrorists
had been stopped by security guards at the airport?”).

Background and History
Philosophers throughout the 20th century have been
fascinated by counterfactuals because of what they say
about logic and the nature, origin, and limits of human
knowledge. Psychological research on counterfactuals
began in the early 1980s with the realization that such
thoughts are crucial to how people understand the past,
predict the future, and come to understand the flow of
events in their lives. Sometimes counterfactual thoughts
are painful and even debilitating, such as when a person
thinks, after a tragic accident, about how he or she
should have told his or her best friend to wear a seat
belt. In such cases, the counterfactual invites selfblame,
which can make the anguish of a bad situation
even worse. For this reason, researchers have been particularly
interested in how counterfactual thinking is
related to coping, depression, and anxiety.
Researchers distinguish between two main types of
counterfactuals. Upward counterfactuals are thoughts
as to how a situation might have turned out better. For
example, a driver who causes a minor car accident
might think: “If only I had swerved sooner, I could have
avoided the accident.” In contrast, downward counterfactuals
spell out the way a situation might have turned
out worse; that is, the same driver could think: “If I had
been driving faster, I might now be dead.” Upward
counterfactuals seem to be the most common in everyday
life.
Characteristics of
Counterfactual Thinking
Three types of circumstances make counterfactual
thinking likely. First, the most common trigger for
counterfactual thoughts is negative emotion or a problematic
situation. When people feel bad about a negative
outcome, they often ruminate about how that
outcome could have been avoided; thus, counterfactual
thoughts are more common after defeats than victories,
failures than successes, and penalties than rewards.
Second, counterfactual thoughts are more likely after a
“near miss” or an event that almost occurred, because
when something almost happens, it seems to invite
speculation about alternatives. For example, missing a
plane by 2 minutes is likely to spark more thoughts on
how one might have caught the plane as compared to
missing a plane by a full two2 hours. Third, people
also think in “If only...” terms when they are surprised
by an outcome, as when an unexpected result
goes against what the person had assumed would
Counterfactual Thinking———197
happen, thereby drawing attention and causing reflection
as to why the outcome occurred.
There are good reasons why negative feelings, near
misses, and unexpected outcomes trigger counterfactuals,
because in these situations, counterfactuals can be
useful for guiding future behavior. When people feel
bad about something, this often tells them the situation
needs attention. If counterfactuals include information
that makes it easier for people to tackle a problem, they
might be better prepared in the future. For example,
thinking “If only I had studied harder...”after a failed
exam helps a person concentrate on studying so as to
perform better on future exams. Similarly, focusing on
near misses rather than far misses is likely to lead to
success in the future because only a small change in
behavior should be effective. Finally, by definition,
unexpected outcomes indicate a person did not make
an accurate prediction about a situation.
Counterfactual thinking appears in children at a
very young age, almost as soon as they begin to speak.
Developmental psychologists believe that because
counterfactual thinking is so closely related to goals,
children start to think about alternative courses of
action as they become aware of their own wants and
desires. Counterfactual thinking also seems to transcend
culture. A controversy in the early 1980s centered
on whether native Chinese speakers are able to
reason counterfactually, given that their language
lacks the specific word phrases that indicate “if only.”
After some false conclusions were clarified with new
research, psychologists had, by the late 1980s, concluded
that the ability to imagine alternatives to the
past is common to all people, regardless of language
or upbringing.
Psychological Consequences
Counterfactual thoughts spell out what people think
caused an outcome. For example, the thought “If I had
not eaten so many potato chips, I wouldn’t feel ill right
now” implies eating too many potato chips caused the
person to feel sick. Of course, these counterfactuals may
be inaccurate (flu might be the real cause), yet counterfactuals
that spring spontaneously to mind have the characteristic
of feeling “right.” Many of the consequences
of counterfactual thinking that have been studied—for
example, a bias toward blaming victims for their own
misfortune—can be traced to the inferences regarding
causation that spring from counterfactuals.
Counterfactual thoughts may also change how
positive or negative an obtained outcome feels. This is

198———Counterregulation of Eating
because people automatically compare what happened
with what might have happened and note the discrepancy
between the two. Whereas upward counterfactuals
make actual outcomes feel worse (by contrast),
downward counterfactuals tend to make outcomes
seem more favorable. For example, after receiving a
“B” on an exam, thoughts of how one might instead
have gotten an “A” (i.e., an upward counterfactual)
makes the “B” seem less satisfying. On the other hand,
thoughts about how one might have gotten a “C”
instead of the “B” (downward counterfactual) make
the “B” seem a bit more satisfying. Regret is the specific
emotional experience that results from an upward
counterfactual that focuses on one’s own personal
actions or decisions, and a fair amount of research has
examined how regret is implicated in biased decision
making. This work is part of an increasing awareness
on the part of economists that emotional factors are
essential to understanding consumer behavior.
Counterfactual thoughts can also increase how
much control people think they have over events.
When people believe an outcome would have been
possible if only they had acted a certain way, events
seem more under their personal control. A variety of
research has pointed out how the feeling of being in
control over life’s events brings health benefits, and so
the effect of counterfactuals on perceived control can
be counted as another positive aspect of these types of
thoughts.
Because counterfactual thoughts influence emotions,
storytellers often use counterfactuals to evoke
certain feelings in their audience. “If only he had
thought to grab the gold before he jumped!” The cinematic
“close-call” is effective because it evokes counterfactual
thinking and its emotional offshoots, such as
relief or regret. As plot unfolds, forks in the road, surprising
twists, and the overall recognition of multiple
possibilities breathe life into the story. Plot devices that
reveal palpable downward alternatives that nearly happened
(nearly fell into a pit of snakes, almost was eaten
by a shark) create dramatic tension and then relief.
A burgeoning genre of popular fiction is called “alternate
history,” and novels in this tradition tell an entire
story inside a world that might have been (e.g., If the
South had won the Civil War; If Nazi Germany had
won World War II). Such stories reveal underappreciated
aspects of reality that become more obvious through
the juxtaposition with a vivid alternative to reality.
Counterfactual thinking is an essential component
of effective social functioning. Geared mainly toward
regulation of ongoing behavior, they also make us
think more, inspiring further creative supposition. The
capacity of counterfactual thinking to launch us into
further reveries of thought is one of several reasons
why counterfactual stories are so enchanting—they
encourage our minds to roam where they otherwise
would not have gone.
See also Mental Control; Regret
Further Readings
Florian Fessel
Neal J. Roese
Harris, P. (2000). The work of the imagination. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
Mandel, D. R., Hilton, D. J., & Catellani, P. (Eds.). (2005).
The psychology of counterfactual thinking. New York:
Routledge.
Roese, N. J. (1997). Counterfactual thinking. Psychological
Bulletin, 121, 133–148.
Roese, N. J. (2005). If only. New York: Broadway Books.
COUNTERREGULATION OF EATING
Definition
Counterregulation of eating refers to a situation in
which an individual eats more after having eaten
something previously than after having eaten nothing
at all. This pattern of intake runs contrary to the regulation
(or compensatory, reduced eating) that we
would normally expect and thus is referred to as counterregulation.
History and Background
As with many living systems, our food consumption
is regulated, in that when we take in too few calories,
we experience hunger, which tends to make us eat to
restore the caloric deficiency; and when we ingest too
many calories, we tend to feel full and cut back on
our food intake. Sometimes it seems that eating is not
very well regulated, because overindulgence does not
always lead to compensatory undereating. Still, the
debate is usually about exactly how well regulated
eating is, with some researchers emphasizing the
power of regulatory mechanisms and others emphasizing
their weakness.

Stanley Schachter suggested, decades ago, that eating
was more strongly regulated for normal-weight
people than for overweight people. He found that if
people were given a certain amount to eat, and then
allowed to continue eating, normal weight people would
continue eating in inverse proportion to how much
they initially ate (normal regulation), whereas overweight
people would eat the same amount regardless
of how much they initially ate (lack of regulation).
This lack of regulation, Schachter argued, helped to
explain how overweight people had become overweight.
Studies on dieters (or restrained eaters) and nondieters
found that nondieters tended to show normal
regulation. When preloaded with (i.e., forced to consume)
either zero, one, or two milk shakes, and then
given free access to ice cream, nondieters ate ice
cream in inverse proportion to the size of the preload.
That is, they ate the least after having a two–milk
shake preload and they ate the most after having a
zero–milk shake preload. Dieters, on the other hand,
did not display normal regulation; in fact, they did not
even display an absence of regulation. Rather, they
displayed counterregulation, eating more ice cream
after a milk shake preload than after no preload (zero
milk shakes).
Interpretations and Complexities
of Counterregulation
The counterregulation effect was interpreted as follows:
Dieters are concerned not so much about maintaining
an appropriate (or regulated) caloric intake as
they are about maintaining their diets, which often
involve significant undereating relative to physiological
requirements. When they receive no (zero) preload,
their diet remains intact; they can achieve their
diet goals by continuing to eat sparingly, and so they
eat only a minimal amount of freely available ice
cream. If, however, the dieter is forced to consume a
rich milk shake, then the diet is “blown,” and the
dieter concludes that there is no point in further
restriction. If the diet cannot be maintained, one might
as well indulge oneself in the normally forbidden ice
cream. This has been called “the what-the-hell effect.”
There are several elements of this effect worth noting.
First, what exactly does it take to blow a diet? Is it
the number of calories in the milk shake that exceeds a
certain quota? The fact that diets are often organized
according to a daily caloric quota means that a single
rich milk shake may well be enough to exceed the
quota, making further dieting seem useless. Of course,
Counterregulation of Eating———199
it is quite irrational to think this way. If you eat a rich
milk shake and are serious about your diet, it doesn’t
make sense to wait until tomorrow to begin eating sensibly;
you should start right away and minimize the
damage. Dieters, however, do not seem to think particularly
rationally about calories. Another possibility is
that instead of the milk shakes’ excessive calories
blowing the diet, it is the fact that milk shakes in any
quantity represent a forbidden food, and eating a forbidden
food blows the diet, leading to disinhibited eating.
In the study mentioned in the previous section, the
effect of a one–milk shake preload was just about as
strong as was the effect of a two–milk shake preload.
It might be that the number of calories in even one
milk shake was excessive, but it also might be that any
amount of milk shake could have blown the diet. In
fact, a preload of 600 calories of a permitted food (e.g.,
salad) will not blow a diet, whereas 600 calories of a
forbidden food will blow a diet.
A preload does not actually have to be rich, forbidden,
or highly caloric to trigger counterregulatory
overindulgence; if dieters are misled into believing
that the preload is sufficiently rich to blow the diet,
then counterregulation may result. It all depends on
how the dieter thinks about the preload and its effect
on the diet. By the same token, if the dieter is convinced
that he or she will be forced to consume a rich
preload later in the day, so that the diet will be blown,
then the dieter may overeat (counterregulate) in anticipation
of this rich preload (actually, a postload).
Most speculation about the psychological dynamics
of counterregulation focus on the dieter’s interpretation
of whether the preload will blow the diet and
make further dieting (for that day) hopeless. Another
interpretation is that a rich preload operates to produce
overeating in dieters by upsetting them emotionally.
As it is known that distress makes dieters eat
more (and nondieters eat less), it is possible that the
preload operates through this emotional channel.
Importance
The discovery of counterregulation of eating has
changed the way that researchers think about dieters
and dieting. The fact that dieters will eat more after a
rich preload than after no preload highlights the fact
that dieters are normally under self-imposed pressure
to suppress their eating but that this pressure may be
released under certain circumstances, resulting in
occasional eating binges. The discovery of counterregulation
has solidified the understanding of the dieter as

200———Creativity
someone who alternates between restraint and indulgence.
If dieters are to avoid damaging binges, they
must take care to avoid consuming anything that
threatens the integrity of their diet or learn to regard
supposedly forbidden foods as less threatening.
See also Binge Eating; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
C. Peter Herman
Herman, C. P., & Polivy, J. (2004). The self-regulation
of eating: Theoretical and practical problems.
In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook
of self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications
(pp. 492–508). New York: Guilford Press.
CREATIVITY
Definition
Creativity can be defined three major ways. First, creativity
can be viewed as a concrete product that satisfies
two specifications: (1) originality or novelty, and
(2) utility usefulness or adaptiveness. The first requirement
excludes routine work that may be adaptive but
habitual. The second separates creativity from the
ideas of a psychotic; such ideas can be highly original
but clearly maladaptive. The product may take many
forms, such as a discovery, invention, painting, poem,
song, design, or recipe. Second, creativity can be
defined with respect to the cognitive process that generates
creative products. This process may include
intuition, imagination, incubation, free association,
insight, heuristic search, and the like. Third, the concept
can be defined relative to the creative person
who has the capacity and the willingness to apply the
process that yields the products. This personal disposition
toward creativity may entail a set of cognitive abilities,
motives, interests, values, and personality traits.
Social Psychology of Creativity
Whether creativity is viewed as product, process, or
person, it is evident that there is nothing inherently
social about creativity. It is most often viewed as an
utterly individual phenomenon. As a consequence, for
a considerable time social psychologists did not consider
creativity to be a mainstream research area.
Instead, most of the publications on the subject were
conceived by investigators in cognitive, personality,
educational, and applied psychology. This peripheral
status notwithstanding, many aspects of creativity do
feature a conspicuous social dimension. The social
nature of creativity was first recognized by sociologists
and cultural anthropologists, some of whom
went so far as to argue that creativity was entirely a
social event, thereby rendering individual psychology
irrelevant. For example, the phenomenon of multiple
discovery—where two or more scientists independently
and sometimes simultaneously arrive at the
same idea—was often cited as positive proof of this
extreme position. Such episodes were said to reflect
the causal impact of the sociocultural milieu, or zeitgeist.
In any case, it is ironic that most of the early
research on creativity was conducted either by
non–social psychologists or by non–psychological
social scientists. The middle, and potentially integrating
perspective, was missing.
This entry illustrates the sociopsychological
aspects of creativity by looking briefly at the following
phenomena: the sociocultural milieu, group
dynamics, social influence, interpersonal relationships,
and personality.
Sociocultural Milieu
As noted earlier, many sociologists and cultural
anthropologists have tended to view creativity as a
sociocultural rather than individual phenomenon. This
sociological reductionism is clearly invalid. After all,
creativity almost invariably emerges out of individual
minds. Nevertheless, it remains true that creativity
often depends on the zeitgeist. That zeitgeist has two
kinds of effects. First, it influences the amount of creativity
that appears in a particular time and place. For
example, certain sociocultural conditions favor
tremendous spurts of creative activity, as those seen in
the Golden Age of Greece or in Renaissance Italy.
Second, the zeitgeist can affect the qualitative nature
of that creativity—the type of creativity that is most
favored. For instance, creativity takes a different form
depending on whether the culture is individualistic or
collectivistic in basic orientation. In an individualistic
zeitgeist, originality or novelty tends to have greater
weight than does utility or adaptiveness, whereas the
reverse is true in a collectivistic zeitgeist. The effects

of individualistic versus collectivistic conditions tend
to be long lasting. Such cultural values do not come
and go very quickly. Yet other sociocultural effects are
much more volatile or transient. That is, creativity can
be influenced by momentary fluctuations in political,
economic, social, or cultural events. For instance, scientific
creativity is adversely affected by assassinations,
coups d’état, military mutinies, and other forms
of political anarchy. Of even greater interest are events
that enhance the cultural heterogeneity or diversity of
a society. These events include nationalistic revolts as
well as the influx of alien ideas through immigration
or foreign travel. Although these findings were based
on analyses of archival data, the positive relation
between cultural diversity and creativity has also been
found in laboratory experiments on group creativity.
Another issue that falls under this heading concerns
the relation between creativity and a person’s sociocultural
status, especially standing with respect to
gender and ethnicity. For example, investigators have
examined how opportunities for creative achievement
among women and specific minorities are shaped by
social norms and cultural values. These investigations
provide the counterargument to those who may advocate
biological explanations for group differences in
creative behavior.
Group Dynamics
Popular culture often projects the image of the “lone
genius,” working away in isolation, whether in lab or
studio, on some great scientific discovery or artistic
creation. Yet this image is very misleading. A great
deal of creativity, on the contrary, involves collaborations.
This is most apparent in the sciences, where
contributions are made by research teams within and
among laboratories. Yet even in the arts, collaborations
are not uncommon, especially in cinematic creativity.
As a result, it is essential to understand how
creativity operates in group settings. Social psychologists
have investigated this problem three major ways.
First, and most commonly, investigators have examined
problem solving in experimental groups. A prime
instance is the extensive literature on brainstorming.
Second, some investigators have taken advantage of
archival data to determine the factors that enhance or
hinder group creativity. An example is research on social
loafing that determines whether individuals working
together are less creative than the same individuals
working alone. Third, and least common, are field
studies of actual group creativity in which the investigator
analyzes member interactions. For instance,
researchers have scrutinized the patterns of communications
that characterize laboratories that generate
high-impact findings.
Social Influence
Creativity———201
Even when a creator is working as an individual rather
than collaborating with other creators in a group, the
person will often still be operating in a social context.
That social environment can then influence the extent
of creativity manifested by the individual. For example,
a considerable amount of research has been conducted
on the repercussions of rewards, evaluations,
surveillance, and other circumstances. Much of this
work has focused on the impact of intrinsic and extrinsic
incentives for performing a task. Creativity usually
seems to be more nurtured when a task is motivated by
inherent enjoyment rather by some external motivation
that has nothing to do with the specific task. Nonetheless,
under certain conditions, extrinsic motivation can
contribute to the enhancement of individual creativity.
This benefit is particularly likely when the extrinsic
incentives function as informational feedback rather
than as the imposition of some external control.
In addition to affecting the amount of creativity a
person displays, the social setting also can sway how
much creativity is attributed to a particular product or
person. After all, the attribution of creativity, like other
kinds of attributions, represents a subjective judgment
that is subject to various cues. Hence, some social psychologists
have studied the information that determines
whether a given individual or act is judged as
being creative—information that may have only a very
peripheral relation to creativity itself.
Interpersonal Relationships
Another social aspect involves the way the creative
product, process, or person is contingent on identifiable
patterns of interpersonal relationships. Most typically,
creativity is promoted when a creator interacts
with other creators. For instance, most creative scientists
and artists belong to rich social networks with
other scientists or artists. These networks may include
collaborators, associates, correspondents, rivals, competitors,
and even friends. The richer and more diverse
the network is, the higher the creative productivity and
longevity tend to be. In addition, the development of

202———Critical Social Psychology
creative potential very much depends on establishing
a long-term relationship with a mentor, master, or role
model. Just as models can serve to amplify a person’s
aggressive tendencies, so too can models help an individual
fully realize his or her capacity for creativity. It
is no accident that recipients of the Nobel Prize have
a high probability of having studied under previous
Nobel laureates.
Even though creative individuals are very involved
in such professional relationships, their involvement in
personal relationships is often much less pronounced.
As a consequence, their rates of divorce are often
somewhat higher than in the general population. This
negative effect is especially conspicuous for creators
in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Personality
Although not the main thrust of most sociopsychological
research, some social psychologists are interested
in how individual-difference variables amplify, moderate,
or diminish the impact of social variables on
personal behavior. Examples include individual differences
regarding the Big Five personality traits
(especially Extraversion); the achievement, affiliation,
and power motives, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism,
narcissism; the need for cognition; self-esteem; shyness;
social anxiety; and Type A personality. Crosssectional
variation in creativity is no less important as
a socially significant variable. In the first place, personal
creativity exhibits positive or negative correlations
with several variables of acknowledged consequence
in social psychology (e.g., authoritarianism, extraversion,
and Type A personality). Even more importantly,
a creative disposition also directly modifies the influence
of social context on individual thought, emotion,
and action. For example, experimental research has
shown that highly creative individuals are more resistant
to conformity pressures. Creators thus display
more independence than is typical of most participants
in sociopsychological research. This autonomy
is probably essential to innovative behavior.
Dean Keith Simonton
See also Brainstorming; Collectivistic Cultures; Group
Dynamics; Intrinsic Motivation; Modeling of Behavior;
Social Loafing
Further Readings
Albert, R. S. (Ed.). (1992). Genius and eminence: The social
psychology of creativity and exceptional achievement
(2nd ed.). Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press.
Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context: Update to the
social psychology of creativity. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Paulus, P. B., & Nijstad, B. A. (Eds.). (2003). Group
creativity: Innovation through collaboration. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Simonton, D. K. (2004). Creativity in science: Chance, logic,
genius, and zeitgeist. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Simonton, D. K. (2005). Creativity (in the arts and sciences).
In M. C. Horowitz (Ed.), New dictionary of the history of
ideas (Vol. 2, pp. 493–497). New York: Scribner.
CRITICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
A central concern of critical social psychology is
inequality and injustice in society. Research from this
approach typically is politically motivated and aims to
highlight and help end the oppression of minority or
marginalized social groups. Critical social psychology
also examines psychology for any ways it contributes
to an unjust and undesirable social order. Another
aspect of critical social psychology is it develops and
endorses the use of qualitative methods in psychology.
Qualitative methods use linguistic rather than statistical
forms of analysis. The term critical has implications
of negativity but in critical social psychology it
refers to work that assesses common assumptions
about psychology, to make positive changes.
Key Themes
Critical psychology draws attention to social factors
impacting on people that are sometimes ignored in
other approaches. That is, it emphasizes contextual
influences shaping a person’s experiences and behavior.
Consider, for example, the case of work-related
stress. A traditional psychologist might study individual
differences in feelings of stress. A test can be
developed to identify workers most prone to stress
so they can undergo some kind of stress-management

training. Note that explaining a problem in terms of
individuals leads to solutions that are focused on individuals.
However, a critical social psychologist would
take a different approach and consider the characteristics
of the job, or of work in general, that lead to
stress. If noise levels, for instance, are identified as a
cause of stress, then employers can be urged to provide
quieter working conditions.
Power is an important theme in critical social psychology.
An aim of research is to identify and challenge
ideas and practices that support discrimination
against people on the basis of their ethnic background,
age, gender, sexuality, disability, and so on. Feminism
is an important influence on critical social psychology
because it highlights that power relations in society
are related to ways of thinking and behaving. Feminist
psychologists, for example, have noted that in the
1970s masculine stereotypical traits (e.g., independent,
active) were associated with adult mental health
but feminine ones were not (e.g., dependent, passive).
Important findings from feminist critical social psychology
are that sex differences (e.g., in confidence)
are typically interpreted as female deficits (i.e., low
self-esteem) and that women’s general lack of social
status is typically explained by individual factors (e.g.,
a fear of success) rather than social ones (i.e., sex bias
in employment practices).
The importance of language for shaping the ways
people make sense and act in the world is a key idea.
Language is understood as a primary basis for social
life because it is largely through talk-in-interaction
and writing that people conduct their lives. The ways
language constructs different versions of the world is
emphasized. Consider that a woman without children
can be called child-less or child-free; how does the
label used influence understanding about the woman?
Why and who might use the term terrorist compared
to the word freedom fighter? Note how different
words refer to the same person but evaluate them in
different ways.
Critique of Mainstream Psychology
Mainstream psychology typically assumes that
researchers can be objective or completely independent
of the subject they are studying. In contrast critical
social psychology suggests research is never
completely neutral. An individual researcher cannot
be separated from the society they live in, so their
Critical Social Psychology———203
research is influenced by social beliefs and values.
There is considerable evidence of bias in what has
been taken for granted about human psychology. For
instance, in the case of intelligence tests, lower scores
from other societies have been interpreted as indicating
genetic inferiority rather than evidence of the cultural
specificity of the tests. Another example is that
up until the 1970s, psychological theories defined
homosexuality largely as a mental disorder, whereas
nowadays psychology offers theoretical and practical
responses to prejudice and discrimination against lesbians
and gay men.
A theoretical idea about people widespread in
mainstream social psychology is that individuals are
information processors. Stereotypes, including prejudiced
ones, are understood as a natural consequence
of all the information the human mind has to process
and its limited cognitive capacities. Critical social psychology
points out that an information processing
model of prejudice is very individualistic in orientation
and fails to explain why certain groups and not
others have been victims of racist thinking. Another
critique is that by suggesting prejudice is a natural and
inevitable result of thought processes, a mainstream
view fails to promote social change that will challenge
racism, sexism, and so on.
The research methods favored by mainstream
social psychology tend to be surveys and experiments
where people’s thoughts and behaviors are represented
quantitatively by numerical scores. The problems
associated with conventional quantitative methods
have been criticized on several grounds. For example,
the measures and categories of mainstream research
overly simplify the complexity of human psychology
and ignore important personal influences on
responses. People behave differently at different times
and places, yet mainstream research assumes a person’s
response in a survey or experiment is stable and
lasting. In the case of experiments, participants are
often deceived about the real purpose of the study,
which is dishonest and disrespectful.
In contrast, critical social psychology promotes
qualitative methods, such as observational and interview
studies. A wide range of language-based data
sources are used, including audio and video recordings
of interactions, newspaper articles, or political
speeches. Action research, in which the goal is social
change for a particular group or community, is a
characteristic approach. Aspects of critical work that

204———Cross-Lagged Panel Correlation
differentiate it from mainstream psychology is that it
usually aims to emphasize the variation and complexity
of human experience rather than discover simple
rules of behavior; consider research participants within
their social contexts instead of examining them in
more controlled experimental settings, and challenge
aspects of inequalities in society instead of producing
scientific facts about thought and behavior.
Ann Weatherall
See also Discursive Psychology; Power; Stereotypes and
Stereotyping; System Justification
Further Readings
Fox, D., & Prilleltensky, I. (Eds.). (1997). Critical social
psychology: An introduction. London: Sage.
Tuffin, K. (2005). Understanding critical social psychology.
London: Sage.
CROSS-LAGGED PANEL CORRELATION
Definition
A cross-lagged panel correlation refers to a study in
which two variables are measured once and then again
at a later time. By comparing the strength of the relationship
between each variable at the first point in
time with the other variable at the second point in
time, the researcher can determine which variable is
the cause and which the effect. A cross-lagged panel
correlation provides a way of drawing tentative causal
conclusions from a study in which none of the variables
is manipulated.
Example
Researchers have used cross-lagged panel correlations
to determine whether watching televised violence
causes aggression or aggression causes people to prefer
viewing television violence. To do so, the researchers
measured both the preferred amount of violent television
viewed and aggressive behavior of third graders.
Ten years later, they again measured the preferred
amount of violent television viewed and the aggression
of those same people.
Interpreting a Cross-Lagged
Panel Correlation
The key to interpreting the results of a cross-lagged
panel correlation is to remember that the cause has to
come before the effect in time. The researcher can
determine which variable influences the other because
the variables are measured at each of two different
points in time. If both variables are measured simultaneously
and only once, causal conclusions cannot be
drawn. In the case of a researcher studying television
violence and aggression, the researcher cannot be sure
whether television violence causes children to become
more aggressive, aggressive kids choose to watch
more violent shows, or some other factor is causing
both aggressive behavior and the viewing of television
violence.
To interpret the results of a cross-lagged panel correlation,
compare the strength of the relationship
between variable A at time 1 and variable B at time 2
with the strength of the relationship between variable
B at time 1 and variable A at time 2. In the television
violence and aggression example, this means comparing
the strength of the relationship between third
graders’ aggressiveness and their television viewing
preferences 10 years later with the strength of the relationship
between third graders’ television viewing
preferences and their aggressiveness 10 years later.
If aggressiveness at the first point in time (when
the participants were third graders) is related to the
amount of violent television viewed at the second
point in time (10 years later), but the viewing of violent
television in third graders is unrelated to aggressiveness
10 years later, then aggressiveness causes
people to prefer watching television violence. If instead
television viewing at the first point in time is related
to aggressiveness at the second point in time and
aggressiveness in third graders is unrelated to their
viewing habits 10 years later, then television violence
causes aggression.
This particular study was conducted by Leonard D.
Eron and his colleagues and published in 1972. They
concluded that watching television violence causes
aggression; aggression does not cause people to watch
more violent television.
See also Experimentation; Research Methods
Sal Meyers

Further Readings
Eron, L. D., Huesmann, L. R., Lefkowitz, M. M., &
Walder, L. O. (1972). Does television violence cause
aggression? American Psychologist, 27, 253–263.
CROWDING
Definition
Environmental psychologists study how human behavior
and the physical environment interrelate. Decision
making and behavior make an impact on environmental
quality—did you walk, bike, drive, or use public
transit to get to school today? The physical environment
also affects behavior. Crowding illustrates how
the physical environment can affect human behavior.
Psychologists distinguish between crowding, a psychological
construct wherein the amount of space
available is less than desired, and purely physical
indices of physical space such as density. Density is
typically indexed as people per room or people per
square foot. More external density measures like people
per acre are less relevant for human well-being. The
more immediate experience of the close presence of
others, particularly in living and working spaces, matters
most. The distinction between psychological and
physical perspectives on crowding explains why a
high-density social event (e.g., party) is fun, whereas a
high-density living or work space can be negative.
When you need more space and can’t have it, you
experience crowding.
The most common reaction to crowding is stress,
particularly over time and in an important space like
home. For example when it is crowded, people typically
have negative feelings such as anxiety and frustration
about restricted behavioral options. Our choices
of what, where, and when we do things are constrained.
If these restrictions are experienced repeatedly,
crowding can also lead to feelings of helplessness
wherein we start to question our own ability to effectively
manage the environment. Studies in India and in
the United States have found that children and adolescents
who live in more crowded homes, independent
of socioeconomic status, are less likely to persist on
challenging puzzles, giving up sooner than those living
under uncrowded conditions.
Crowding———205
When people experience crowding, their social
interactions change. Two results are common: They
withdraw from others, creating more psychological
space when physical space is limited, and they
become more irritable and potentially aggressive. The
natural tendency to cope with crowding by social
withdrawal may become a characteristic way of interacting
with others. For example, one study of college
roommates found that when they initially moved in
together, the number of people per room in their apartment
was unrelated to how much social support they
perceived from their housemates. But after 6 months
of living together, more crowded undergraduates felt
more withdrawn and less social support from their
roommates. When these college students were
brought into a laboratory to interact with a stranger,
they exhibited this same more socially withdrawn
style. Furthermore, when the stranger (who was really
a confederate working with the experimenter) offered
them some emotional support during a stressful experience,
the higher the density of the apartment the student
lived in, the less likely they were to accept the
stranger’s offer of support. Thus, even when in an
uncrowded situation, students who had adapted to living
under more crowded conditions were more withdrawn
and less receptive to offers of social support.
Parents in more crowded homes are also less responsive
to their children.
One of the ways researchers mark whether a situation
is stressful or not is to use physiological measures
like blood pressure or stress hormones (e.g., cortisol,
epinephrine). If crowding is a stressor, then it should
affect these physiological measures. Both laboratory
research, usually with college students, and community
studies provide evidence that crowding can cause
physiological stress. If you carefully observe yourself
or others who are in a crowded situation, you can also
see nonverbal indicators of stress. For example when
it’s crowded, people will fidget; adjust their clothes,
hair, jewelry, and so on; and often avoid eye contact.
Next time you are in a very crowded setting (e.g., elevator,
train), see if you notice a link between how
crowded the setting is and how much these behaviors
occur.
Will crowding make you seriously disturbed or
damage your health? Will it ruin your grades and
undermine your college experience because you are
in a dorm room that isn’t big enough? No, but it
will probably lead to more distress and more social

206———Cultural Animal
withdrawal, especially from your roommates. If you
have an exam to study for or a difficult, challenging
task, crowding could have some negative effects. Laboratory
experiments show that crowding impairs complex,
but not simple, task performance. If the task is
demanding, requiring a lot of effort and attention to
multiple components, it is likely to suffer under crowded
conditions.
What about individual differences in sensitivity to
crowding—does everyone respond the same way to a
crowded situation? If you are studying and your friend
is talking with his friends, crowding is likely to have
drastically different effects on each of you. Men may
react more physiologically to crowding, their blood
pressure and stress hormones elevating more, whereas
women (at least initially) try to get along with those
around them when it’s crowded. However, over time,
if these attempts are unsuccessful, women may actually
react more negatively because their attempts at
affiliation prove futile. One study of tripled college
dorm rooms designed for two people found more psychological
distress in women than in men, but it took
more time for this to occur in the females. The tripledup
men, but not the women, evidenced elevated stress
hormones. How about culture or ethnicity? Some
groups of people (e.g., Asian, Latin Americans) do
indeed perceive high-density situations as less
crowded than do others (e.g., White and Black North
Americans). But their negative reactions to crowding
are similar across cultures. The threshold to experience
crowding may be different, but once it happens,
their reactions are parallel to one another.
One final topic worth brief mention is the potential
role of architecture and design in crowding. Space is
not simply area or volume. For example, in a study of
elementary school children, the impacts of residential
density were related to the type of housing. Children
living in larger, multifamily residences, independently
of social class, reacted more negatively to higherdensity
living spaces than did children living in singlefamily
homes. There is also evidence that having some
space in your home where you can at least temporally
be alone (refuge) can offset some of the negative
impacts of crowding. Crowding is but one example of
the many ways in which human behavior and the physical
environment can influence one another.
See also Control; Personal Space; Stress and Coping
Gary W. Evans
Further Readings
Bechtel, R. B. (1997). Environment and behavior. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bell, P. A., Greene, T. C., Fisher, J. D., & Baum, A. (1996).
Environmental psychology (3rd ed.). Fort Worth, TX:
Harcourt Brace College.
Evans, G. W. (2001). Environmental stress and health.
In A. Baum, T. Revenson, & J. E. Singer (Eds.), Health
psychology (pp. 365–385). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Evans, G. W. (2006). Child development and the physical
environment. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 423–451.
Gifford, R. (2002). Environmental psychology (3rd ed.).
Vancouver, BC: Optimal Books.
CULTURAL ANIMAL
Definition
Cultural animal is a term used to refer to human
beings. The core idea is that human beings differ from
other animals in the extent to which they create, sustain,
and participate in culture.
There are hundreds of definitions of culture.
However, there are several main themes in understanding
what culture is. Culture refers to learned behavior
rather than innate predispositions. Culture is not created
or owned by a specific person but rather requires
a group, usually a large group. (You cannot have culture
by yourself.) Crucially, a culture must reproduce
itself, so it includes some means by which it is passed
down from one generation to another. Culture consists
of shared ideas and shared ways of doing things. Thus,
American culture includes shared values such as freedom
and democracy, and it also includes ways of doing
things, such as how to get a job, get food, vote, and pay
taxes. Cultures generally include organized frameworks
that allow people to live together. For that to
happen, cultures must find ways to satisfy basic human
needs, such as for food, water, shelter, and safety.
Thus, to call humans cultural animals is to say that
human beings almost always prefer to live in groups
that have these properties. They are organized. They
collect and share information, including passing on
what they have learned to the next generation. They
rely on the group to help them get what they need to
live. Through this cooperation and learning, members
of the group come to hold common beliefs and values
and to do things in similar ways.

Context and Importance
Social psychology has developed over the decades by
studying one slice of behavior at a time. Periodically,
its thinkers wonder how to put all these little bits of
information together to construct a broad, coherent
understanding of human nature, which is to say, what
kind of creatures human beings are. This sort of question
lurks in the background of nearly all the work that
seeks to understand people: Are they good or evil?
Are they products of their environment? Do they have
free will? What do they mainly want? How does the
human mind work, and how did it get to be that way?
Social psychologists have long responded to questions
about human nature by saying that humans are
social animals. The “social animal” phrase was coined
by Aristotle and has been preserved in an often-updated
book by Eliot Aronson. Its central idea is that people
are, by nature, motivated to be with other people,
including forming relationships with them, working
with them, and playing with them.
The cultural animal view takes a large step beyond
the social animal view. It agrees that humans are social
animals, but in that respect they are not all that different
from a great many other social animals—from ants
and birds to wolves and zebras. Hence, if we want to
understand what is special about human beings, indeed
understand what makes us human, we must go beyond
the social animal idea, correct though it is.
Culture is a better way of being social. It has made
possible the great achievements and progress that
humankind has seen across its history. Social animals
may work together toward common goals and copy
each other’s successful behaviors, but without a culture
to store information and transmit it to others, every
generation starts over from the beginning. Without
culture, each new generation of human beings would
have to start over too, such as figuring out how to find
food and make fire. Culture allows each new generation
to inherit what its parents knew and then, perhaps,
to add to that stock of knowledge. Cooking, medical
technology, automobile travel, electrical appliances,
and indoor plumbing all reflect the accumulation of
knowledge across generations and hence the benefits
of culture.
Evidence
The theory that humans are cultural animals is not
something that can be easily proven or disproved. It is
Cultural Animal———207
not a conclusion from a laboratory study. Rather, it
is a broad theory that can be used to explain many
aspects of human behavior. The usefulness of such
grand theories is found not in whether they can be
tested experimentally but rather in how many different
ideas and observations they can make sense of
together and how few seem to contradict them. The
facts that people everywhere live in groups, use language,
socialize their children, and share information
are consistent with the view of humans as cultural animals.
Those observations fit but do not prove that
humans are cultural animals. Still, if the opposite patterns
were true (e.g., if people generally refused to
share information or cooperate, learned language only
reluctantly and under pressure, and left their children
to fend for themselves), then it would be implausible
to say people are cultural animals.
Implications
Researchers who study animals say that many of them
have the beginnings of culture, such as if they learn
how to get food in a certain way and then their children
copy them. However, these are tiny bits and beginnings,
whereas humans rely on culture in almost everything
they do. For example, most animals get their own
food directly from nature and make or find their own
nests or other shelters, whereas most likely you have
hardly ever hunted your own food, sewn your own
clothes, or built your home with your own hands.
The cultural animal view holds that what makes
people unique, and what makes us human, can be
found in the special traits that make culture possible.
These start with the capacity to use language. They
include the complex ways people think and make decisions
and the way people understand each other’s emotions
and goals.
A long tradition in Western thought has focused on
the conflict between the individual and society, sometimes
viewing the individual as a victim of powerful,
impersonal social forces and proposing that people
would be better off if they could escape from society.
The cultural animal view, in contrast, holds that humans
are designed, by nature, precisely to live and work in a
cultural society. Although cultures are far from perfect
and can be quite oppressive, the option of living alone in
the forest is not to be taken seriously for the bulk of
humanity, because human nature is far better suited to
cultural life. We must strive to make society better rather
than to escape from it. Despite its shortcomings and

208———Cultural Differences
problems, culture has been a remarkable success when
judged in biological terms: Unlike the other great apes,
humans have multiplied, spread out to live in a wide
assortment of lands and climates, and accumulated the
knowledge of how to enable individuals to live two or
three times as long as their ancestors.
Roy F. Baumeister
See also Culture; Evolutionary Psychology; Social Learning
Further Readings
Aronson, E. (2004). The social animal (9th ed.). New York:
Worth.
Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human
nature, meaning, and social life. New York: Oxford
University Press.
CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
Definition
Cultural groups can differ widely in their beliefs about
what is true, good, and efficient. The study of cultural
differences combines perspectives in psychology and
anthropology to understand a society’s signature pattern
of beliefs, behavior, and social institutions and
how these patterns compare and contrast to those of
other cultural groups.
Cultural differences appear both between and
within societies, for example, between Canadians and
Japanese, and within the United States between Anglos
and Latinos. Descriptions of cultural differences are
made in context to the many similarities shared across
human groups. Although a variety of attributes differ
between cultures, there are also many similarities that
exist across human societies. Moreover, even where
there are differences between cultural groups, individual
differences mean that not every person within a
particular culture will have beliefs or exhibit behaviors
that resemble predominant patterns in their society.
Context and Focus
Cultures can contrast in many ways, some more obvious
and observable than others. For example, cultures
differ in language, dress (kilt, kimono, or three-piece
suit), and social greetings (kiss, bow, handshake).
From a psychological perspective, cultures also differ
in more subtle, yet important ways, such as how they
explain why someone behaved the way they did, what
they notice and remember from social interactions, or
whether they try to “fit in” versus “stand out” in their
peer group. For example, in the United States and
Australia, individuals tend to define themselves in
terms of their unique personality characteristics and
individual attributes (e.g., outgoing, optimistic, ambitious),
whereas in Korea and Mexico, individuals are
more likely to define themselves in terms of their connection
to others or membership in social groups (e.g.,
sister, friend, student). In Chinese cultures, building
deep personal relationships is considered more effective
than contracts as a way to establish trust in a business
relationship. Yet, in the United States, contracts
are valued more than personal assurances. Psychological
research on cultural differences focuses on such subtle
differences and unexpected similarities in beliefs
and behavior.
Background and History
Humans have long been interested in cultural differences.
The first written accounts of cultural diversity
appear as far back as the 4th century B.C.E. in
Herodotus’ description of the unique beliefs and customs
among the different cultural groups that traded
along the shores of the Black Sea. However, it was not
until around the 19th century C.E. that scholars began
to conduct systematic studies of unique cultural beliefs
and practices, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings
about the unique aspects of early American culture
and Max Weber’s analysis of how religious ideologies
developed in Northern Europe created cultural differences
in beliefs about the meaning of work. About
100 years later, the field of cultural anthropology
emerged with an exclusive focus on understanding the
nature of cultural differences around the world. Today,
psychological research has brought new understanding
about the nature of cultural differences and similarities
by combining an anthropological focus on culture with
sophisticated experimental methods developed in social
and cognitive psychology. This area of research within
social psychology is referred to as cultural psychology.
Before psychologists began to study culture, it was
often assumed that knowledge gained from psychological
research conducted within one culture applied
to all humans. This assumption about the universality
of human psychology was challenged when researchers
then tried to replicate studies in other cultures and
found very different results for a number of important

phenomena. For example, psychological experiments
showing that people tend to exert less effort when
working in a group versus alone showed an opposite
pattern in East Asian societies. There, people tend to
exert less effort when working alone compared to
when working in a group. Further, studies conducted
in India, and later in Japan, showed an opposite pattern
to earlier research conducted in the United
States—that people tend to overestimate the influence
of personality and underestimate the influence of situational
factors on behavior.
Evidence
Three broad types of evidence have been used to
demonstrate cultural differences. First, in-depth
studies of single cultures have found a variety of culturally
unique ways people think about and engage in
interpersonal relations. For example, within Mexico,
interpersonal relations are characterized by a sincere
emphasis on proactively creating interpersonal harmony
(i.e., simpatía) even with strangers. In Japan and
Korea, people also exhibit a heightened focus on interpersonal
harmony. However, unlike Mexicans, the
concern for harmony among the Japanese is more
focused on relationships with one’s ingroup (e.g.,
friends, family), and it is sustained through a more passive,
“don’t rock the boat” strategy. In the United
States, the concern for interpersonal harmony differs
for casual, social relationships versus work relationships.
While it is common in the United States for individuals
to create a pleasant and positive social dynamic
across most settings, they show a tendency to attend
less to interpersonal relations and overall level of harmony
while in work settings. To provide evidence of
these different relational styles across cultures,
researchers have examined, for example, how members
of these cultures convey information that could be
embarrassing or disappointing to others. When talking
with friends or social acquaintances, Americans and
Koreans use indirect, subtle cues to avoid embarrassing
others when conveying such bad news. However,
when talking with someone in a work setting,
Americans believe it is more appropriate to be direct
even if the message contains bad news for the listener.
In contrast, Koreans believe that at work it is even
more important to use subtle communication that will
convey the message but also save face for the listener.
Thus, cultural differences in attention to interpersonal
concerns can be more pronounced in some settings
(e.g., work) than in other settings (e.g., party).
Cultural Differences———209
A second type of evidence comes from multinational
surveys that have measured people’s values in
every major continent, across hundreds of societies. In
these survey studies, people are asked to rate how
much they agree with statements like “It is important
to be free to make one’s own decisions” and “People
are defined by their connection to their social group.”
This type of research shows that cultural groups fluctuate
significantly in how much they value individual
autonomy versus obligations to follow traditions;
equality versus respect for differences in status; competition
versus cooperation; and distinctions between
ingroups and outgroups.
A third and compelling type of evidence for cultural
differences is provided by cross-cultural experiments
on the way people perceive and react to their
social environment. When experimental studies present
individuals from different cultures with the exact
same situation, for example, a video of two people
talking with each other during a workgroup meeting,
very different interpretations and responses can
emerge. In many Latin American cultures, people
notice and remember how hard the individuals in the
video are working and how well or poorly they are
getting along interpersonally. In North American cultures,
people tend to also notice how hard people are
working but notice much less information about the
level of interpersonal rapport.
There is evidence that cultural differences are the
result of people’s experience living and participating in
different sociocultural environments. Bicultural groups,
for example, Chinese Canadians or Mexican Americans,
often exhibit psychological patterns that are somewhere
in between those found in their mother country (e.g.,
China or Mexico) and those in their new adopted culture
(e.g., Canada or the United States). Experimental
evidence also shows (in certain domains) significant
cultural differences between different regions within
a society, for example, between individuals from the
northern versus southern United States. In relative
terms, an insult to one’s honor is a fleeting annoyance
for northerners, but a more serious affront to southerners,
and although violence is generally no more tolerated
among southerners than northerners, it is more
likely to be considered justified when honor is at stake.
Implications
Cultural differences have implications for virtually
all areas of psychology. For example, cultural differences
have been found in child-rearing practices

210———Culture
(developmental psychology), the range of personality
traits in a society (personality psychology), how
people process information (cognitive psychology),
effective treatments for mental disorders (clinical psychology),
teacher–student interactions (educational
psychology), motivational incentives important to
workers (organizational psychology), and interpersonal
styles (social psychology). Research in each of
these areas provides knowledge about how cultures
can differ and when they are likely to be more similar
than different.
The existence of cultural differences has significant
implications for people’s daily lives, whether at school,
work, or any other setting in which people from diverse
cultural backgrounds interact. It is important to recognize
that diversity can mean much more than differences
in ethnicity, race, or nationality; cultural diversity
also includes sometimes subtle, yet important basic
differences in the assumptions, beliefs, perceptions,
and behavior that people from different cultures use to
navigate their social world.
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks
See also Collectivistic Cultures; Culture; Culture of Honor;
Individual Differences
Further Readings
Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self:
Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.
Psychological Review, 98(2), 224–253.
Nisbett, R., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001).
Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic
cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310.
Sanchez-Burks, J., Nisbett, R., & Ybarra, O. (2000). Cultural
styles, relational schemas and prejudice against outgroups.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(2),
174–189.
Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
CULTURE
Definition
Culture can be generally defined as an interrelated
set of values, tools, and practices that is shared among
a group of people who possess a common social
identity. More simply, culture is the sum total of our
worldviews or of our ways of living. Cultural worldviews
affect a range of psychological processes, including
perceptual, cognitive, personality, and social
processes, but are thought to most strongly influence
social psychological processes.
Background and History
For much of the 20th century, there was scant
research and publishing on the subject of culture and
behavior in the general psychological literature.
Some of the more notable exceptions are seen in the
work of Wilhelm Wundt, Lev Vygotsky, and Frederic
Bartlett. One influential finding on cultural effects
was made by Marshall Segall in the 1960s, who,
along with his colleagues, found that Africans and
Westerners varied in their susceptibility to certain
visual illusions, theoretically because of their differential
exposure to built environments and wide vistas.
Apart from such isolated cases of research, however,
much of the early academic study of the behavioral
effects of culture can be drawn from the work of
social anthropologists.
Since 1970, social psychologists have paid significant
attention to the effects of culture on behavior.
This growth was due, in part, to the increased level of
intercultural interaction and its associated challenges
that occurred with the rapid expansion in global communication,
economies, and migration in the intervening
period. Advances in social psychological theory
and research methodology also facilitated more interest
in the study of culture. As a result, knowledge
about culture and behavior increased significantly in
the latter half of the 20th century, principally through
the work of social psychologists like Harry Triandis,
Geert Hofstede, Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama,
Shalom Schwartz, and Richard Nisbett, among others.
Current Approaches and Knowledge
Many contemporary social psychologists who investigate
the effects of culture do so by comparing national
cultures to determine universal and culture-specific patterns
of behavior. Cross-cultural research is conducted
primarily from the sociocognitive perspective and
focuses on the cultural values, beliefs, and attitudes or
cultural knowledge that distinguishes the behavior of
people with different national backgrounds.
One prominent tool employed by cross-cultural
researchers is to classify nations by their relative support
for individualism or collectivism. Individualism

is a set of values, beliefs, and attitudes that emphasize
the importance of people pursuing their individual
goals and behavior. Collectivism is manifest in values,
beliefs, and attitudes that emphasize the importance of
people following group goals and group norms for
behavior. Research has shown North American,
Western European, and Australian cultures to be relatively
individualistic, while Japanese and Chinese cultures
are comparatively collectivistic.
Individualistic and collectivistic cultures encourage
people to adopt a certain set of interrelated values,
beliefs, and perceptions of the self and the group. A
person exposed to an individualistic culture is more
likely to value personal autonomy, freedom of expression,
and self-enhancement than is a person from a collectivistic
culture, who would contrastingly be more
likely to value obedience, tradition, and group enhancement.
In addition, individualistic cultures encourage
people to adopt an independent self-view or distinguish
the self from others, whereas people in collectivistic
cultures view themselves as more interdependent or
connected to others. As a consequence, the individual
and the group are perceived as the more prominent
agent in behavior in individualistic and collectivistic
cultures, respectively.
The distinction made between individualistic and
collectivistic cultures helps explain a range of behaviors.
Research has shown that North Americans
attribute behavior to individual volition or internal dispositions.
Chinese, on the other hand, attribute behavior
to the influence of a person’s primary reference
groups or other factors external to the individual, such
as situational influences. It has also been shown that
the preference for maintaining harmonious interpersonal
and intragroup communication patterns is much
stronger in collectivistic than individualistic cultures.
Individualism and collectivism are even manifested in
language practices with Westerners more prone to use
first person pronouns (e.g., I, me) than are people from
collectivistic cultures.
While the classification of nations according to
broad constructs such as individualism and collectivism
is a powerful tool in cross-cultural psychology,
our understanding of cultural knowledge is not limited
to this extent. Nations have been shown to vary on
other distinct systems of cultural values, such as the
level of universalism, security, or power they promote.
Moreover, groups within nations (e.g., states, regions,
organizations) and groups that transcend national
boundaries (youth, arts, religious groups) exhibit their
own distinct cultural knowledge.
Cultural knowledge is thought to have evolved to
meet a range of significant social and basic emotional
needs. On one level, cultural values and practices give
order and structure to the social world, be it to nations,
societies, or groups. At another level, culture fulfills
the individual emotional need for belonging, and the
need for purpose and meaning to existence. Recent
work by Jeff Greenberg and his colleagues also highlights
that cultural worldviews fulfill the need for selfesteem:
Self-esteem is derived from being seen to have
successfully performed culturally valued behaviors.
The range of social and emotional needs that cultural
worldviews meet helps explains why people are
prone to show strong allegiance to their culture and
their cultural group. Indeed, research has shown that
raising existential anxiety among people leads them to
strongly endorse their cultural values and beliefs and
derogate, or distance themselves from, culturally different
values or others.
Implications
Knowledge about culture and behavior from the view
of social psychology has been successfully applied in
various settings to solve a range of problems. These
problems have included those that arise with intercultural
communication and negotiation, the acculturation
experience of immigrants, the contrasting ways
people label and treat health concerns and psychological
disorders, and the management of multinational
organizations. More generally, intercultural understanding
has been shown to reduce prejudice and
intergroup conflict and promote harmonious relations
and exchange between social groups.
Michael J. Halloran
See also Cultural Animal; Cultural Differences; Collectivistic
Cultures; Interdependence Theory; Self-Enhancement
Further Readings
Culture———211
Fiske, A. P., Kitayama, S., Markus, H. R., & Nisbett, R. E.
(1998). The cultural matrix of social psychology.
In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The
handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 915–981). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Halloran, M., & Kashima, E. (2006). Culture, social identity,
and the individual. In T. Postmes & J. Jetten (Eds.),
Individuality and the group: Advances in social identity
(pp. 137–154). London: Sage.

212———Culture of Honor
Kashima, Y. (2001). Culture and social cognition: Towards a
social psychology of cultural dynamics. In D. Matsumoto
(Ed.), Handbook of culture and psychology (pp. 325–360).
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
CULTURE OF HONOR
Definition
A culture of honor is a culture in which a person
(usually a man) feels obliged to protect his or her reputation
by answering insults, affronts, and threats,
oftentimes through the use of violence. Cultures of
honor have been independently invented many times
across the world. Three well-known examples of cultures
of honor include cultures of honor in parts of the
Middle East, the southern United States, and innercity
neighborhoods (of the United States and elsewhere)
that are controlled by gangs.
Cultures of honor can vary in many ways. Some
stress female chastity to an extreme degree, whereas
others do not. Some have strong norms for hospitality
and politeness toward strangers, whereas others
actively encourage aggression against outsiders. What
all cultures of honor share, however, is the central
importance placed on insult and threat and the necessity
of responding to them with violence or the threat
of violence.
Insults and threats take on great meaning in cultures
of honor, because of the environments in which
cultures of honor develop. Such cultures develop in
lawless environments where there is no central authority
(such as the state) that can offer effective protection
to its citizens. In such a situation, a person has to
let it be known that he will protect himself, his family,
and his property. Insults and affronts are important
because they act as probes, establishing who can do
what to whom. A person who responds with violence
over “small” matters (e.g., an insult or an argument
over a small amount of money) can effectively establish
himself as one who is not to be messed with on
larger matters. Thus, an effective response to an insult
can deter future attacks, when the stakes may be much
higher.
Many violent incidents in cultures of honor center
on what might be considered a trivial incident to outsiders.
Such matters are not trivial to the people in the
argument, however, because people are defending
(or establishing) their reputations. What is really at
stake is something of far greater importance than a
one-dollar debt owed or a record on the jukebox.
In cultures of honor, reputation is highly tied up
with masculinity. A telling anecdote from Hodding
Carter’s book Southern Legacy (1950) concerned a
1930s Louisiana court case, in which Carter served as
a juror. The facts of the matter were clear. The defendant
lived near a gas station and had been pestered for
some time by workers there. One day, the man had
had enough and opened fire on the workers, killing
one person and wounding two others. As Carter tells
it, the case seemed open and shut, and so Carter began
discussions in the jury room by offering up the obvious
(to him) verdict of guilty. The other 11 jurors had
very different ideas about the obvious verdict, however,
and they strongly and unanimously favored
acquittal. Fellow jurors explained to Carter that the
man couldn’t be guilty—what kind of man wouldn’t
have shot the others? An elder juror later told Carter
that a man can’t be jailed for standing up for his
rights. In cultures of honor everywhere, traditional
masculinity is a virtue that has to be defended.
Various ethnographies have described cultures of
honor in great detail. Sociologist Elijah Anderson, for
example, has written about the culture of honor in inner
cities of the United States. Anthropologists Julian Pitt-
Rivers and J. G. Peristiany have written about honor
in the Mediterranean region, and an important collection
of papers can be found in Peristiany’s 1966
book Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean
Society. Notably, the book includes chapters by Pitt-
Rivers, Peristiany, and Pierre Bourdeau, who has written
about honor and the importance of female chastity
among the Kabyle of Algeria. As in many Mediterranean
cultures, the sanctity of the family name among
the Kabyle depends a great deal on the purity of its
women and how well the men guard and protect it. In
such cultures, females who disgrace the family may be
killed by their male relatives in an attempt to cleanse
the family name.
Within experimental social psychology, Richard
Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s 1996 book Culture of Honor
lays out the case that there is a culture of honor among
Whites in the contemporary South of the United States.
Among other evidence, they show that the homicide
rate is higher among Whites in the U.S. South, but only
for killings that involve quarrels, lovers’ triangles, and
other arguments (i.e., those killings where honor is
most likely to be at stake). They also show in opinion

surveys that White southerners are more likely to
endorse violence than are northerners when the violence
is used in response to insult or in response to
some threat to home, family, or property.
In laboratory studies, they showed that southern
U.S. college students were more likely than northern
college students to respond in an aggressive manner
when they were insulted. The insult involved an experimental
confederate who bumped into the experimental
participant as he was walking down the hallway
and then called the participant an expletive. Southern
students were more than twice as likely as northern
students to become visibly angry at the insult (85% vs.
35%). They were more cognitively primed for aggression,
completing scenarios with more violent endings.
And they showed surges in their levels of testosterone
(a hormone associated with aggression, competition,
and dominance) and cortisol (a hormone associated
with stress and arousal) after the bump. Additionally,
southerners also became more aggressive as they subsequently
walked down the hallway and encountered
another experimental confederate (who was 6 feet
3 inches tall and weighed 250 pounds).
Finally, the researchers also showed that the laws
and social policies of the South were more lenient
toward violence than those of the North. This is
important, because social policies may be one way the
culture of honor is carried forward, even after the originating
conditions (the lawless environment of the
frontier South) have largely disappeared.
See also Aggression; Culture; Masculinity/Femininity;
Threatened Egotism Theory of Aggression
Further Readings
Dov Cohen
Anderson, E. (1994, May). The code of the streets. Atlantic
Monthly, 5, 81–94.
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. Hawthorne,
NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
Gilmore, D. (1990). Manhood in the making: Cultural
concepts of masculinity. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Nisbett, R. E., & Cohen, D. (1996). Culture of honor: The
psychology of violence in the South. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Peristiany, J. G. (1966). Honour and shame. Chicago:
University of Chicago.
CURIOSITY
Definition
Curiosity———213
Curiosity is a pleasant motivational state involving the
tendency to recognize and seek out novel and challenging
information and experiences. Curiosity differs
from other positive emotions by the strong desire to
explore and persist in the activity that initially stimulated
an individual’s interest. Although curiosity and
enjoyment tend to go in tandem, sometimes there is a
conflict between curiosity and other positive emotions
because curiosity can lead to the pursuit of new, uncertain,
and complex activities that are aversive. With
curiosity, the rewards appear to come from the process
of integrating varied and complex information and
experiences rather than simply the positive affect associated
with it.
Individual Differences in Curiosity
All human beings have moments of curiosity, as it is a
universal characteristic that begins to emerge during
infancy. Yet, individuals differ in the preference for
novel and challenging activities; the tendency to find
themselves in, or actively search for, these activities;
the breadth of activities that stimulate their interest;
the threshold to experience curiosity; and the intensity,
frequency, and chronicity of curiosity. Individuals also
differ in their willingness to take physical, social,
financial, and legal risks to satisfy their need for varied,
uncertain, and complex experiences and avoid the
pain of boredom. This is a variant of curiosity called
sensation seeking. Sensation seeking not only includes
more socially desirable activity, such as taking a walk
in a cold breeze, using aromatherapy, and trying exotic
foods, but also less socially desirable activity, such as
gambling, cliff diving, ingesting consciousnessexpanding
drugs, or having a fascination with death and
violence.
The degree to which people become curious or
interested appears to be a function of recognizing the
potential novelty, complexity, uncertainty, and conflict
in the object of one’s attention. Some of the primary
qualities that induce curiosity include (a) novelty—
newness relative to prior experiences and expectations,
(b) complexity—the more variety or less integration
of components within the scope of attention,
(c) uncertainty—the presence of multiple outcomes and

214———Curiosity
possibilities with little knowledge of which will occur,
and (d) conflict—the presence of competing response
tendencies such as being motivated to approach or
avoid the same activity. Each of these qualities can
point to a gap in one’s preexisting knowledge and
capabilities, or representation of the self, world, or
future. Strong feelings of curiosity can be expected
when individuals are aware of discrepancies between
what is known and not known and when they find it
desirable to make the unknown known. An individual’s
curiosity is not only affected by evaluations of how
novel and challenging an activity is, but also by
personal abilities to cope and feel a sense of control.
These appraisals (of novelty and coping potential)
have an inverted-U function on curiosity and
exploratory behavior. For example, high levels of novelty,
complexity, uncertainty, and conflict can lead to
undesirable feelings of anxiety and confusion, whereas
moderate levels appear to be ideal for creating and sustaining
curiosity and interest.
Despite these general factors that affect whether a
person will be curious, the specific information and
experiences that interest one individual can be boring
or anxiety-provoking to another. That is, when you
begin to examine interests and judgments, individuals
with the same tendency to be curious may be interested
in vastly different information, knowledge, and
direct sensory experiences. For example, one highly
curious person may be extremely interested in playing
chess and solving complex, mathematical formulas
while another highly curious person may find puzzles
to be boring and be primarily interested in gossip and
meeting new people. Among other psychological
processes, the experience of curiosity in a given activity
helps explain why individuals develop longstanding
interests in one thing and not another.
Context and Importance
Curiosity is relevant to nearly all human activity ranging
from leisure, creativity, decision making, and
social relations to education, sports, work, and clinical
therapy. By being fully engaging in varied and novel
activities, a curious individual is guaranteed of stretching
or expanding his or her knowledge, skills, and
competence. Upon investing time, effort, and energy in
activities that are intrinsically valued, curiosity facilitates
personal growth and learning. In addition to these
personal resources, feelings of curiosity can build
social bonds by promoting behaviors such as engagement,
responsiveness, and flexibility to others’ varied
experiences and perspectives. These behaviors are
desirable in interpersonal transactions and the formative
stages of relationship development. On average,
people enjoy spending time and developing friendships
with people who are interested in them and what
they say and do.
Another value of curiosity is its role in motivating
and sustaining interest in important, but boring or
tedious, activities. If an activity induces curiosity, an
individual is likely to persist and the process is likely
to be as enjoyable as (or even more so than) other goalrelated
outcomes. If an activity does not induce curiosity
but there is a good reason to continue (such as
having to take calculus to graduate high school), individuals
can transform activities by making them more
interesting (such as completing projects with someone
else or with good music in the background or trying
to make a game out of it). Attempts to self-generate
curiosity in mundane activities leads to sustained motivation
and increased effort and performance.
What makes an individual curious and interested is
a large determinant of the career choices they make
and, on a smaller scale, activities chosen when options
and time are available. Individuals who are generally
more curious tend to achieve and perform better in
academics, work, and sports (even after accounting
for how intelligent or athletic they are). They also
adjust better to school and job-related changes and are
generally more satisfied and have better relationships
with others in school, work, and other settings.
Curiosity is associated with a wide range of desirable
psychosocial outcomes. This includes greater
well-being, intelligence, creativity, critical thinking
and problem-solving skills, goal effort and progress,
preference for challenge in work and play, perceived
control, and less perceived stress, negative emotions,
and reliance on stereotypes and dogmatic thinking.
A few provocative studies have even shown that more
curious older adults live longer than their less curious
peers even after accounting for the usual suspects such
as age, gender, and physical health.
See also Intrinsic Motivation; Sensation Seeking
Todd B. Kashdan
Michael F. Steger
William E. Breen

Further Readings
Kashdan, T. B. (2004). Curiosity. In C. Peterson &
M. E. P. Seligman (Eds.), Character strengths and
virtues: A handbook and classification (pp. 125–141).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association &
Oxford University Press.
Sansone, C., & Smith, J. L. (2000). Interest and selfregulation:
The relation between having to and wanting to.
Curiosity———215
In C. Sansone & J. M. Harackiewicz (Eds.), Intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation: The search for optimal motivation
and performance (pp. 341–372). San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Silvia, P. J. (2006). Exploring the psychology of interest.
New York: Oxford University Press.

DATE RAPE
Definition
Date rape refers to forced sexual intercourse without
consent that is perpetrated by someone familiar to
the victim, usually an acquaintance or date. Although
date rape can be perpetrated by women, the typical
date rape occurs when a man uses physical or psychological
intimidation to force a woman to have intercourse
against her will. Date rape also occurs when
men have sex with women who have been incapacitated
with alcohol or drugs and thus unable to consent
to sex. Many social psychological factors influence
how date rape is defined, perceived, and experienced
by victims and perpetrators. These factors include
stereotypes, scripts, gender roles, and elements of the
sexual situation.
Stereotypes of rape lead many people to believe that
rape occurs when a woman is attacked by a stranger
in a dark, secluded street. In fact, the vast majority of
rapes are committed against women by men they know,
including former lovers, current boyfriends or spouses,
friends, and acquaintances. The typical date rape occurs
after a man and woman have had several dates. The
couple has previously engaged in some level of consensual
activity like heavy petting or oral sex. The man
wants to continue, but the woman refuses. Most men
stop at this point, but date rape occurs when the man
forces the woman into sex despite her rejection.
Why Does Date Rape Occur?
Theories to explain rape have focused on whether rape
is sexually motivated or motivated by the male goals
D
217
to exert power over women. Early views emphasizing
sex often blamed rape victims for tempting men with
their style of dress or behaviors. Rapists could not
control their sexual desire in the face of such temptation.
This view was challenged in the 1970s by feminist
theories. Feminists proposed that most or all men
are socialized by culture to rape, and that all men support
and encourage rape because rape functions to
instill fear in women. According to feminist theory,
rape is one way that men can keep women in less
powerful positions in society. The feminist view of
rape can be credited for helping to dispel the victimblaming
of earlier theories, though it does not have
much supporting evidence itself. Today, many psychologists
believe that date rape results from a combination
of personality and situational factors. These
factors consider the background and personality of
rapists as well as social-psychological factors related
to the situation.
Factors Related to Rapists
Date rapists tend to explain their motives in terms of
sex rather than power. They report having more sexual
partners and sexual activity than other men. Date
rapists prefer not to use force to get sex, but they will
use force or intimidation if necessary. Risk factors
for rapists include backgrounds with violent home life,
delinquency, and macho peer groups that encourage sexual
promiscuity and conquest. Date rapists also identify
with exaggerated masculine gender roles. For example,
they may endorse views that equate masculinity with
hostility toward women and femininity, sexual conquest,
and acting macho. Date rapists are egocentric and lack
empathy toward their victims. They may justify their

218———Debiasing
actions by blaming their victims for being a tease or
wasting their time and money on the date. Many date
rapists do not interpret their actions as rape. The common
belief that their victim actually enjoyed the rape is
a sign of the rapist’s distorted perceptions and lack of
empathy for their victims.
Factors Related to the Situation
Research on date rape has examined how gender roles
and sexual scripts may set the stage for sexual miscommunication
between men and women. People use
scripts or mental frameworks for organizing and guiding
behaviors. Cultural standards of masculinity and
femininity influence the scripts that men and women
have for negotiating sexual activity. Many people possess
a sexual script that “no” really means “yes.” A man
may believe that a woman’s refusal is just a token
so that she will not appear too permissive. The script
suggests that if the man persists in his advances, the
woman will eventually submit willingly, which is
what she wanted to begin with. This script contributes
to sexual miscommunication between men and
women, and it may distort individuals’ perceptions of
other’s sexual motives.
Individuals also have scripts and stereotypes that
rape only occurs in the stranger scenario. This script
may influence the way that individuals label their
sexual experiences. Many women who have experienced
nonconsensual sexual intercourse do not label
or acknowledge their experience as rape. This is likely
due to the fact that their experience does not fit into
the stereotypical script for rape. Their rape script
focuses on the stranger rape rather than date rape.
A new theory of date rape combines personality
factors of the rapist with situational factors. This theory
suggests that date rapists are narcissists who are
insulted when women refuse their sexual advances.
Narcissists feel a sense of personal entitlement. A narcissist
may feel that a woman owes him sex after he
has spent effort and money on a date. Narcissists are
especially sensitive to rejection and may be easily
offended when their sexual advances are refused.
Narcissists are prime candidates to experience what
psychologists refer to as reactance in this situation.
Psychological reactance occurs when an individual
feels that his or her freedom has been limited. In this
case, the rapist feels that his right to have sex with
his date has been denied. Reactance theory predicts
that a forbidden fruit, once forbidden, becomes more
valuable. People will react and reassert their freedom
by trying to take that which has been forbidden
and aggressing against the person who limits their
freedom. In other words, a narcissistic man will be
insulted when his date does not submit to his desires.
The sexual conquest will then become more valuable
to the narcissist, and he will use force or intimidation
to reassert his freedom and take that which he desires.
Because most men do not rape, this theory is useful in
predicting the type of man who will rape when his
advances are refused.
Kathleen R. Catanese
See also Narcissism; Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Sexual
Coercion; Reactance
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Wallace, H. M. (2002).
Conquest by force: A narcissistic reactance theory of
rape and sexual coercion. Review of General Psychology,
6, 92–135.
Byers, E. S. (1996). How well does the traditional sexual
script explain sexual coercion? Review of a program of
research. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality,
8, 7–25.
Kanin, E. J. (1985). Date rapists: Differential sexual
socialization and relative deprivation. Archives of Sexual
Behavior, 14, 219–231.
DEBIASING
Definition
Debiasing refers to the wide variety of techniques, methods,
and interventions that are designed to eliminate
or lessen potential errors, distortions, or other mistakes
in people’s thinking, judgment, or decision making.
Specific debiasing techniques can be placed into three
general categories: (1) cognitive, involving things like
changes in the ways in which decision makers conceptualize
a problem; (2) motivational, involving things
like changes in the ways in which incentives or punishments
are allocated to decision makers; or (3) technological,
involving things like changes in the ways in
which computers and other technological advances can
be employed to assist in problem solving.

Because people are imperfect and fallible decision
makers, no matter which techniques are ultimately
implemented, the term debiasing is normally used to
refer to something that occurs to a relative degree
rather than something that occurs completely.
Background and Importance
When there are problems, people quite naturally look
for possible solutions. People are certainly skilled
enough in their decision making to get through life
perfectly fine most of the time, but they are also often
unskilled enough to make predictable mistakes in their
judgments. For the human decision maker, the glass is
thus both half full and half empty.
Although debiasing research occasionally appears
to be overshadowed somewhat by research demonstrating
various biases—it may seem more noteworthy
to show that something is broken rather than to show
how to fix it—both debiasing and biasing are equally
important to fully understanding decision making. Just
as the study of biases can supply a roadmap predicting
the conditions under which judgmental mistakes are
likely to occur, the study of debiasing can supply a
roadmap describing what might be done about these
mistakes.
Evidence for Techniques
Evidence supporting the three general categories of
debiasing techniques is fairly extensive and comes
from diverse sources. This is illustrated with some specific
examples.
Cognitive
Perhaps one of the best-researched cognitive debiasing
techniques requires people to consider the opposite
of their initial impressions before making a final decision.
The strategy essentially entails asking, “Are there
reasons why my initial judgment may be wrong?” For
example, with the hindsight bias, people are most apt
to come up with reasons supporting known outcomes,
and thus those outcomes seem inevitable. Thinking
about the opposite can work as a debiasing intervention
by directing people’s attention to alternative outcomes
that might not have otherwise received adequate consideration.
This debiasing technique seems to work
especially well when people can easily think of opposing
alternatives.
Other cognitive debiasing techniques involve education
and training. People who know the correct rule
to calculate the area of a parallelogram simply make
fewer errors than those who do not. Similar to mathematics,
one presumption is that other judgmental rules
might likewise be taught. For example, once people
learn that large samples represent a population better
than small samples, this can lead to more accurate
decision making. Educational training seems to be
most effective when decision rules are concrete and
directly applicable.
Motivational
Motivations can similarly influence debiasing. For
example, people have a general propensity to simplify
the world by categorizing things. An object with
a flat platform, straight back, and four legs, may be
characterized as a chair. However, one particularly
negative consequence of this tendency is stereotyping.
People may similarly characterize others just because
they think the person belongs to a particular group.
Although debate exists regarding the extent to which
stereotyping is automatic, incentives such as considering
future interactions with a person can sometimes
lead to less reliance on stereotypes and more reliance
on personalized information. Punishments, such as
considering retribution for acting in prejudiced ways,
may also lead people to put greater effort into decisions,
resulting in less bias.
Accountability motives can also be used to debias.
For example, if people expect they will have to explain
their reasoning to others, they are more likely to put
greater effort into a decision. When preparing to justify
decisions to others, people seem better able to anticipate
possible flaws in their own reasoning. Incentives
or punishments can be social or monetary.
Technological
Debiasing———219
Technological advances, notably the widespread dispersion
of computers, have further increased the potential
for debiasing. In fact, many decision-making tasks
are simply too complex and time consuming to carry
out without the assistance of technology; for example,
consider the complexities of launching the Space
Shuttle. Complex decision tasks are known to be more
susceptible to biases and errors. It thus seems logical, at
least superficially, that computers can aid complex calculations
and help lead to more accurate judgments.

220———Deception (Lying)
Technological advances in the form of various
algorithms to arrive at particular decision outcomes
relatedly can result in greater debiasing. Complex
equations can now be accurately solved in nanoseconds.
Of course, the weak link in technology still may
be the human decision makers running the computers
and writing the programs.
General Implications
People have many highly useful and often adaptive
decision-making strategies, but sometimes these strategies
are susceptible to errors, distortions, or other mistakes.
Debiasing techniques have been devised as
attempts to eliminate or at least minimize these.
However, successful debiasing requires at least four
things. Decision makers must (1) be aware of the potential
bias, (2) be motivated to correct the bias, (3) recognize
the direction and magnitude of the bias, and (4) be
able to adequately control or adjust for the bias.
Together, these things may not always be achievable.
The extent to which people’s biases can be effectively
debiased thus has very profound implications for virtually
all thinking, judgment, and decision making.
Lawrence J. Sanna
See also Accountability; Decision Making; Hindsight Bias;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Arkes, H. R. (1991). Costs and benefits of judgment errors:
Implications for debiasing. Psychological Bulletin,
110, 486–498.
Larrick, R. P. (2004). Debiasing. In D. J. Koehler &
N. Harvey (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of judgment and
decision making (pp. 316–337). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Wilson, T. D., & Brekke, N. (1994). Mental contamination
and mental correction: Unwanted influences on judgments
and evaluations. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 117–142.
DECEPTION (LYING)
Definition
Deception is most commonly defined as intentional
attempts to mislead others through words or behaviors.
Deception can involve misrepresenting one’s
actual beliefs, knowledge, feelings, characteristics,
or experiences. The term lying is commonly used to
describe explicit verbal deception (e.g., telling your
boss that you were late for work because of traffic,
when in reality you overslept). However, deception is
more than intentionally providing others with false
verbal statements; it also includes verbal omissions or
the withholding of information (e.g., not telling your
spouse about an affair). Deception can also be, and
perhaps is most commonly, behavioral (e.g., concealing
sadness by smiling, getting cosmetic surgery to
appear younger). Lying and purposefully misleading
others are generally viewed as socially unacceptable,
although some forms of deception are socially
accepted and expected (e.g., impression management),
and social psychologists have found that individuals
commonly mislead themselves in certain ways
(self-deception).
Research on the Prevalence and
Purposes of Deception
Only in recent years has systematic research been conducted
to understand how often and why individuals
deceive others. This work has led to an important conclusion:
Everyone lies. The most direct evidence of
this has been conducted by Bella DePaulo and her colleagues.
Using survey and diary research methods,
they have found that the overwhelming majority of
people (approximately 99.5%) report lying daily, willingly
describing in detail an average of approximately
1 to 2 explicit verbal lies per day. The most commonly
reported lies involve the misrepresentation of one’s
feeling and opinions (e.g., telling your grandmother
that you like the out-of-style sweater she gave you) and
providing false information about one’s actions, plans,
and whereabouts (e.g., reporting that you were at the
library studying when actually at the pub). Less frequent
but still common lies concern misleading others
about one’s knowledge or achievements (e.g., lying
about one’s academic record), providing fictitious reasons
or explanations for actions taken (e.g., blaming
computer trouble for late work actually resulting from
procrastination), and lies about facts and possessions
(e.g., claiming to not have the money to loan to a
friend). Commonly reported reasons for lying include
to avoid embarrassment, to make a favorable impression
on others, to conceal real feelings or reactions,
to avoid punishment or aversive situations, and to not
hurt others feelings (often called altruistic lies).

Research on Deception Detection
A long-standing interest among social psychologists
and others concerns whether deception can be
detected. The two approaches to deception detection
have been at the interpersonal level and at the technological
level.
In general, research indicates that people cannot
detect deception during normal social interactions as
much as they think they can. Typically, people can
detect when others are being deceptive toward them at
only a little above the level of chance guessing (i.e.,
a little more than 50% of the time). Noteworthy research
by Paul Ekman and his colleagues has found that
judges, police officers, psychiatrists, polygraph experts,
business people, lawyers, and students are all not much
better than chance at detecting lies. But interestingly,
subsequent research indicates that some individuals
who have had extensive and direct experience with
detecting deception for their profession (e.g., secret
service agents, sheriffs, and clinical psychologists
with experience with criminal defendants) can do so
at levels significantly better than chance. Potentially
explaining why some individuals are better at detection
than others, it has been found that deception is
associated with some subtle behaviors. For example
microexpressions, very quick facial expressions that
last only a few tenths of a second and are difficult to
suppress, have been found to be associated with lying
(e.g., a frown quickly followed by a smile). Also found
to be related is eye contact, with deceptive individuals
often blinking more, having more dilated pupils, and
engaging in either very little or an unusually high level
of eye contact. Other potential indicators are a raised
voice pitch, long response delays, the use of different
words than normal, and the presence of inconsistencies
among nonverbal cues (e.g., the deceptive person may
seem to have normal facial expressions but awkward
eye contact or interpersonal distance). Importantly,
although indicators of deception have been found, it is
clear that no single indicator is a highly reliable cue for
lying in all situations. Furthermore, it has been found
to be difficult to train people to be more accurate at
detecting lies.
The polygraph machine, commonly referred to as
the “lie detector machine,” is a device that measures
physiological responses such as heart rate, blood pressure,
breathing rate, and skin conductance (to measure
sweating). These physiological measures are all associated
with the autonomic nervous system, the activation
of which occurs naturally in situations of threat, stress,
and anxiety. The basic assumption underlying the polygraph
is that physiological indicators of autonomic
nervous system activation will occur when a person is
attempting to lie or deceive. The common polygraph
technique involves comparing an individual’s responses
to control questions (e.g., “What is your name?”) with
the individual’s responses to critical questions (e.g.,
“Did you steal the money?”). If an individual shows
more physiological response when responding to critical
questions, then deception is “detected” by the logic
that only a guilty or deceiving individual would become
anxious when responding. While under ideal circumstances,
research shows that polygraph machines can
detect deception at above-chance levels, they do so well
below perfection. As a result, the scientific consensus is
that they are far from infallible, and most researchers
seriously question the validity of using the polygraph
for important legal, security, or employment decisions.
What is especially troublesome is that there is no
widely agreed-upon method for administering or scoring
polygraph examinations. As a result, operators have
been found to disagree on the results. Furthermore, it
is known that errors are common—both false negatives
(declaring deceitful responses as truthful) and false
positives (judging truthful responses as lies). There is
also evidence that countermeasures—attempts to “beat”
the polygraph by controlling physiological responses—
can be effective. Lastly, in recent years newer and more
sophisticated technologies such as “brain fingerprinting,”
in which brain activation patterns are analyzed,
have been offered as potentially more accurate methods
for lie detection. However, like the polygraph, at this
time the scientific evidence supporting the use of such
techniques is weak.
Michael J. Tagler
See also Bogus Pipeline; Facial Expression of Emotion;
Forensic Psychology; Impression Management;
Self-Deception
Further Readings
Deception (Lying)———221
DePaulo, B. M. (2004). The many faces of lies. In A. G. Miller
(Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (pp. 303–326).
New York: Guilford Press.
Ekman, P. (2001). Telling lies: Clues to deceit in the marketplace,
politics, and marriage. New York: W. W. Norton.
National Research Council of the National Academies,
Committee to Review the Scientific Evidence on the
Polygraph. (2003). The polygraph and lie detection.
Washington, DC: National Academies Press.

222———Deception (Methodological Technique)
DECEPTION
(METHODOLOGICAL TECHNIQUE)
Definition
Deception is a methodological technique whereby a
participant is not made fully aware of the specific purposes
of the study or is misinformed as part of the study.
Two main forms of deception may occur in research.
1. The researcher intentionally misinforms the participant
about some aspect of the study. For example,
a researcher wanting to study how people respond to
negative health feedback may deceive participants by
telling them a saliva test they took indicates that they
may have a disease, when in fact the test was only a
manipulation used to create an emotional response.
2. The researcher omits some information, such as
not telling participants that a study of “relationship formation
with a stranger” actually deals with the specifics
of interracial interactions. This type of deception is
based on the notion that certain psychological processes
may be biased if the participant were aware of the exact
nature of the study.
A common form of deception is not fully disclosing
the true nature of the study until it is over. Here
knowledge of the purposes of the study may cause
participants to act in less than spontaneous ways and
may bias the results. Additionally, the “stranger” in
the study may not be another participant at all but
rather a trained member of the research team, called a
confederate, whose job it is to guide the interaction
based on a script and evaluate the actual participant.
In this form of deception, the participants are not misinformed,
but they are not made fully aware of the
specific purposes of the study. The use of a confederate
is another form of deception. In this example, it is
true that the participant was interacting with another
person. The deception occurred because the other person
was not another participant but rather a member of
the research team, and the interaction was predetermined
by an experimental script. In this and other
cases, deception can often be seen in the “cover story”
for the study, which provides the participant with a
justification for the procedures and measures used.
The ultimate goal of using deception in research is to
ensure that the behaviors or reactions observed in a
controlled laboratory setting are as close as possible to
those behaviors and reactions that occur outside of the
laboratory setting.
Deception and Ethics
Since it is an ethical responsibility of researchers to
gain informed consent from participants, deception
can be seen as a threat to the “informed” nature of
consent. For this reason, deception can only be used in
certain circumstances. The conditions for those circumstances
are that (a) no other nondeceptive method
exists to study the phenomenon of interest, (2) the
study possesses significant contributions, and (3) the
deception is not expected to cause significant harm or
severe emotional distress. Whenever deception is
used, it is the responsibility of the experimenter to
fully debrief the participants at the end of the study by
explaining the deception, including the reasons it was
necessary and ensuring that participants are not emotionally
harmed. In certain cases, debriefing participants
can actually increase the harm of deception by
making participants feel tricked by pointing out perceived
flaws. However, a thorough debriefing that
alleviates distress and explains the deception is usually
sufficient. Human subjects committees or
Institutional Review Boards, which include
researchers and lawyers that review and approve
research at an institution, must approve the use of
deception to certify that it is both necessary and that a
plan exists to debrief participants to remove and residual
effects of the deception.
History in Social Psychology
The use of deception can be tied to the earliest experiments
in social psychology, but it began in earnest
after World War II when social psychology began to
prosper. In the 1960s and 1970s, many of the most
famous and most important social psychology studies
involved deception. One famous example is Stanley
Milgram’s studies of obedience in which the participants
were told that they were to deliver strong electrical
shocks to a participant sitting in the next room.
The shocks were never administered, although the
other person, who was a confederate, reacted as if they
were. As a result of critiques of these types of studies,
both the type and amount of deception used in current
social psychology studies tend to be less extreme.
David B. Portnoy

See also Bogus Pipeline; Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
Studies; Research Methods
Further Readings
Korn, J. H. (1997). Illusions of reality: A history of deception
in social psychology. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects
of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The
Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the
protection of human subjects of research. Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office.
Sieber, J. E. (1992). Planning ethically responsible research:
A guide for students and internal review boards. Newbury
Park, CA: Sage.
DECISION AND
COMMITMENT IN LOVE
Definition
Commitment represents the motivation to stay in a
relationship and to work at it. It is not surprising that
we stay in relationships while they are highly satisfying,
but why stay in a relationship that has not been
satisfying lately? People may choose to persevere
when things get difficult because they have invested a
great deal, they have poor alternatives, or they wish to
stay true to their personal values (“I made a pledge to
stick with this”). Furthermore, a relationship can, over
time, become a big part of “who I am,” and therefore
it is not something that is easily discarded.
The decision to commit and work through shortterm
periods of boredom or distress will allow people
to potentially reap the benefits of a loving, long-term
relationship. Commitment promotes relationship
longevity by motivating people to see, think, and act
in ways that help sustain a relationship. For example,
romantic partners sometimes can behave undesirably,
ranging from annoying little habits to major transgressions.
Highly committed people are less likely to
notice the bad behavior and are more likely to excuse
the behavior if it is noticed (“It’s because she had
a bad day at work”). Finally, if explaining away the
behavior is not sufficient, committed individuals are
more likely than others to accommodate the bad
behavior in ways that help keep the relationship going
(talk through the problem, loyally keep quiet and
move on), and they are less likely to respond in ways
Decision and Commitment in Love———223
that undermine the relationship (scream, throw objects
and leave, or neglect the partner). Of course, the darker
side of this is that committed individuals may try to
accommodate their partners even when the partner is
abusive.
In general, commitment motivates people to sacrifice
their self-interest and short-term rewards, and
to inhibit immediate negative impulses, on behalf of
the relationship. How far a person is willing to go
depends upon the level of commitment and the level
of costs. For example, research has found that students
committed to heterosexual dating relationships judged
an attractive opposite-sex person as ordinary-looking,
whereas those less committed judged the person as
highly attractive. However, when they were led to
believe that the other person was attracted to them,
committed daters no longer defended the relationship
by “devaluing” the attractiveness of the person. The
researchers concluded that the daters were not sufficiently
committed to withstand the stronger threat. In
contrast, married people high in commitment dismissed
the highly threatening attractive person as unappealing.
Finally, when predicting the future prospects for
the relationship, one’s frame of mind matters. When
people are deliberating about the pros and cons
of a relationship goal (“Should we go on a vacation
together?”) or even a personal goal (“Should I major
in psychology?”), they make more accurate predictions
about their relationships than when they are
thinking about how to implement a goal to which
they have already committed to pursuing (“How am I
going to get an A in this course?”). For example, after
thinking of whether to major in psychology, a person
should more accurately forecast relationship longevity
than after thinking about how to get an A in a course
this term. Deliberation makes people more realistic in
their assessments of their relationship prospects. Commitment
may help sustain a relationship, but mindset
may help one gauge commitment.
John Lydon
Lisa Linardatos
See also Attributions; Love; Triangular Theory of Love
Further Readings
Arriaga, X. B., & Agnew, C. R. (2001). Being committed:
Affective, cognitive, and conative components of
relationship commitment. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1190–1203.

224———Decision Making
Johnson, M. P. (1991). Commitment to personal
relationships. In W. H. Jones & D. W. Perlman (Eds.),
Advances in personal relationships (Vol. 3, pp. 117–143).
London: Jessica Kingsley.
Lydon, J. E., Burton, K., & Menzies-Toman, D. (2005).
Commitment calibration with the relationship cognition
toolbox. In M. Baldwin (Ed.), Interpersonal cognition
(pp. 126–152). New York: Guilford Press.
DECISION MAKING
Definition
Decision making refers to the act of evaluating (i.e.,
forming opinions of) several alternatives and choosing
the one most likely to achieve one or more goals.
Common examples include deciding for whom to
vote, what to eat or buy, and which college to attend.
Decision making plays a key role in many professions,
such as public policy, medicine, and management. The
related concept of judgment refers to the use of information,
often from a variety of sources, to form an
evaluation or expectation. One might imagine that
people’s judgment determines their choices, though it
is not always the case.
Background
Theories of decision making were originally developed
by philosophers, mathematicians, and economists,
who focused on how people make choices to
achieve often conflicting goals. Following the work of
early theorists such as John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern and Leonard Savage, a theory called subjective
expected utility theory has become particularly
influential. This theory distinguishes between the decision
maker’s values (otherwise called his or her utilities)
and expectations or beliefs. The key assumption is
that people select the option that is associated with the
highest overall expected utility. In plain terms, you
pick the best option, and so decision making is about
figuring out what is the best choice.
Expected utility theory and decision theory have
focused on normative aspects (i.e., what people
should do), whereas behavioral decision theory and
the general field of behavioral decision making have
focused on descriptive aspects of decision making
(i.e., what people actually do to form judgments and
make choices). It is noteworthy that, although expected
utility theory was derived from economic principles
of rational behavior rather than based on studies of
human behavior, economists and researchers in many
other fields have assumed that the theory also
describes actual behavior and that departures from
rational choice would eventually correct themselves
based on learning and external forces.
This assumption, in turn, led to a great deal of
behavioral decision research, which has documented a
wide range of violations of utility maximization, that
is, cases in which people pick something other than
what is objectively the best option. Thus, research
findings have often been seen as interesting to the
extent that they appeared surprising and inconsistent
with expected utility theory. Such research has shown
that expected utility theory is often inadequate.
Furthermore, the theory does not address many of the
key aspects of judgment and decision making, such as
the selection of information and options to be considered,
the manner in which a decision maker might
trade off the considered attributes of the options, and
the impact of affective and social factors. Moreover,
expected utility theory does not address the process of
judgment and decision making.
A cognitive scientist named Herbert Simon introduced
the concept of bounded rationality, which is an
idea that takes into account the fact that people only
have a limited cognitive ability to process information.
Because of limited processing ability, instead of
maximizing utility (i.e., picking the objectively best
option), people may satisfice; that is, they may choose
an option that is good enough, even though it may
often not be the overall best. Limited cognitive capacity
also implies that people will tend to rely on shortcuts
or simplifying strategies, referred to as heuristics,
which typically produce satisfactory decisions, though
in some cases they may produce errors.
Despite the initial emphasis on demonstrating
violations of rationality and expected utility theory,
behavioral decision theory research has become more
psychological and process oriented. Thus, following
research in social and cognitive psychology, researchers
have started employing various process measures
(e.g., verbal protocols) and manipulations that were
designed to provide a better understanding of the
processes underlying judgment and choice.

Constraints on Effective Judgment
and Decision Making and Insights
Into How Judgments and
Decisions Are Made
Behavioral research on judgment and decision making
has documented numerous violations of normative
models that were previously relied upon. The following
discussion briefly reviews a few important examples.
Judgment Heuristics and Biases
The theory of rational choice has assumed that
people are generally capable of computing and making
unbiased judgments. However, a great deal of
research has demonstrated that people’s assessments
of probabilities and values are often inconsistent with
basic laws of probability. Going beyond the notion of
bounded rationality, psychologists Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahneman advanced three heuristics that play
a key role in intuitive judgments of probabilities, magnitudes,
and frequencies: representativeness, availability,
and anchoring. According to the representativeness
heuristic, people judge the likelihood that X is a Y
based on their assessment of the degree to which X
resembles Y. For example, when assessing the likelihood
that a student specializes in poetry, people assess
the similarity between that student and the prototypical
poet.
The availability heuristic indicates that people
assess the frequency and probability of an event or a
characteristic based on the ease with which examples
come to mind. For example, in one demonstration, a
group of respondents estimated the number of sevenletter
words (in a few book pages) that end with ing,
whereas a second group estimated the number of sevenletter
words with n in the sixth position. Consistent with
the availability heuristic, the former estimate was much
higher than the latter (even though any seven-letter
word that ends with ing necessarily has n in the sixth
position).
Anchoring refers to a process of assessing values
whereby people who start from an anchor tend to end
up with a value that is close to the initial anchor. For
example, people estimated that Gandhi lived until the
age of 67 after being asked if he died before or after
the age of 140, whereas those asked if he had died
before or after the age of 9 estimated that he had died
at the age of 50. Similar anchoring effects have been
observed even when the anchor was clearly arbitrary,
such as when people make an estimate by deciding
whether the true value is above or below the last two
digits of their own social security number.
Prospect Theory
Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory represents
an influential, comprehensive attempt to revise
and address key violations of the standard expected
utility model. That is, those two researchers tried to
formulate a general explanation of the reasons people
fail to make the best choice. Options are evaluated as
gains or losses relative to a reference point, which is
to say that it is not the absolute effect that matters but
whether the event has positive or negative implications
for one’s current standing. This has often been
applied to money: The data show that it’s not the same
to gain $10,000 for a poor person as it is for a rich person,
because the gain is much greater for the person
whose current wealth is very little.
In general, most people tend to be risk averse for
gains and risk seeking for losses. Risk aversion can be
thought of like this: A person facing two options, one
of which is a surer bet but has a smaller payout compared
to the other, which is more uncertain to be
obtained but with a larger payout, would be predicted
to choose the option that will bring a surer but smaller
payout. Risk seeking (or risk tolerance it is also called)
is the opposite. Imagine a person facing a choice
between two options, one of which is more certain to
happen. Prospect theory and many experiments that
have tested it have shown that people prefer the larger
(riskier) loss that has less certainty to happen.
Another important point from prospect theory is
loss aversion—losses have a greater impact psychologically
than similar gains. In other words, losing
$500 hurts a lot more, psychologically, than finding
$500 brings pleasure. The property of loss aversion is
related to endowment effect and the status quo bias.
The Construction of Preferences
Decision Making———225
A great deal of decision-making research since
around 1975 has led to a growing consensus that preferences
for options are often constructed when decisions
need to be made, rather than when they are
retrieved from a master list of preferences stored in
memory. This means that people tend to make decisions

226———Decision Making
because of “on-the-spot” feelings or ideas rather than
some deep, ingrained beliefs that they constantly use
to make choices. This means that choices are sensitive
to the framing of the options, the choice context, and
the preference elicitation task.
With respect to framing, it has been shown, for
example, that (a) framing options as losses rather than
as gains leads to more risk-seeking preferences, and
(b) framing (cooked) ground beef in terms of how lean
it is (e.g., 80% lean) rather than how much fat it contains
(20% fat, even though that conveys the same
message about the meat as 80% lean) produces more
positive evaluations of the beef’s taste. Regarding the
impact of the choice context (or choice set configuration),
it has been shown that adding an asymmetrically
dominated option (e.g., adding an unattractive pen to
a choice set consisting of an attractive pen and $6 in
cash) increases the share of the dominating option (the
attractive pen).
It has also been shown that an option often is chosen
more often, relative to how often other options are
chosen, when there is a “compromise” (a middle)
option in the set. With respect to the preference elicitation
task, studies have shown, for example, that performing
what is called a matching task (i.e., the person
is asked to enter a value that makes two options
equally attractive) leads to different preferences than
when people simply perform a choice task—despite
the fact that the options that are presented are the same,
and the only difference is the method used by the person
to evaluate the options. Similarly, ratings or evaluations
of individual options tend to produce systematically
different preferences than choices or other tasks
involving joint evaluation of options.
Current Directions in
Decision Research
As the question of whether expected utility model adequately
describes decision making has been largely
resolved, decision researchers have tried to gain a better
understanding of how decisions are actually made,
often using various process measures and task manipulations.
Furthermore, researchers have examined a
wider range of judgment and decision-making dimensions
and have addressed topics that were previously
regarded as the domain of other fields, such as social
and cognitive psychology and business administration.
Process Measures
Whereas earlier decision research was focused on
the outcomes of decisions, it has become clear that
decision processes can provide important insights into
decision making, because they are influenced by task
and option variations that may often not influence
decision outcomes. It was initially assumed that decision
makers apply particular decision rules, such as
forming an evaluation of an option by adding the positive
aspects of that option and subtracting the negative
aspects (e.g., weighted additive [compensatory]
model), or by choosing important aspects of the decision
and then choosing based on whether options
do or do not reach a certain cutoff in that domain
(e.g., conjunctive rule, or lexicographic decision rules).
However, consistent with the notion of constructed
preferences, subsequent research has shown that decision
makers typically combine fragments of decision
rules, such as starting by eliminating options that do
not meet certain standards and then using the adding
positives/subtracting negatives compensatory rules to
evaluate the remaining options.
Early process-oriented decision research relied
largely on process measures, such as response latencies,
the percentage of intradimensional versus interdimensional
comparisons, and verbal protocols. Such
measures can provide rich data, though concerns might
arise whether the behavior and responses that are captured
accurately represent naturally occurring decision
processes. A complementary research approach,
similar to many studies in psychology, is to rely on
task conditions (e.g., cognitive load, time pressure),
stimulus manipulations, and individual differences
from which one could infer the underlying decision
processes and moderators of the observed decision
outcomes.
The Role of Affect in Decision Making
Most decision research has focused on what might
be seen as objective evaluation of options based on
attributes such as the probability of winning and the
payoff. However, there is a growing recognition that
decisions are often influenced by the affective reactions
to options. Affect refers to the emotional reaction
to the “goodness” (or attractiveness) of options,
which is often triggered automatically without much
(or any) thought. It has been suggested that such automatic,
affective reactions are often the main drivers of

judgments and decisions, with conscious, deliberate
arguments merely serving to explain those decisions.
Researchers have used a wide range of methodologies
to examine the role, primacy, and speed of affective
reactions to decision stimuli, such as subliminal priming,
the observation of patients whose affective processing
ability was damaged, and the impact of putting
respondents in a positive or negative mood.
The Two-System View of
Judgment and Decision Making
Evaluations based on automatic, affective reactions
belong to a broader class of judgments and decisions
that tend to be done intuitively and automatically,
without any deliberate evaluation. It is now believed
that such processes may characterize many, perhaps
most, judgments and decisions, whereas more deliberate,
slow, reason-based processes are activated as
needed, sometimes correcting or overriding the automatically
produced responses. Although intuitive,
automatic responses have been shown to influence
both judgments and choices, deliberate evaluations of
options and their attributes tend to play a greater role
in choice. Indeed, viewing choice as driven by the balance
of reasons for and against options has been shown
to account for choice anomalies (e.g., the asymmetric
dominance and compromise effects discussed earlier),
which are more difficult to explain based on value
maximization or based solely on the notion that decisions
are made automatically, with little consideration
of attributes or the relations among options.
Social and Cultural Aspects
of Decision Making
In addition to considering the implications of task
and stimuli characteristics for decision processes and
outcomes, decision researchers have studied the role of
social and cultural factors and individual differences in
decision making. Some social aspects, such as conformity,
have received relatively little emphasis, despite
their clearly important role in decision making, in
part because they appear straightforward and not
surprising. However, researchers have examined, for
example, the ability of social conditions, such as
accountability and having to justify to others, to moderate
and possibly diminish people’s susceptibility
to various judgment and decision errors. By and large,
similar to other types of incentives such as giving monetary
compensation for good performance, research
has shown that social incentives have limited beneficial
impact on decision performance, though they
could diminish some errors that are due to limited
effort. There also has been a growing interest in the
role of cross-cultural differences in decision performance.
Initially, researchers focused on the differences
between “individualistic” (e.g., people in the United
States and Western Europe) and “collectivist” (e.g.,
Asian) societies, for example, showing that Chinese
tend to be more susceptible than Westerners to the
overconfidence bias. More recent research suggests
that cross-cultural differences in judgment and decision
making are less robust than previously thought
and are sensitive to various situational factors.
The Growing Influence of Behavioral
Judgment Decision Making
Research in Applied Fields
Most behavioral decision researchers now reside in
business schools rather than in psychology departments.
This shift reflects, in part, the growing influence
of decision research on applied fields, such as marketing,
organizational behavior, and behavioral economics.
For example, a great deal of behavioral decision
research over the past 30 years or so has examined topics
related to consumer decision making, bargaining,
fairness, and behavioral game theory. Furthermore,
there is a growing recognition in the economics field,
which dominated early views of decision making, that
violations of rationality are often systematic, predictable,
and are not corrected by learning or market forces.
Accordingly, the still evolving subfield of behavioral
economics has increasingly incorporated descriptive
aspects of decision making, derived from studies
conducted by behavioral decision researchers, into
economic models, addressing issues such as choice,
valuation of goods, and discrimination.
See also Heuristic Processing; Loss Aversion; Mere
Ownership Effect; Overconfidence
Further Readings
Decision Making———227
Itamar Simonson
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An
analysis of choice under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263–291.

228———Decision Model of Helping
Savage, L. J. (1954). Foundations of statistics. Oxford,
UK: Wiley.
Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of man: Social and rational.
Oxford, UK: Wiley.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157),
1124–1131.
Von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1947). Theory of
games and economic behavior (2nd ed.). Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
DECISION MODEL OF HELPING
Definition
The decision model of helping, introduced in The
Unresponsive Bystander by Bibb Latané and John
Darley, outlines a process of five steps that will determine
whether a bystander will act or not in a helping
situation. This model is also intended to offer a counterargument
to the proposition that people do not help
in emergencies simply because they become apathetic.
As Latané and Darley suggest, an individual’s
interpretation of the emergency may be more influential
than the individual’s general motivation when it
comes to his or her actions in an emergency. The decision
model of helping outlines the five steps to helping
behavior. First, the bystander must recognize a
problem. If perceived as a problem, the second step
requires the interpretation of the problem as an emergency.
If perceived as an emergency, the third step
requires the bystander to feel a personal obligation to
act. If the bystander feels responsible to help, the
fourth step requires that bystander to decide how to
act (form of assistance). And finally, the bystander
must decide how to implement the form of assistance.
Thus, the decision model of helping explains the helping
behavior process from the perception of a problem
to the actual act of helping.
Fives Steps to Helping Behavior
There are five distinct and consecutive steps in this
model. First, one must recognize a problem. Second,
there must be an interpretation of the problem as an
emergency. Third, the bystander must feel a personal
obligation to act. Fourth, the bystander must decide how
to act (form of assistance). And finally, the bystander
must decide how to implement the assistance.
Step 1: Recognizing the Problem
Bystanders must first recognize that whatever is
occurring is not normal, usual, or common; it is a problem.
A famous experiment conducted by Darley and
Latané exemplifies this first step. Experimental participants
were completing a questionnaire in a waiting
room before an interview when smoke suddenly
appears out of an air vent. These participants were
either in the waiting room alone or with two other participants
who were actually confederates pretending to
be waiting for their interview. Results showed that the
75% of the participants who were in the waiting room
alone reported the smoke to the experimenter, whereas
only 10% of the participants did so when in the waiting
room with two other confederates. Darley and
Latané used this experiment to illustrate how people
must first recognize a problem. Participants who are
alone think something is wrong when they see smoke
emanate from a vent. Because this does not usually
happen, participants recognize that this could be a
problem and hence report it to the experimenter.
However, in the other condition, the participants see
that smoke is escaping an air vent but then look to the
calm expressions of the confederates, who continue
filling out the questionnaire, and make the inference
that the smoke may not be a problem. After all, if it
were a problem, the confederates would have appeared
to be alarmed. Hence, the implication is that the same
event, a smoky vent, can be interpreted as a problem
when the participant is alone but not when the participant
is in the presence of calm peers.
Step 2: Interpreting the
Problem as an Emergency
If bystanders conclude that there is a problem in
Step 1, then Step 2 follows—interpreting the problem
as an emergency. Latané and Darley foresee considerable
material and physical costs of both intervention
and nonintervention, noting additionally that the
rewards associated with helping are usually not high or
profitable. Consequently, perceiving the problem as an
emergency is subject to rationalizations such as discounting
the extent to which the problem is really an
emergency. The tendency for bystanders to avoid perceiving
a problem as an emergency is illustrated in
an experiment involving a fight between children.
Participants were placed in a room adjacent to another
in which (tape-recorded) children were purported playing
when the sounds of fighting or play-fighting occurs.

Participants were previously told that the children were
either “supervised” or “unsupervised.” Results showed
that 88% of the participants who were told the children
were supervised (no personal responsibility) thought
that the fight was real, compared to only 25% of those
participants who were told that the children were unsupervised
(personal responsibility). In other words, participants
who had more personal responsibility for the
children were more likely to rationalize the fighting as
playing than those who had no responsibility. Hence,
the implication is that the same problem can be perceived
as an emergency in one case but not another.
One’s decision whether or not to help is rooted in the
interpretation of the problem as an emergency.
Step 3: Deciding Whether One
Has a Responsibility to Act
If people recognize a problem (Step 1) and interpret
it as an emergency (Step 2), then a bystander is forced
to decide whether one has a responsibility to act.
A bystander who is alone has all the responsibility
during an emergency. However, the level of personal
responsibility that one feels can become diffused to the
extent that other bystanders are also present and aware
that help is needed. For example, consider the famous
case of Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in New
York City despite her pleas for help. It turns out that
many people in the neighborhood fully understood that
help was needed but no one felt personally responsible
to help, as they assumed that others in the neighborhood
had already took action (i.e., calling the police).
A bystander, however, has a greater sense of responsibility
to act when placed in situations with greater personal
involvement or a psychological connection to the
victim or fellow bystanders. For example, when experimental
participants were accompanied by friends,
there was not only a significant increase in the percentage
of participants completing Steps 1 and 2 of the
decision model but also Step 3—determining a responsibility
to act. In fact, the rates at which participants
took the responsibility to act when accompanied by a
friend were similar to the rates at which participants
did so when alone with a victim.
Steps 4 and 5: Deciding How
to Assist and How to Act
Assuming that Steps 1, 2, and 3 are met, Steps 4
and 5 follow. Step 4 of Latané and Darley’s model
involves deciding what form of assistance to provide.
This step has many variables in it, including the competency
and confidence of the bystander in a specific
context (e.g., a bystander familiar with CPR might
hesitate before giving CPR compared to a bystander
who is a physician). This step is closely followed by
the actual act of helping—Step 5. Latané and Darley
discuss Steps 4 and 5 together and note that once an
individual reaches Step 4, it is highly likely that he or
she will continue with the Step 5. Thus, once an individual
decides how to help, he or she will very likely
implement that way to help. To explain these final two
steps and their interconnection, experiments on the
willingness to help someone purportedly experiencing
a seizure varied the composition of participants and
confederates. The participants were either female or
male with female or male confederates, who were
either medical experts or not. Regardless of the characteristics,
Latané and Darley concluded that, for Step
4, the form of intervention is crucial, and it can be
direct such as stepping in to break up a fight or reportorial
in which the need for help is reported to another
person. Thus, in deciding what kind of assistance to
provide and how to provide it, subjects must make
delineations between direct and reportorial action.
Stephen M. Garcia
Bryan J. Harrison
See also Altruism; Arousal; Bystander Effect; Diffusion of
Responsibility; Terror Management Theory
Further Readings
Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The unresponsive
bystander: Why doesn’t he help? New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., & Schroeder, D. A.
(2005). Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives.
Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365–392.
DEFENSIVE ATTRIBUTION
Defensive Attribution———229
Definition
Defensive attributions are explanations of behaviors
that serve to defend an individual’s preferred beliefs
about self, others, and the world.

230———Defensive Attribution
Background
Sigmund Freud, at the beginning of the 20th century,
first popularized the idea that people’s desires can bias
their explanations of events. Freud proposed a variety
of defense mechanisms people use to avoid threatening
interpretations of their own and other people’s
behavior. For example, rationalization involves constructing
false explanations for one’s own actions that
avoid negative interpretations of them.
The term defensive attribution combines the Freudian
notion of psychological defense with the attribution
theory of Fritz Heider. Attribution theory posits that
people understand their social worlds as comprising
causes and effects. The individual typically decides an
action was caused either by an attribute of the individual
(internal attribution) or by an aspect of the situation
(external attribution). Like Freud, Heider proposed
that because the cause of a behavior can never be
known for certain, individuals’ desires can easily influence
their attributions.
Types of Defensive Attribution
A variety of causal attributions serve a defensive function.
When researchers began studying causal attributions
in the 1960s, they found that people generally
attribute their successes internally to their own abilities,
but failures to external factors such as bad luck.
This pattern of attributions, known as self-serving
attributions, serves to defend or bolster individuals’
positive view of themselves (their self-esteem). People
even sometimes set up an impediment to success prior
to difficult evaluative situations so that they can have a
ready defensive attribution should they subsequently
fail. If they fail, they can then blame the impediment.
For example, a student can go out drinking the night
before an important exam, or procrastinate and only
begin studying the night before the exam. Should the
student then do poorly, he or she can defend against the
self-esteem threatening possibility that he or she lacks
the ability to do well by blaming a hangover or lack
of preparation. This well-documented phenomenon,
known as self-handicapping, demonstrates that people
are often motivated to engage in defensive attribution
to protect their self-esteem.
Similar defensive attributions are made for other
people whom individuals like, such as friends, relatives
and members of their own groups. For example,
if a well-liked male friend treats his girlfriend badly,
one is likely to be biased toward believing the girlfriend
must have provoked the poor treatment. In contrast,
people also generate defensive attributions to
maintain negative views of people they don’t like and
members of rival groups. A success by a member of a
disliked group will tend to be attributed to luck or perhaps
cheating.
Defensive attributions have also been shown to
protect an individual’s beliefs about the world. Many
people live with difficult circumstances such as poverty,
disease, and physical handicaps. Yet, as Melvin Lerner’s
just-world theory has proposed, individuals want to
believe that the world is a just place and that they will
not be victims of such circumstances. Research shows
that to preserve such beliefs, people often blame others
who experience misfortunes for their own fate. By
defensively attributing negative outcomes to the person’s
immorality, stupidity, or laziness, people can
maintain the belief that the world is just and they themselves
will be spared such a fate; this can lead to overly
harsh judgments of others who are living in poverty or
who have been victimized by diseases, accidents, or
violent crimes such as rape.
Similarly, defensive attributions can be used to
maintain faith in virtually any belief. They can help
sustain faith in one’s religion, the righteousness of
one’s nation, and the validity of one’s own theories.
By using defensive attributions, people can tenaciously
cling to their preferred beliefs even in the face of what
would seem to be clear discrediting evidence. In the
mid-1950s, Leon Festinger and colleagues documented
this by studying a doomsday cult that predicted the
world was going to end on a certain day. When that
day arrived without incident, the members of the group
explained that their own prayers and faith had saved
the world.
The Importance of
Defensive Attributions
As these examples suggest, defensive attributions
often lead people toward biased and inaccurate views
of themselves, other people, and the world around
them. These views are often psychologically comforting;
it feels good to have positive views of oneself and
those one likes and relieves guilt and makes one feel
safe to believe that the world is just and that people
suffering misfortune are responsible for their problems.
Indeed, some theory and research suggest that

defensive attributions can help people function
successfully in the world. For example, self-serving
attributions seem to be prevalent in well-functioning
people and lacking in depressed people.
However these attributions also contribute to failures,
unjust treatment of others, prejudice, and interpersonal
and intergroup conflict. They lead people to
overlook aspects of themselves they need to improve,
and to pursue career paths for which they are not
suited. Minority groups within nations are almost
always lower in socioeconomic status, and so defensive
attributions to support belief in a just world are
likely to contribute to negative stereotypes and prejudice
against such groups.
In the interpersonal realm, defensive attributions
often contribute to “finger pointing” or reciprocal blaming,
leading to dissension within organizations and
conflict within relationships. For example, in a failing
marriage, a man may blame his dissatisfaction on his
wife’s constant nagging, whereas the wife may blame
her dissatisfaction on his neglect of her and the relationship.
The truth may be that both need to change,
but the defensive attributions lead to such divergent,
unrealistic views of the problems that a positive resolution
is unlikely.
Finally, defensive attributions can also contribute
to political and international conflicts. For example,
many Americans attributed the 2003 invasion of Iraq
to a moral effort to remove a dangerous dictator and
spread democracy. In contrast, many in the Middle
East attributed the invasion to American immorality,
arrogance, and greed. This is only one of many historical
examples in which defensive attributions have had
global consequences.
See also Attribution Theory; Just-World Hypothesis;
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Jeff Greenberg
Pyszczynski, T., & Greenberg, J. (1987). Toward an
integration of cognitive and motivational perspectives
on social inference: A biased hypothesis-testing model.
In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 297–340). New York: Academic
Press.
Shaver, K. G. (1985). The attribution of blame: Causality,
responsibility, and blameworthiness. New York: Springer.
DEFENSIVE PESSIMISM
Defensive Pessimism———231
Definition
Defensive pessimism is a strategy people can use to
manage their anxiety. Those who use the strategy feel
anxious and out of control as they think about an
upcoming situation. In response to those feelings, they
set pessimistic expectations about how things will
go, and they mentally rehearse all the things they can
think of that might happen. Thinking in specific and
vivid terms about things that might go wrong helps
these individuals focus on what they can do to prevent
the disasters they imagine.
Defensive pessimism is an example of an affect
regulation strategy. These strategies describe the ways
that people try to handle their emotions in everyday
life. The strategy of defensive pessimism prevents
anxiety from interfering with what individuals want to
accomplish, and those who use the strategy typically
perform well.
Varieties of Pessimism
Defensive pessimism is different from other kinds of
pessimism, such as dispositional pessimism (also
known as trait pessimism) and attributional pessimism
(which focuses on how people interpret past negative
events). Dispositional pessimism refers to the general
tendency to have negative expectations about future
events, while attributional pessimism refers to
whether you think past negative events were caused
by internal, stable, and global factors (i.e., the causes
were internal to you, they won’t change over time, and
they’ll affect everything). Both of these kinds of pessimism
exert a general influence on behavior in most
situations. In contrast, defensive pessimism is more
specific and more focused on the process that
describes how individuals’ expectations in a particular
situation are connected to what they do. Defensive
pessimism and other affect regulation strategies are
similar to coping strategies, except that they do not
typically refer to how people cope with particular
external events or crises (e.g., bereavement or severe
illness). Instead, they focus on everyday thoughts,
feelings, and motivations, such as how a person deals
with feeling anxious before giving a speech or meeting
a blind date. If an individual has different goals or
different feelings or a different outlook in one kind of

232———Defensive Pessimism
situation than in another, this perspective would predict
that the individual would use different strategies
in those different situations. Thus, a person might use
defensive pessimism in work-related situations but not
in social situations, or vice versa.
How Defensive Pessimism Works
Students are sometimes anxious about their exams.
Students using defensive pessimism would be likely
to convince themselves that they were certain to fail
miserably on the next test. A defensive pessimist would
then imagine discovering incredibly hard questions
that refer to obscure facts, or sitting down to take the
test and being unable to remember anything. This negative
thinking helps those using defensive pessimism
to figure out what they need to do to prevent the bad
things that they have played through in their minds
from actually happening. The thinking-through process
accomplishes two things. It motivates defensive pessimists
to focus on action instead of their anxious feelings,
and because the process is typically detailed and
specific, it functions as a guide to planning effective
action. Potentially intimidating goals (e.g., “do well
on a really hard exam”) are broken into smaller, concrete
steps (e.g., “gather all the reference materials at
your desk”) that are less intimidating and easier to
accomplish. Defensive pessimism is similar to some
of the techniques that clinicians and counselors use to
help anxious people or those who are troubled by procrastination
or lack of motivation.
Evidence
Most of the research on defensive pessimism contrasts
it with a strategy called strategic optimism. Strategic
optimism is typically used by people who do not feel
anxious. These individuals set high expectations and
actively avoid thinking about what might happen in an
upcoming situation. Several studies have been done to
compare defensive pessimism and strategic optimism,
and most show that both strategies work well when
they are used in appropriate situations. Some conditions,
however, facilitate defensive pessimism but
interfere with strategic optimism, while others facilitate
strategic optimism and interfere with defensive
pessimism.
For example, one study found that participants
who typically use defensive pessimism performed
better in a dart-throwing game when they listened to
an audiotape prior to their game that mimicked the
thinking-through part of defensive pessimism. In contrast,
if they listened to a relaxation tape designed to
prevent them from thinking about the upcoming
game, they performed more poorly. Exactly the
opposite happened for those using strategic optimism:
They did better in the relaxation tape condition and
worse in the thinking condition. Putting those who use
defensive pessimism in a better mood, encouraging
them to be more optimistic, or otherwise distracting
them from using their strategy also leads to poorer
performance. Results such as these suggest that defensive
pessimism works well for those who use it, while
encouraging them to use a more optimistic approach
is not helpful. Other research shows that anxious people
who use defensive pessimism do better in a variety of
ways than anxious people who do not.
Implications
Defensive pessimism research demonstrates how
people are able to develop effective ways of managing
their anxiety so that it does not interfere with their
performance. It also implies that there are many paths
that individuals can take to succeed.
Defensive pessimism research shows that many
variables can influence the costs and benefits of a strategy,
and no strategy is likely to be effective at all times
for all people. In the United States, optimism is highly
valued, and pessimism is considered less desirable. In
Japan, China and Korea, however, optimism is less valued
in social interactions, and pessimism is considered
more appropriate. Defensive pessimism may be more
socially accepted in those contexts and may have fewer
costs, while strategic optimism may have fewer benefits.
Different strategies may work best in different
contexts, in response to different emotions, or for different
people.
See also Affect; Coping; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Julie K. Norem
Chang, E. C. (Ed.). (2001). Optimism and pessimism:
Implications for theory, research and practice.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association
Press.
Norem, J. K. (2001). The positive power of negative thinking.
New York: Basic Books.

DEINDIVIDUATION
Definition
Deindividuation theory was developed to explain the
violence and irrationality of the crowd. How does a
group of seemingly normal individuals become an
unruly mob? According to deindividuation theory, the
anonymity and excitement of the crowd make individuals
lose a sense of individual identity. As a result,
crowd members cease to evaluate themselves, and
they become irrational and irresponsible. All of this
makes the crowd fickle, explosive, and prone to antinormative
and disinhibited behavior.
But, despite a large amount of research, there is
little support for deindividuation theory. Alternative
approaches suggest that crowd behavior is not due
to a loss of identity but to a transition to a collective
(social) identity. The remainder of this entry outlines
the theoretical evolution of deindividuation theory,
summarizes the research to date, and highlights an
alternative perspective.
Theoretical Evolution of
Deindividuation
Deindividuation theory can be traced back to some of
the earliest works of social psychology. In his 1895
book La Foule (The Crowd), Gustave Le Bon described
how the crowd psychologically transforms the psychology
of its members. Anonymity, suggestibility,
and contagion turn a gathering of individuals into a
psychological crowd. The collective mind (dominated
by primitive instincts rooted in our racial unconscious)
takes possession of individuals. As a result, rational
self-control ceases, and individuals become unthinking,
fickle, and suggestible; that is, they become inferior
forms of evolution. The individual submerged in
the crowd thus becomes a mindless puppet capable of
performing any act, however atrocious or heroic.
Although many have criticized Le Bon’s theory
and his politics—the two are not unrelated—the influence
of La Foule in science and society has been huge.
His book is a scientific bestseller. But Le Bon was
also controversial. He was popular with politicians of
the right, including Benito Mussolini, Joseph Goebbels,
and Adolf Hitler. Although one should not blame Le
Bon for the atrocities of fascism, his writings did
blend science with a shot of far-right politics. His
Deindividuation———233
analysis of the crowd was clouded by fears of communism
and trade unionism; he also gave race a prominent
place in his theory.
As a result of his politics, Le Bon is rarely credited
for his contribution to social psychology. But when
Leon Festinger, Albert Pepitone, and Theodore
Newcomb coined the term deindividuation in 1952,
they borrowed core ideas from Le Bon. Their starting
point was Le Bon’s characterization of the crowd as
irrational, disinhibited, and antinormative. What psychological
process could explain this? The answer lay
in the lack of accountability in the crowd, inducing a
feeling among people in the crowd of being unaware
of themselves. This process is called deindividuation.
Over the subsequent decades, deindividuation theory
was developed and expanded. Interestingly, the psychological
process that deindividuation referred to gradually
shifted. By the 1990s, deindividuation had become
a loss of awareness of the self. But both aspects of what
became known as deindividuation (lack of accountability
and lack of self-awareness) were processes already
identified by Le Bon.
In other ways, deindividuation theory did move
away from Le Bon. The most important difference is
that deindividuation is defined as an absence of individual
identity. Le Bon argued that the crowd replaces
individual identity by a collective mind. But the collective
mind plays no role in deindividuation theory.
In fact, deindividuation theory did not offer any systematic
analysis of social influence to explain how the
actions of the crowd were guided or controlled.
Deindividuation Research
In the 1970s, deindividuation became a popular area in
group research. Many laboratory studies tested the prediction
that anonymity leads to disinhibition. Often participants
were dressed in uniforms or cloaks and hoods
to render them anonymous, and they were placed in a
situation where they could display aggressive or antinormative
behavior (as in the Stanley Milgram’s studies
of obedience). Their actions were compared with a
plain-clothed control group. Unfortunately for deindividuation
theory, the empirical support was inconsistent.
Overview articles written in 1977 and 1980
concluded that there was virtually no evidence for the
psychological state of deindividuation.
Partly to overcome these obstacles, the focus of
deindividuation theory moved away from anonymity
during the 1980s. Most studies from that period induced

234———Deindividuation
deindividuation by getting participants to focus attention
outward in other ways. But despite more and more
extreme (and increasingly contrived) experimental
designs, many studies simply failed to support deindividuation
theory or reported contrary results. A metaanalysis
(combining all experimental results in one
overarching analysis) of deindividuation studies conducted
in 1998 concluded that large groups and
crowded anonymous settings do not increase disinhibition
and antinormative behavior. Even the reduction of
self-awareness in more direct and invasive ways does
not yield consistent evidence of disinhibition. Four
decades of research failed to confirm the theory.
Reconceptualizing Deindividuation
To explain the failure of deindividuation theory,
researchers revisited its starting assumptions about
crowds. These were largely based on Le Bon, but he,
as noted, was strongly biased against crowds, seeing
them as a left-wing threat to civilization. He claimed
all collective behavior was irrational. But if Le Bon’s
portrait of the crowd is wrong, then deindividuation
theory set out to explain the wrong phenomenon.
Systematic research of crowds throughout history
shows that Le Bon’s characterization of crowds was
wrong. Although almost everyone is appalled by lynch
mobs, Kristallnacht, and the Rwandan genocide, we
should not let our horror and fears at the outcome
cloud our analysis of the process. Violence in crowds
is very rare and usually a last resort when other means
of action are exhausted. But when it does occur, crowd
historians have witnessed preciously little chaos and
randomness. Most crowds behave orderly and restrained.
Even when they loot and pillage and rape, crowds
display a considerable amount of organization and
structure to their atrocities. Far from blindly pursuing
destruction, the crowd is normally propelled by moral
beliefs and consensus. Moreover, its violence is not
random but targeted and symbolic of its purposes (e.g.,
Islamist crowds would attack Western tanks or nonveiled
women but not their own mosques). Of course
there are cases in which the moral principles of the
crowd are completely alien to ours, and their logic
might be warped. But to advance understanding of
crowd psychology, it is important to acknowledge that,
to the members of the crowd, their actions make sense.
The implication for crowd psychology is profound:
Collective behavior (however atrocious) can be under
conscious control. Le Bon’s observation that crowd
members are somehow automatically and inevitably
mentally incapacitated and irresponsible is simply
false. In some sense, this is a disturbing (if unsurprising)
conclusion—it means that people are capable
of committing the vilest atrocities willingly. But in
another sense, it is constructive and positive: If crowd
members make conscious decisions about how to act,
then we can influence their behavior and hold them
personally responsible if they violate the law. It also
means that we can set out to provide a better explanation
for collective behavior, namely, one that tries to
understand how the actions of the crowd are socially
regulated (rather than why they are chaotic).
Taking this new perspective, a large body of field
research of crowds has noted that group norms inform
collective action. Other field research has noted that
crowd members act as a collective identity (which also
comprises a set of norms). Yet more field research has
documented that collective identities emerge and
change in an intergroup dynamic (e.g., between demonstrators
and police). It follows that the police can influence
the crowd by changing its tactics. Insights from
this research have had a major impact on public order
policing in Europe, and these new strategies seem to
pay off—“football hooliganism” has declined considerably
in recent international matches.
These new insights have also been tested in experimental
research of deindividuation effects. Results
are broadly consistent with field studies of crowds
and historical evidence. Thus, the settings which were
originally thought to “deindividuate” participants
were actually making them more responsive to situational
norms. For example, making participants anonymous
by dressing them in cloaks and hoods leads to
greater aggression. But dressing them in nurses’ uniforms
reduces it. Anonymity does not render people
unthinkingly violent. Rather, anonymity increases their
responsiveness to the normative cues present in their
immediate environment.
Put together, experimental and field research suggest
that crowd behavior is guided by a collective
identity that emerges in the crowd. This common
identity may become accentuated or polarized if an
opposing group (such as the police) acts upon the
crowd as if it were one, for example, by deploying
indiscriminate tactics of crowd control. It is this
collective identity which normatively regulates the
actions of individuals in the crowd and which gives
them a common goal.
In conclusion, social psychologists’ understanding
of deindividuation has advanced enormously. Contemporary
studies of collective action have moved away

from the assumption that crowd members lose their
identity. Instead, collective action is explained as the
result of “normal” processes of social influence and
intergroup relations. In this contemporary perspective,
deindividuation is the transformation of a collection
of distinct individuals into a group with a collective
identity.
Tom Postmes
See also Aggression; Crowding; Group Decision Making;
Group Identity; Self-Awareness; Stanford Prison
Experiment
Further Readings
Le Bon, G. (1995). The crowd: A study of the popular mind.
London: Transaction. (Original work published 1895)
Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (1998). Deindividuation and
anti-normative behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 123, 238–259.
Reicher, S., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A social
identity model of deindividuation phenomena. In W.
Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European Review of Social
Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 161–198). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Stott, C. J., & Adang, O. M. J. (2004). “Disorderly” conduct:
Social psychology and the control of football hooliganism
at “Eur02004.” The Psychologist, 17, 318–319.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). The human choice: Individuation,
reason, and order vs. deindividuation, impulse and chaos.
In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium
on Motivation (Vol. 17, pp. 237–307). Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press.
DELAY OF GRATIFICATION
Definition
Delay of gratification requires resisting the impulse
to take an immediately available reward, in the hopes
of obtaining a more valued reward in the future. For
example, a person who wakes up feeling tired can
make the impulsive choice of going back to sleep or
can delay gratification by getting up, making coffee,
going to work, and hence feeling productive and alert.
The ability to delay gratification is an essential to regulating
or controlling oneself.
Background
The dilemma of whether to give in to temptation or
to resist in favor of a long-term benefit has plagued
Delay of Gratification———235
humans from the beginning of time. It has been discussed
in every major philosophical and religious
tradition. Best known to those of Judeo-Christian background
is the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden
fruit. By giving in to this very first temptation,
Adam and Eve forfeited the rewards of living under
God’s care in the Garden of Eden. At the same time,
people gained a greater awareness of the consequences
of their choices. Indeed, this awareness may be what
makes human life unique.
In addition to the fundamental desires that support
humans’ basic needs, Henry Frankfurt, a philosopher,
points out that humans form second-order desires,
which are desires to change those fundamental desires.
For example, a teenager falling in love for the first time
experiences sexual desire but at the same time may feel
a second-order desire to remain abstinent to adhere to
a moral code or to avoid the risks that come with sexual
activity. Second-order desires emerge from our
ability to anticipate the future and recognize a longterm
benefit to suppressing our immediate impulse.
Indeed, the capacity to delay gratification is essential
to human accomplishment and thus has become an
important topic for psychological inquiry.
A Classic Experimental Situation
To study the conditions that promote delay of gratification,
Walter Mischel and his colleagues designed an
experimental situation in which an experimenter sets
up a challenge for a child. The child is asked to choose
between a larger treat, such as two cookies, and a
smaller treat, such as one cookie. After stating a preference
for the larger treat, the child learns that to
obtain that treat, he or she must wait for the experimenter
to return. The child is also told that if he or she
signals the experimenter, the experimenter will return,
and the child will receive the smaller treat. Thus, the
smaller treat is available now, but the larger treat
requires waiting. To get the larger treat, the child must
resist the temptation to get an immediate treat.
This experimental situation has proven very useful
both in demonstrating the importance of the ability to
delay gratification and in identifying strategies that
make it possible for children to delay. Children who
are best able to wait in this situation at 4 years old are
more socially and academically successful as high
school students and they earn higher Scholastic
Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. The procedure adapted for
adolescents by Edelgard Wulfert and his colleagues
has revealed that middle and high school students who

236———Delay of Gratification
waited a week for a monetary reward earn higher
grades, show less problem behavior in school, and are
less likely to use cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs
than their peers who chose not to wait.
The Warm/Cool Model
By varying the situation, researchers have learned
what enables children to wait effectively. Waiting is
made more difficult when children attend to the hot or
emotional aspects of the reward; waiting is easier
when children attend to the cool or intellectual aspects
of the situation. For example, children who are told to
think of marshmallow rewards as little fluffy clouds
are better able to wait than those who are told to think
of the sweet, chewy texture of the marshmallows.
Good waiters have learned ways to distract themselves
from the hot rewards and instead activate their
cool systems. A child with a good ability to delay
might sing a happy tune to him- or herself and look
around the room while waiting. A child with a poor
ability to delay might instead focus on the cookie and
its satisfying sweet taste. Children improve in their
cooling strategies over time. Almost all adolescents
can easily endure the 10-minute wait that is very challenging
for a preschooler.
Unfortunately, the cool system is most difficult to
access when it is needed most. Stress impairs the ability
to delay gratification. The first semester in college,
for example, when it would be quite advantageous to
control urges to drink and eat excessively, is a time
when these urges are frequently indulged. In addition,
chronic stress during childhood impairs the development
of the ability to delay gratification.
This program of research has gone a long way
toward mapping how people’s ability to delay gratification
develops and has highlighted just how useful
waiting can be. It does not, however, address people’s
capacity to use this ability judiciously.
Delay as a Motivational Tendency
Rather than conceptualizing delay of gratification as an
ability, Jack Block, David Funder, and their colleagues
have identified it as one expression of ego control, a
person’s more general tendency to inhibit impulses. On
the low end of this continuum is the undercontrolled
individual who spontaneously expresses his or her
wants, without concern about the future. On the high
end is the overcontrolled individual who restrains the
self, even when it is not necessary. Both undercontrol
and overcontrol are maladaptive. The undercontrolled
individual is unable to work toward long-term goals,
such as pursuing a challenging career path. The overcontrolled
individual misses opportunities to experience
pleasure and express feelings.
To measure this tendency to delay, these researchers
developed an experimental situation in which children
are shown an attractively wrapped present and told that
it is for them, but that it will be set aside while they
work on a puzzle. Delay of gratification is measured
by the degree to which the child resists attending to
and opening the gift. It is clear to the child that he or
she will receive the gift regardless of his or her behavior,
and so in this situation, delay behavior is not necessarily
adaptive.
Gender Differences
Interestingly, delaying gratification in this experimental
situation has more positive implications for girls than
for boys. Girls who delay are described by adults who
know them well as “having high intellectual capacity”
and being “competent” and “resourceful,” while those
who do not delay gratification are described as being
“emotionally labile” and “sulky or whiny.” Boys who
delay gratification, on the other hand, are described as
“shy and reserved,” “obedient,” and “anxious,” while
boys who do not are described as “vital, energetic, and
lively” and “self-assertive.” These differences may
reflect the value our culture places on self-control for
girls, while revealing a cultural acceptance of a certain
degree of impulsivity among boys. In this way, the culture
may encourage boys to develop behavior patterns
that can cause them many problems later in life.
Clearly then, waiting is not always rewarded, and it
can be a tricky business, especially for boys, to learn
when to wait and when to indulge. Hence, in real life,
delay of gratification is a function of both ego control
and what these researchers call ego resiliency, or the
capacity to be flexible and skillful in making social
decisions. Such decisions can be more complicated
than they appear at first.
The Behavioral Economics Approach
The clever approach taken by Howard Rachlin illuminates
the logic that leads to a cycle of impulsivity,
even when the delayed alternative is clearly advantageous
in the long run. In a self-control dilemma,
the impulsive choice will always produce greater
pleasure. The overeater, for example, will be given

a boost by a tasty snack. Whether the overeater is in
a festive mood or in a depressed state, that tasty snack
will make him or her feel better than he or she
presently feels. The problem, of course, is that too
many tasty snacks will eventually make the overeater
miserable.
Even if the overeater has accepted the goal of lowering
his or her calorie intake, having the snack now
can be justified. This one last snack will not make a
difference. After it, the overeater can abide by his or
her long-term intention and derive the health and
appearance benefits of a lower weight. And so it goes,
with the short-term option often having more value in
the present than the delayed option, leading the unwitting
individual down the primrose path to addiction.
Implications
Given the emotional appeal of the short-term option,
it is impressive that children learn to wait. Mischel’s
work has shown that it is a well-developed cool system
that allows them to do so. Funder and Block point
out that people are naturally inclined toward hot or
cool responses, and that adaptive responding depends
on our ability to know when waiting makes sense.
According to Rachlin, knowing is not enough. People
need to commit to adaptive patterns of action rather
than considering actions individually. In doing so,
they are working together with their future selves to
create a life of the highest subjective value over time.
While challenging, such a quest for happiness is a
uniquely human opportunity.
See also Ego Depletion; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Regina Conti
Funder, D. C., & Block, J. (1989). The role of ego-control,
ego-resiliency, and IQ in delay of gratification in
adolescence. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 57(6), 1041–1050.
Mischel, W., & Ayduk, O. (2004). Willpower in a cognitiveaffective
processing system: The dynamics of delay
of gratification. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs
(Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research,
theory, and applications (pp. 99–129). New York:
Guilford Press.
Rachlin, H. (2000). The science of self-control. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Demand Characteristics———237
DEMAND CHARACTERISTICS
Definition
Demand characteristics are any aspect of an experiment
that may reveal the hypothesis being tested or
that may cue participants as to what behaviors are
expected. Cues that may reveal the true purpose of an
experiment can be embedded in information conveyed
in the solicitation of participants, instructions given to
participants, the tone of voice of the experimenter,
gestures used by the experimenter, feedback given
to participants (e.g., feedback about performance or
personality characteristics), the laboratory setting, the
design of the study, or rumors spread by others who
have participated in the study.
The possibility that demand characteristics are present
within a study is problematic. If participants
guess what the hypothesis is, they might not act naturally,
causing the results of the experiment to be inaccurate.
The presence of demand characteristics could
even lead to the good subject effect, where participants
are overly cooperative and behave in such a way
that confirms the hypothesis of a study. Put another
way, if an experiment suffers from demand characteristics,
then its findings are considered neither valid
nor meaningful. Demand characteristics can ruin an
experiment.
Evidence
One study demonstrated how demand characteristics
could influence the outcome of an experiment by
recruiting participants for what they believed to be a
sensory deprivation study. In this study, participants
sat in a small but comfortable room for 4 hours. Participants
in the experimental group, who were asked
to sign a form releasing the experimenter from liability
if anything happened to them during the experiment,
and given a “panic button” to push if they felt
overly stressed by the deprivation they were led to
believe they would experience, exhibited signs of distress.
Those in the control group, who did not sign a
release form, were not given a panic button, and were
not given the expectation that their senses were being
deprived, did not exhibit signs of distress.
Reducing Demand Characteristics
There are several ways to reduce demand characteristics
present within an experiment. One way is through

238———Dependence Regulation
the use of deception. Using deception may reduce
the likelihood that participants are able to guess the
hypothesis of the experiment, causing participants to
act more naturally. Experimenters can also conduct a
manipulation check, in which they ask participants
what they thought the true purpose of the study was.
This allows experimenters to assess whether or not
participants correctly guessed the hypothesis of the
study. A third way to reduce demand characteristics is
to include a placebo control group in the experiment.
Those in the placebo control group think they are
receiving treatment (e.g., drug X), but in reality they
are not (e.g., a sugar pill). Finally, experimenters can
conduct field research, research that takes place outside
of the laboratory in a real-world setting, to reduce
demand characteristics.
Ginette C. Blackhart
See also Deception (Methodological Technique); Reactance;
Research Methods
Further Readings
Orne, M. T. (1962). On the social psychology of the
psychological experiment: With particular reference to
demand characteristics and their implications. American
Psychologist, 17, 776–783.
Orne, M. T., & Scheibe, K. E. (1964). The contribution of
nondeprivation factors in the production of sensory
deprivation effects: The psychology of the “panic button.”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 68, 3–12.
DEPENDENCE REGULATION
Definition
Dependence regulation refers to people’s tendency to
adjust how close they allow themselves to be to a significant
other to match the perceived risks of rejection.
People risk greater closeness when they are more
confident that their relationship partner accepts them
and regards them positively (and the risk of rejection
is perceived to be lower). In contrast, people find less
to value in relationships where they are more uncertain
or doubtful about the other’s regard for them (and
the risk of rejection is perceived to be higher). People
regulate dependence so that they can protect against
the potential pain of rejection in advance by devaluing
relationships where rejection seems likely. After all, it
should hurt less to feel rejected if people can convince
themselves that they did not really care all that much
about the partner that hurt them in the first place.
Background and History
Psychologists interested in studying bonds between
parents and children and between adults in romantic
relationships have long recognized that relationships
are inherently risky. Depending on another person,
and coming to love and value them, gives that person
tremendous power over one’s emotions and welfare.
Having one’s needs met by a significant other can be
a great source of happiness, but having one’s needs
ignored by that same significant other can be a great
source of unhappiness. Consequently, situations of
dependence—situations where one person relies on
another person to meet his or her needs—raise anxieties
about rejection and disappointment.
Imagine an interaction between spouses, Harry and
Sally. When Harry has broken a promise to spend an
evening out with Sally, Sally must decide whether to
risk letting her welfare depend on Harry’s actions
again in the future. Deciding not to trust Harry’s
promises protects Sally from feeling rejected or let
down in the future. However, such a cautious or selfprotective
choice also limits Harry’s future opportunities
to demonstrate his trustworthiness, putting the
well-being of the relationship at greater risk.
Relationships thus present a central context where
two fundamental motives—the need to protect against
the potential pain of rejection and the need to establish
satisfying connections to others—can frequently
conflict. For people to put concerns about rejection
aside psychologically, they need to be able to give
themselves some sort of assurance that the risks of
rejection are minimal. A sense of confidence in a relationship
partner’s positive regard and caring provides
the psychological insurance policy people need to
establish and maintain satisfying and fulfilling connections
to others.
Evidence
To establish the needed level of confidence in a relationship
partner’s positive regard and acceptance,
people need to believe that this partner sees positive

qualities in them worth valuing. To feel confident of
Harry’s regard, for instance, Sally needs to believe that
Harry sees her as warm, and smart, and responsive.
Once established, this level of confidence in a partner’s
regard has a transforming effect on relationships.
Dating and marital relationships and parent–child
relationships generally thrive when people both feel
and are more valued by their relationship partner. For
instance, in both dating and marital relationships,
people report greater satisfaction and less conflict the
more positively they believe their partner sees their
traits, the more loved they feel, and the more positively
their partner actually regards them. As for the qualities
people attribute to a romantic partner, people in both
dating and marital relationships are more likely to see
the best in their partner’s traits when they believe their
partner loves and values them. Feeling positively
regarded by a partner also predicts increases in satisfaction
and decreases in conflict as relationships continue
over time.
Implications
Unfortunately, some people do not have an easy time
believing that their partner loves and values them. In
dating and marital relationships, people who generally
feel badly about their own worth—that is, people with
low self-esteem—dramatically underestimate how
much their partner loves and values them. Children
with low self-esteem also underestimate how much
their mothers love and value them. In contrast, people
with higher self-esteem better appreciate how much
others value them.
For people with low self-esteem, unfulfilled needs
for a partner’s positive regard and approval then create
substantial difficulties within their relationships. First,
feeling undervalued, people with low self-esteem look
to specific events in their relationships to try to figure
out whether their partner really cares about them.
However, they are much more likely to read into negative
than positive events. For a low self-esteem person,
a routine event, such as a conflict or a partner being
irritable, then exacerbates the fear that their partner
does not really care about or value them. In fact, low
self-esteem people tend to perceive rejection in situations
where their partner may be behaving quite
benignly. Low self-esteem people then protect themselves
against such heightened anxieties by finding
greater fault in their partner and by reducing closeness.
By lashing out in return, low self-esteem people can
effectively diminish the pain of this perceived rejection.
Unfortunately, however, such reactions then have
the effect of annoying and upsetting a partner who was
not actually upset in the first place.
A dramatically different sequence of events is likely
to occur for someone with high self-esteem. People
with high self-esteem are not likely to be on the lookout
for problems, because they are generally more
confident of their partner’s positive regard and love.
Instead, they are able to mentally transform negative
events in their relationships, seeing even events like
conflicts as a testament to their partner’s love and caring.
In situations where they feel hurt or rejected by
their partner, people with high self-esteem also resist
the impulse to hurt the partner in return. Instead, they
take such events as an opportunity to draw closer.
Consequently, people with high self-esteem are better
able to cope with relationship ups and downs. An
understanding of dependence regulation dynamics can
be applied to explain why some people are involved in
less satisfying interpersonal relationships than others.
Sandra L. Murray
See also Need to Belong; Positive Illusions; Rejection;
Rejection Sensitivity; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Dependence Regulation———239
DeHart, T., Murray, S. L., Pelham, B., & Rose, P. (2003). The
regulation of dependency in non-romantic relationships.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 59–67.
Murray, S. L. (2005). Regulating the risks of closeness:
A relationship-specific sense of felt security. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 74–78.
Murray, S. L., Bellavia, G., Rose, P., & Griffin, D. (2003).
Once hurt, twice hurtful: How perceived regard regulates
daily marital interaction. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 84, 126–147.
Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (2000).
Self-esteem and the quest for felt security: How perceived
regard regulates attachment processes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 478–498.
Murray, S. L., Rose, P., Bellavia, G., Holmes, J. G., &
Kusche, A. (2002). When rejection stings: How
self-esteem constrains relationship-enhancement
processes. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 83, 556–573.

240———Depression
DEPRESSION
Definition
Depression is a common disorder primarily characterized
by either a low or depressed mood or a loss of
interest or pleasure in nearly all activities. Many additional
symptoms are often present in the disorder,
such as changes in weight, appetite or sleep patterns,
fatigue, difficulty with concentration or decision making,
moving more slowly than usual or agitation, feelings
of worthlessness or guilt, and suicidal thinking.
To receive a diagnosis of major depression, an individual
must have at least five of these symptoms,
causing significant impairment in functioning, nearly
every day for at least 2 weeks. Biological, cognitive,
and interpersonal factors have all been shown to play
a significant role in the development and treatment of
the disorder.
Background and Significance
In addition to being extremely common, depression
also has serious consequences. Up to 25% of individuals
may experience depression at some point in their
lives, and the disorder leads to significant problems in
social and occupational functioning and heightened
risk for suicide. It is also recurrent, with individuals
who have experienced one episode of depression
having a very high risk for future episodes. No one
approach to the study of depression can provide a
complete picture of the disorder, and different areas of
research provide a variety of insights. Common perceptions
of depression often emphasize the role of
biological factors and medical treatments, and neurotransmitters,
such as serotonin, have been found to be
different in individuals who are experiencing or are at
risk for depression. Genetic factors may also play a
role, as those with relatives who have the disorder are
also at somewhat higher risk. In addition to these biological
factors, however, psychological factors have
been found to be very important in understanding the
development and treatment of depression, and this
entry will focus on current research on the cognitive
and interpersonal factors involved in the disorder.
Studies conducted on college students have been
an important part of the development of all of the
major psychological theories of depression. Many
social psychologists and other depression researchers
are interested in examining the possible origins of
depression; to this end, they examine mild levels of
depression experienced by college students and its
association with their cognitions or interpersonal
relationships. While these mild levels of depression
are very different from the full syndrome of clinical
depression, small, theoretical studies often provide the
first information supporting a new theory of depression,
which is later tested on larger and more diverse
samples. Understanding how mild symptoms of depression
increase over time and in response to a variety of
factors provides a good starting point for more intensive
clinical research on depression.
Psychological Theories of Depression
Cognitive Processes and Depression
One of the most common features of depression is its
impact on an individual’s thoughts, and a persistent pattern
of negative thoughts plays a prominent role in the
disorder. The cognitive theories of depression describe
how an individual’s pattern of thoughts or interpretations
may increase risk for depression as well as being a
part of, and helping to maintain, an episode of depression
after it has started.
Attributions, Hopelessness, and Depression. One of
the earliest cognitive developments in the study of
depression was based on Martin Seligman’s work on
learned helplessness. This research proposes that an
individual’s interpretations, or attributions, about the
causes of events can lead to a feeling of helplessness,
which can lead to depression. Individuals who tend to
make internal (i.e., the event was caused by something
about the self), stable (the causes of the event are
unlikely to change over time), and global (the causes
of the event also have a negative impact on other areas
of the individual’s life) are said to have a negative attributional
style, which is associated with depression.
The more recent hopelessness theory of depression
proposes a process by which an individual’s attributional
style may lead to the development of depression
in some individuals. A negative attributional style
places an individual at risk for depression, and in these
people, the occurrence of negative life events can lead
to attributions causing hopelessness, which then leads
to depression.
Beck’s Cognitive Theory of Depression. Another cognitive
theory of depression was developed by Aaron Beck.
Beck’s cognitive theory of depression focuses on the
persistent negative thoughts of depressed individuals.

In this theory, individuals who have, or are at risk for,
depression have negative mental schemas, or automatic
patterns of viewing themselves and the world. Their
experiences are filtered through these schemas, leading
to certain automatic negative thoughts. These distorted
thoughts about the self, world, and future are
automatic in a variety of situations, and the depressed
person has difficulty coming up with more positive,
adaptive thoughts which might help reduce the symptoms
of depression.
Cognitive Therapy for Depression. Cognitive theories
of depression have led to the development of cognitive
therapy, one of the most successful and common forms
of treatment for depression. Cognitive therapy works
to identify and challenge the automatic negative
thoughts of the depressed individual. Over time, the
negative cognitive style of the individual becomes less
biased, and depression is reduced. Cognitive therapy is
highly effective, and clinical trials have shown it to be
at least as effective as medication in treating depression
and preventing its recurrence.
Interpersonal Processes and Depression
Depression has a significant negative impact on
interpersonal processes and relationships. Patterns of
negative interpersonal behaviors, leading to increased
stress or even rejection, have been observed in
depressed individuals and may be a part of the process
that maintains a depressive episode.
Feedback-Seeking Behaviors and Depression. Research
has shown that depressed individuals are highly interested
in different kinds of feedback from others. One
such interpersonal process that has been linked to
depression is excessive reassurance-seeking, which
was initially described as part of James Coyne’s interpersonal
theory of depression. Some individuals who
are experiencing, or are at risk for, depression may
continually seek reassurance from others as to their
own worth. This process has been shown to lead to
rejection by others and increased depression. Another,
opposite behavior has also been associated with
depression and is based on William Swann’s selfverification
theory. This theory states that individuals
desire feedback from others that will maintain their
consistent views about themselves. As this theory predicts,
research has shown that depressed individuals
desire, and may even seek, negative feedback from
others that confirms their negative self-views. Even
though desired, negative feedback may lead to increased
feelings of depression. Additionally, the process of
feedback-seeking may be aversive to others and has
been associated with increased rejection.
Stress Generation and Contagious Depression. Depression
has a strong impact on the relationships and experiences
of the depressed individual. Negative life events
generally have been found to place an individual at
risk for depression, but one unusual effect that has
been observed in depression is stress generation, which
refers to the tendency for depression to lead to increases
in negative life events. The processes involved in stress
generation are unclear, but the interpersonal stress and
rejection that can be caused by depressive behaviors
may play an important role. Depression has also been
found to be “contagious,” in that the significant others
of depressed individuals are likely to experience
symptoms of depression. All these negative interpersonal
processes put strain on an individual and his or
her relationships and may operate in a cyclical way in
the development and maintenance of depression.
Interpersonal Therapy for Depression. Many different
interpersonal processes are involved in depression,
and although no therapy has been developed to specifically
address the individual processes, interpersonal
therapy for depression is a type of psychotherapy that
naturally addresses some of these issues. Interpersonal
therapy examines the interpersonal patterns of a
depressed individual’s life and then focuses on specific
interpersonal problem areas. Interpersonal therapy
has been studied in clinical trials and has been
shown to be effective in treating depression.
Implications
Depression———241
Diverse psychological and biological processes play
a role in depression. Negative cognitive and interpersonal
processes have been shown to be prominent
aspects of the disorder and may also act as risk factors
for the disorder. Depressive thoughts and interpersonal
behaviors may work together in contributing a negative
cycle, maintaining depression and adversely affecting
many areas of an individual’s life. Despite this, psychotherapies
have been developed that can alleviate
many of these problems and are highly effective in the
treatment of the disorder.
Katherine Merrill
Thomas Joiner

242———Depressive Realism
See also Learned Helplessness; Schemas; Self-Verification
Theory; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Alloy, L. B. (1989).
Hopelessness depression: A theory-based subtype of
depression. Psychological Review, 96(2), 358–372.
Beck, A. T. (1972). Depression: Causes and treatments.
Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
Gotlib, I. H., & Hammen, C. L. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of
depression. New York: Guilford Press.
Joiner, T. E. (2000). Depression’s vicious scree:
Self-propagating and erosive processes in depression
chronicity. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice,
7(2), 203–218.
DEPRESSIVE REALISM
Definition
Depressive realism refers to the findings that depressed
individuals tend to be more accurate or realistic than
nondepressed persons in their judgments about themselves.
Specifically, research suggests that nondepressed
people are vulnerable to cognitive illusions, including
unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and
an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events.
This same research indicates that depressed people’s
judgments about themselves are often less biased.
Context and Importance
Depressive realism is provocative for two reasons.
First, it contradicts both the intuitions of common
sense and the mental health profession’s assumption
that mental health should be associated with a high
capacity to perceive and test reality. Second, depressive
realism also presents a serious challenge to cognitive
theories of depression, which have become
increasingly important over the past 30 years. According
to cognitive theories, depressed individuals
make judgments about themselves that are unrealistic,
extreme, and illogical, and cognitive therapy for
depression is designed to correct these irrational perceptions.
If depressed people already view themselves
realistically, their thought patterns may not need the
correction that cognitive therapists propose to provide.
In fact, there is good evidence that cognitive therapy
works to alleviate depression, but it may work by training
patients to construct optimistic illusions about
themselves rather than by teaching them to think more
realistically.
The study of depressive realism also may serve as
a bridge between clinical and experimental psychology.
Unlike neuropsychologists and visual perception
researchers, clinical psychologists rarely have studied
abnormal functioning to develop theories about normal
psychology. However, an understanding of depressive
realism may allow psychologists and researchers
to see the adaptive functions of optimistic biases in
normal human thinking.
Evidence
What is the evidence for depressive realism? In one of
the first studies, depressed and nondepressed undergraduates
were asked to judge their degree of control
over an outcome of a button-pressing task. The experimenters
systematically varied the actual degree of control
as well as the frequency and valence (good or bad)
of the outcome. Nondepressed students judged incorrectly
that they had control over good outcomes but not
bad ones. Depressed students might have been
expected to show the opposite bias; instead, they were
consistently accurate judges of their control over events.
Many other studies of depressed children, college
students, and older adults have confirmed these results.
Experiments also show that depressed people are better
than average at predicting events in their own lives,
especially misfortunes. The participants in most of
these studies were only moderately depressed, but it is
not clear that even severely depressed people are unrealistically
pessimistic. The evidence is mixed; some
studies have found that even patients hospitalized for
depression are quite realistic about themselves.
Depressive realism and nondepressive optimistic
illusions are also seen in social situations. One study
found that normal individuals and psychiatric outpatients
who were not depressed rated their own social
competence much higher than objective observers
did. Depressed patients, in contrast, agreed with the
observers. There is also evidence that depressed individuals
are better at evaluating the impression they
make on others and that depressed mothers report
their children’s behavior more accurately than do nondepressed
mothers.
However, depressed people are not more realistic in
judgments about others. Studies consistently find that
although nondepressed people succumb to optimistic

illusions about themselves, they are fairly unbiased in
judging others. Depressed individuals do the opposite.
For example, depressed students judge their own control
over outcomes accurately but judge incorrectly
that others have control over good outcomes that were
actually uncontrollable. In another study, depressed
and nondepressed undergraduates and psychiatric
patients were asked to predict whether the roll of two
dice would have a successful outcome, defined as a 2,
3, 4, 9, 10, 11, or 12 (a 44% chance). When subjects
rolled the dice themselves, depressed students and
patients made more accurate predictions. When experimenters
rolled the dice, nondepressed students and
patients guessed more accurately.
Does depression cause people to be more realistic
about themselves, or does realism about the self make
one more vulnerable to depression? Research suggests
that it works both ways. When experimenters used
mood inductions to make nondepressed students feel
temporarily depressed and depressed students feel
temporarily elated, their susceptibility to illusions of
control was reversed. But, individuals with optimistic
illusions of control are also less vulnerable to depression
under stress. After performing a task measuring
their judgments of control, undergraduates were asked
to solve problems with no answers. Their mood was
assessed immediately before and after the inevitable
failure on the unsolvable problems. At this time and a
month later, they also completed a checklist of depressive
symptoms. At the second time, they also listed
stressful life events they experienced in the previous
month. The students who were realistic about their
control over outcomes on the original task showed
more symptoms of depression after they failed to
solve the unsolvable problems and more depression a
month later if they experienced many stressful events
during the month. Students with strong illusions of
control on the original task did not become more
depressed when they failed to solve the problems or a
month later even if they had experienced many negative
life events. Thus, depression and realism appear
to be interdependent.
Implications
The nondepressive tendency to engage in overly
optimistic thinking about oneself may have adaptive
behavioral and emotional consequences. Optimistic
illusions may function to enhance self-esteem, increase
resilience under stress, increase capacity for persistence,
and decrease vulnerability to depression. It is
ironic from the standpoint of the cognitive theories of
depression, but maladaptive features of depression such
as low self-esteem, sadness, and decreased persistence
might result from the loss of normal, healthy personal
illusions.
See also Depression; Illusion of Control
Further Readings
Lauren B. Alloy
Lyn Y. Abramson
Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1988). Depressive realism:
Four theoretical perspectives. In L. B. Alloy (Ed.),
Cognitive processes in depression (pp. 223–265).
New York: Guilford Press.
Alloy, L. B., & Clements, C. M. (1992). Illusion of control:
Invulnerability to negative affect and depressive
symptoms after laboratory and natural stressors. Journal
of Abnormal Psychology, 101, 234–245.
DEVIANCE
Definition
Deviance is a broad term meant to signify behavior
that violates social norms. The origins and functions
of deviant behavior have long been of interest in the
social sciences, with early sociological theories influencing
the psychology theories that followed.
Sociological Theories
Structural Functionalism
Deviance———243
One broad sociological approach to the study of
deviance was structural functionalism. This viewpoint
focused attention on social institutions in societies.
Social institutions are organizations that fulfill vital
roles in society and that promote the continued existence
of society (e.g., the criminal justice system,
the courts, the family). Institutions bind individuals
together by promoting social norms that define right
and wrong.
Émile Durkheim, an early structural functionalist,
introduced the notion of anomie, a precursor to modern
conceptions of deviance. Anomie was conceived
of as a psychological state created when social norms
fail to affect how an individual acts. Robert Merton

244———Deviance
expanded on the concept of anomie by showing two
dimensions upon which individuals might deviate
from social norms. First, they can reject the normative
goals of society (e.g., wanting to support a drug habit
rather than a family). Second, they can reject the normative
means of achieving goals (e.g., stealing money
rather than earning it from an employer). Alternatively,
an individual can seek radical changes to society,
changes that alter its normative goals and means. As
an example, an American citizen might reject his or
her society’s embrace of capitalism in favor of community
and might advocate for socialist policies as a
way of promoting this new social agenda.
The strength of structural functionalism was that it
drew attention to the role that society plays in defining
right and wrong. Deviation from social norms was
not viewed as a property inherent to certain actors. It
instead was viewed as something social institutions
create to preserve the society. The major weakness of
this approach was that it did not elaborate on the individual-level
mechanisms that cause people to deviate.
In fact, structural functionalists tended to question
whether one could understand the whole (society) by
examining the parts (the individual).
Symbolic Interactionism
Some scholars were interested in the component
parts, and this contributed to the rise of symbolic interactionism
within sociology. Symbolic interactionists
examine how individuals construct social meaning
through their interactions with other people. A key concept
is the looking-glass self, coined by Charles Horton
Cooley. Accordingly, individuals cannot find a personal
identity by looking inward but must instead adopt the
viewpoints of other people. The tendency to incorporate
the opinions of others into the self can lead to a
self-fulfilling prophesy, such that individuals become
the very people they are thought to be by others.
Because symbolic interactionists focus on the opinions
of other people, many of these scholars have
focused attention on the majority opinions found in
societies. Howard S. Becker followed such an approach.
He argued that social institutions create accepted labels
that give meanings to actions. Over time, he argued,
people come to accept the labels society gives them. For
instance, a society might create the negative term thief
as a way of deterring crime, but people who are labeled
in this way (e.g., by the criminal justice system) might
come to identify with their label and then commit more
crimes.
Group Dynamics
Although symbolic interactionism succeeded in
bringing the individual into the discussion on deviance,
it largely ignored the harder question that was of interest
to structural functionalists: Why do social groups
categorize certain people as deviant? It was this question
that early psychological theories sought to
address. The most influential of these traditions was
the group dynamics approach, which was started in
the 1940s by Kurt Lewin and his students and colleagues
at the Research Center for Group Dynamics.
This perspective emphasized two broad psychological
tendencies that were thought to generate pressures
to conform.
The first tendency was the need for social reality.
It was thought that individuals possess an epistemic
need to possess both certain and veridical knowledge.
Individuals can satisfy this need by joining groups
with like-minded individuals. For this reason, groups
tend to punish and reject opinion deviants, because
these individuals threaten a shared social reality. The
second tendency that generated conformity pressure
was the desire to succeed. Social groups often form as
a way of helping individuals accomplish their goals.
Group locomotion toward a shared goal thus creates
uniformity pressures within the group, and so groups
that are driven to succeed should identify and then
punish deviants who stand in the way.
Implications
These three broad approaches to deviance differ
considerably in their assumptions, but each offers a
valuable and complementary view. A structural functionalist
approach emphasizes external forces that
define deviance (e.g., social institutions). This draws
attention to complex social systems and larger societal
needs, that is, needs that occur outside the individual.
A group dynamics perspective focuses attention on
internal psychological forces and the individual’s
need to maintain a coherent social reality and to succeed.
Symbolic interactionism splits the difference
between these two extremes. It shares the structural
functionalist emphasis on external causes (others’
opinions), but it focuses attention on individual-level

mechanisms (the looking-glass self). In a way, structural
functionalism and group dynamics are the most
alike in that they want to reveal the ultimate cause of
deviance. Structural functionalism locates this cause
in the needs of societies to endure, whereas group
dynamics locates this cause in the needs of the individuals
to know and to grow. If symbolic interactionism
is less ambitious for not seeking the true cause
of deviance, it is also more generous in that it can
accommodate causes that arise from society and the
individual.
Hart Blanton
See also Group Dynamics; Looking-Glass Self; Normative
Influence; Symbolic Interactionism
Further Readings
Abrams, D., Marques, J. M., & Hogg, M. A. (2004). The
social psychology of inclusion and exclusion.
Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Durkheim, É. (1999). The normal and the pathological.
In S. H. Traub & C. B. Little (Eds.), Theories of deviance
(pp. 4–9). Itasca, IL: Peacock. (Original work published
1938)
Haslam, S. A., & Turner, J. C. (1998). Extremism and deviance:
Beyond taxonomy and bias. Social Research, 65, 111–222.
Levine, J. M. (1989). Reactions to opinion deviance in small
groups. In P. B. Paulus (Ed.), Psychology of group
influence (pp. 187–231). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schachter, S. (1951). Deviation, rejection and
communication. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 46, 190–207.
DIAGNOSTICITY
Definition
Diagnosticity refers to the extent to which a source of
data can discriminate between a particular hypothesis
and its alternatives. In social situations, individuals
often observe others’ behaviors and attempt to form
an impression about their personality and aptitudes.
As part of this process, individuals test dispositional
hypotheses, namely, hypotheses regarding others’ traits
and abilities. Diagnostic sources of data are those that
discriminate between possessing a particular trait or
ability and not possessing the trait or ability.
For example, consider a situation in which a new
classmate, John, does not respond to your welcome
greetings and you want to know what kind of person
he is. You may generate a hypothesis (e.g., “John is
unfriendly”), gather information to test this hypothesis,
and draw an inference based on the available
information. Finding out that John “yelled at a fellow
classmate in public” is highly diagnostic information,
because such behavior is unlikely to occur unless John
is an unfriendly person. Finding out that John dislikes
parties has little diagnostic value. This information
cannot distinguish between the hypothesis that John
is unfriendly and the plausible alternative hypothesis
that he is shy, as both unfriendliness and shyness may
lead John to dislike parties.
Background
Diagnosticity———245
When testing a dispositional hypothesis, one of two
broad strategies, distinguished by the extent to which
individuals consider alternatives to their chosen hypothesis,
may be undertaken. One strategy, called diagnostic
hypothesis testing, is employed when individuals
search for evidence that bears on both the plausibility
of their focal hypothesis as well as on the plausibility
of its alternatives. By this strategy, individuals gather
information that can distinguish between their chosen
hypothesis and alternative ones. Once sufficient information
has been gathered, their confidence in their
conclusion is high only if the evidence is largely consistent
with the chosen hypothesis and inconsistent
with its alternatives.
In contrast to diagnostic testing, a second strategy,
called pseudodiagnostic hypothesis testing, involves
gathering and using information only according to its
consistency with the chosen hypothesis. Alternative
hypotheses are ignored, or it is simply assumed that
information that is consistent with the focal hypothesis
is inconsistent with its alternatives. In the previous
example, individuals would only ask about John’s
unfriendly behaviors and not about his shy behaviors.
They would then draw their conclusion on the basis
of the extent to which the evidence is consistent with
being an unfriendly person, without considering if this
evidence is also consistent with other possibilities such
as being a shy person. Compared to diagnostic testing,
pseudodiagnostic strategy is simple, fast, and relatively
effortless. However, when evidence is both consistent
with the focal hypothesis and its alternatives,

246———Diagnosticity
pseudodiagnostic testing might lead to a confirmation
bias, namely, a sense of confidence that the evidence
supports one’s chosen hypothesis when, in fact, alternative
hypotheses may be true.
Evidence
Research by Yaacov Trope and his colleagues has
demonstrated that individuals are sensitive to diagnosticity
concerns when testing their hypotheses. That is,
they consider alternative hypotheses when searching
for information regarding a chosen hypothesis and
weighing the evidence against these alternatives when
drawing their inferences. For example, when individuals
tested a hypothesis that a target person is an
extravert, they preferred to ask questions about highly
diagnostic introverted behaviors (being quiet) over
questions about weakly diagnostic extraverted behaviors
(engaging in athletic activities) and when testing a
hypothesis that a target person is an introvert they preferred
questions about highly diagnostic extraverted
behaviors (being friendly) over weakly diagnostic
introverted behaviors (listening to classical music).
They were also more confident in their inferences
when the answers to these questions provided more
diagnostic evidence.
However, individuals do not always engage in
diagnostic hypothesis testing. Whether individuals
will engage in diagnostic or pseudodiagnostic strategies
depends on cognitive and motivational resources.
When individuals are distracted, their cognitive
resources to process information are limited. Similarly,
when individuals do not have incentive to reach an
accurate conclusion, their motivational resources are
low. Under such suboptimal conditions, individuals
tend to perform pseudodiagnostic testing. Thus, if individuals
are not motivated to reach an accurate conclusion
or when they have other things on their mind, they
will select and use information that only bears on their
chosen hypothesis and ignore information relevant to
alternative hypotheses.
Implications for Dispositional Bias
In many real-life situations, individuals’ behaviors are
determined more by situational constraints and less
by their personal dispositions. Factors such as group
pressures, social norms, and situational stressors can
affect the way individuals behave. For example, a person
might react aggressively following a situation of
strong provocation regardless of whether that person
is dispositionally friendly or unfriendly. Diagnostic
testing of a dispositional hypothesis considers both
the personal disposition (the focal hypothesis) and
situational constraints (the alternative hypothesis) as
potential causes of a person’s behavior. Consequently,
individuals using a diagnostic strategy will not attribute
a behavior to the corresponding disposition when strong
situational inducements to behave in a certain manner
are present. For example, if John’s reaction to your
greetings occurred while he was in a hurry to class,
then under diagnostic inference this behavior would
not be attributed to dispositional unfriendliness since
most individuals in this situation would behave in such
a way regardless of whether or not they are friendly.
Pseudodiagnostic testing, in contrast, ignores alternative
hypotheses and, therefore, may fail to give the
proper weight to situational inducements in determining
a person’s behavior. Under pseudodiagnostic
testing, John’s behavior would still be attributed to dispositional
unfriendliness, because the possibility that
most individuals, not only those who are unfriendly,
would have behaved in such a way when in a hurry is
given little consideration. Pseudodiagnostic testing
may thus produce a dispositional bias in the inferences
individuals draw from others’ behavior. This is particularly
likely when individuals’ processing and motivational
resources are depleted. Under these circumstances,
individuals are likely to rely on pseudodiagnostic testing
and conclude that a person’s immediate behavior
reflects his or her corresponding personal disposition
when alternative situational explanations are no less
and even more likely.
Diagnosticity in Self-Evaluation
Diagnostic and nondiagnostic testing strategies are
relevant to questions about one’s own dispositions and
skills as well. Yet, when a person searches for information
bearing on one’s own attributes, other motivations
besides reaching an accurate conclusion might
play a role. Researchers have proposed three types of
motives that guide testing of self-relevant information.
One motive is self-enhancement, namely, the
motive to hold favorable self views and therefore seek
positive feedback as well as avoid negative feedback
regarding self-relevant attributes. A second motive is
self-verification, namely, the motive to affirm preexisting
self views. These two motives will lead individuals
to seek information that may be nondiagnostic of
their abilities and personality traits. That is, when selfenhancement
goals guide processing of self-relevant

information, individuals will only accept information
that can bolster their self-esteem, whereas information
that might expose their liabilities will be avoided or
rejected. Similarly, when self-verification goals guide
processing of self-relevant information, individuals will
only accept information that can affirm their existing
self-views, whether positive or negative, whereas information
that proves otherwise will be ignored regardless
of its diagnosticity.
A third type of motive that guides self-relevant
information processing is self-assessment, namely, the
motive to hold accurate self-views that can help one
predict the outcomes of future decisions and selfimprovement
attempts. When self-assessment goals
regulate behavior, individuals will prefer diagnostic
information regardless of whether it is positive or negative.
Self-assessment may also lead to undertaking
intermediate difficulty tasks. These tasks are diagnostic
of one’s ability because success is more likely
given high ability, whereas failure is more likely given
low ability. Easy or difficult tasks are nondiagnostic,
because success on easy tasks and failure on difficult
ones are highly likely regardless of one’s ability level.
As in dispositional hypothesis testing, whether one
will engage in diagnostic testing of self-relevant information
depends on cognitive and motivational factors.
Individuals are more likely to seek diagnostic feedback
when they perceive the feedback as pertaining to
changeable abilities rather than fixed abilities. This
is particularly true for individuals who are uncertain
or think that their ability is relatively low. Another factor
that has been found to facilitate diagnostic selfassessment
is positive mood. Individuals in a positive
mood seek positive as well as negative feedback. In
contrast, individuals in a neutral or negative mood
tend to prefer positive, self-enhancing feedback. It has
been proposed that positive mood buffers against the
immediate emotional costs of negative feedback and
attunes individuals to the long-term, learning benefits
of diagnostic feedback.
See also Decision Making; Inference
Further Readings
Ido Liviatan
Yaacov Trope
Trope, Y., Ferguson, M., & Raghunathan, R. (2001). Mood
as a resource in processing self-relevant information.
In J. P. Forgas (Ed.), Handbook of affect and social
cognition (pp. 256–274). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Diffusion of Responsibility———247
Trope, Y., Gervey, B., & Bolger, N. (2003). The role
of perceived control in overcoming defensive
self-evaluations. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 39, 407–419.
Trope, Y., & Liberman, A. (1996). Social hypothesis testing:
Cognitive and motivational mechanisms. In E. T. Higgins
& A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook
of basic principles (pp. 239–270). New York: Guilford
Press.
Trope, Y., & Mackie, D. (1987). Sensitivity to alternatives in
social hypothesistesting. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 23, 445–459.
DIFFUSION OF RESPONSIBILITY
Diffusion of responsibility is a concept that has been
employed in several fruitful ways in psychology. First,
consider a collection of persons, strangers, that faces
an unexpected situation, such as that of a person who
is suddenly in distress. Intuitively it is clear that each
member of the collection of persons feels less responsibility
to intervene in the situation than does a solitary
individual who, knowing he or she is the sole
witness, faces the same crisis alone. The solitary individual
knows that if help is to come, it must come
from him or her, while a witness who is a member of
a crowd reasons that there are many other persons
who could provide help.
Any reluctance a person has to intervene in this situation
can be rationalized by this possibility. Reasons
to be reluctant to intervene are present in many situations,
such as fears of embarrassment for crying wolf
when the situation is in fact no emergency, to fears of
performing the necessary actions in an incompetent
way, to fears for one’s own personal safety. Social
psychological research demonstrates that, in staged
situations in which a victim is calling for help, this
effect occurs; there is a markedly lower probability of
each individual intervening as the apparent size of the
group available to intervene increases.
In these experimental tests of the concept, it is
usual to make the witnessing individual aware that
other witnesses are also aware of the potential emergency
but to make it impossible for the witness to
know how the other individuals are reacting to the
event. The reasoning here is that if they are aware of
how the others react, this provides information about
the others’ definition of the event, which could also
influence their reactions to it in ways not connected

248———Dilution Effect
with the diffusion concept. The attempt here is to
model situations such as the famous Kitty Genovese
killing, in which a person was killed in the courtyard
of her apartment building. Neighbors at their windows
were aware that other neighbors’ were also witnessing
the event but could not be aware of the exact reactions
of the other neighbors to the event.
Diffusion of responsibility can arise in group
decision-making situations as well. Assume that a
decision needs to be made, and it is one of uncertainty
or risk. That is, the decision outcome may be good,
but it also may be bad. If the decision is made by one
person, that person will worry about whether the decision
he or she makes will be a bad one, because he or
she will feel responsible for the poor decision. Also,
others will hold that person responsible and criticize
and perhaps punish that person. On the other hand,
suppose that it is a group that is making a decision
about what action will be taken. Again, intuitively,
each individual participating in a group decisionmaking
process will feel that he or she would not be
so responsible for the joint decision outcome if the
decision comes out poorly. After all, the decision
would not have been made if others didn’t agree with
it. “So I was not really so dumb because everybody
thought it was the right decision.”
The diffusion idea is easily expanded to illuminate
the often-observed phenomenon of social loafing. The
task of a tug of war team is to win the tug of war, and
the task of a group making a report in class is to turn
out a really good report. But it won’t surprise you to
learn that people often expend less effort to achieve a
goal when they work in a group than when they work
alone. The reason is that they feel a diminished motivation
to do their best when their own contributions to
the product will be lost in the overall group product.
This is why those who are clever at task design will
often arrange things so that each person’s true contributions
to the task can be separately assessed and the
group members know this is so. But in some ways, this
is really nothing more than turning a group task back
into a set of individual tasks. Happily, it is often not
necessary to go this far to get high productivity out of
the group. For instance, if the members are really committed
to reaching the group goal, then social loafing is
not likely to occur. It is also often possible to get efficiency
gains by working in groups, by having different
individuals take on the tasks that they do best.
John Darley
See also Bystander Effect; Decision Model of Helping;
Social Loafing
Further Readings
Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in
emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377–383.
Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A
meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 681–706.
Latané, B. (1979). Many hands make light the work: The
causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 822–832.
Mynatt, C., & Sherman, S. J. (1975). Responsibility
attribution in groups and individuals: A direct test of the
diffusion of responsibility hypothesis. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1111–1118.
DILUTION EFFECT
Definition
The dilution effect is a judgment bias in which people
underutilize diagnostic information when nondiagnostic
information is also present. Diagnostic information
is knowledge that is useful in making a particular
judgment. Nondiagnostic information is knowledge
that is not relevant to the judgment being made. For
example, if a medical doctor were making a judgment
about a patient’s condition, the patient’s symptoms
would be diagnostic information. The doctor might
also know the patient’s hair color, but because this
information would not be useful in judging the patient’s
condition, it would be nondiagnostic.
When both kinds of information are present,
people tend to underrely on diagnostic information in
making judgments. Thus, the presence of nondiagnostic
information weakens, or dilutes, the impact of diagnostic
information on judgment. The dilution effect
results in less-extreme judgments than those made using
only diagnostic information.
Background and History
The term dilution effect was first used by Richard E.
Nisbett, Henry Zukier, and Ronald E. Lemley. These
scientists observed that when research participants

considered both diagnostic and nondiagnostic information,
they made less-extreme predictions about
other people than when they considered diagnostic
information alone. Michael C. Troutman and James
Shanteau previously made a similar observation. They
referred to the same phenomenon as the nondiagnostic
effect. Although Troutman and Shanteau were first
to report this judgment bias, it became commonly
known by its later name.
The dilution effect conflicts with intuitive knowledge
about how human judgment should operate.
Logically, when people are given diagnostic information,
they should make the same judgment whether or
not they have access to nondiagnostic information.
For instance, a professor’s prediction of a student’s
future academic success should be the same if the professor
knows only the student’s grade point average as
it would be if the professor knows both the grade point
average and the student’s color preference. Logically,
color preference has no impact on future academic
success. However, the professor is likely to underutilize
information about the grade point average if color
preference is also known, due to the dilution effect.
Differing explanations have been proposed for why
the dilution effect occurs. It may in part be due to
people’s failure to distinguish clearly between diagnostic
and nondiagnostic information. When people
are given information and asked to make a judgment,
it is reasonable for them to assume that all of the information
they have been given is useful or diagnostic.
Thus, they may give both kinds of information equal
weight. Although this explanation raises important
considerations about how the dilution effect is studied,
it is not likely to account for it fully. The ability to distinguish
between the two kinds of information does not
seem to prevent susceptibility to the dilution effect.
Even when people know that some of the information
they have is nondiagnostic, it still influences their
judgments.
Research relating the dilution effect to stereotyping
has yielded information about another possible explanation.
It may in part be due to the process by which
people categorize others. In making a judgment, people
may compare what they know about the person being
judged to what they know about the social categories
to which that person could belong. The more similar a
person is to a category, the more likely that person is to
be perceived as belonging to it. Diagnostic information
helps in identifying a person’s similarity to a possible
category. Conversely, nondiagnostic information can
Dilution Effect———249
make the person seem distinct from typical members
of the category. When nondiagnostic information is
present, the person seems less similar to what is known
about the possible social category, and thus categorization
is weakened.
Importance and Consequences
of Dilution Effect
The dilution effect relates importantly to several reallife
situations in which individuals must make judgments.
It has been observed in a variety of settings and
situations. It affects business judgments, consumer
behavior, and social categorization.
Studies of financial auditing have indicated that
auditors are susceptible to the dilution effect in assessing
the risk that an auditee’s records contain misstatements.
Auditors’ judgments indicate that they take
into consideration nondiagnostic information, such as
the auditee’s field of business. This information weakens
the effect of diagnostic information, such as previous
misstatements in the auditee’s records.
Marketers are aware that providing consumers with
nondiagnostic information can decrease the extent to
which they judge a product to be beneficial. When a
marketing message contains information that is useful
in judging a product’s purported benefits as well as
irrelevant information, the irrelevant information is
likely to dilute the impact of diagnostic information.
Consumers’ likelihood of judging the product as beneficial
is thereby weakened.
The dilution effect has a positive consequence
in relation to stereotypes. In some circumstances, the
dilution effect can reduce people’s reliance on stereotypes
in forming judgments. Nondiagnostic information
can increase the extent to which a person is
perceived as an individual rather than as a member of
a social category. This occurs because information
that is irrelevant to category membership reduces a
person’s perceived similarity to members of that category.
Perceiving people as individuals can decrease
reliance on stereotypes in forming judgments.
However, it would be inaccurate to conclude that
the dilution effect is likely to inevitably negate the
effects of stereotypes. It has been shown to decrease
the impact of stereotypes on judgment under some
conditions. Conversely, in other conditions, the dilution
effect fails to prevent, or may even enhance, the
use of stereotypes.
Celeste E. Doerr

250———Discontinuity Effect
See also Representativeness Heuristic; Salience; Social
Categorization; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Hilton, J. L., & Fein, S. (1989). The role of typical
diagnosticity in stereotype-based judgments. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 57(2), 201–211.
Krueger, J., & Rothbart, M. (1988). Use of categorical
information and individuating information in making
inferences about personality. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 55(2), 187–195.
Nisbett, R. E., Zukier, H., & Lemley, R. E. (1981). The
dilution effect: Nondiagnostic information weakens the
implications of diagnostic information. Cognitive
Psychology, 13, 248–277.
Troutman, C. M., & Shanteau, J. (1977). Inferences based on
nondiagnostic information. Organizational Behavior and
Human Performance, 19(1), 43–55.
DISCONTINUITY EFFECT
Definition
The interindividual–intergroup discontinuity effect is
the tendency in some settings for relations between
groups to be more competitive, or less cooperative,
than relations between individuals. Why is this effect
referred to as a discontinuity rather than just as a difference?
Unpublished research has demonstrated that
variation in the number of people in an interacting
pair from one-on-one to two-on-two to three-on-three
to four-on-four, and so on, has found a large difference
between one-on-one and two-on-two, a smaller
difference between two-on-two and three-on-three,
and little change thereafter; that is, there is a discontinuity
between one-on one relations and two-on-two
(intergroup) relations. Research has documented the
discontinuity effect in both nonlaboratory and laboratory
contexts.
Nonlaboratory Evidence
The nonlaboratory research has had participants
record on small diaries instances of back-and-forth
social interaction that fell into one of five categories:
(1) one-on-one (participant interacting with another
individual), (2) within-group (participant within a
group interacting with other group members), (3) oneon-group
(participant interacting with a group),
(4) group-on-one (participant in a group interacting
with an individual), (5) group-on-group (participant
within a group interacting with another group). After
classifying the social interaction, the participants then
evaluated the interaction as cooperative or competitive.
Data collected over a number of days indicated
that interactions of types 1 and 2 were less competitive,
or more cooperative, than interactions of types 3,
4, and 5. More specifically, there was a discontinuity
effect, a difference between interactions of type 1 (oneon-one)
and type 5 (group-on-group).
Laboratory Evidence
Most of the laboratory research has structured the
interaction with the use of a matrix game referred to
as the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG). Within the
PDG each of two players, A and B, has two choices, X
and Y, yielding a total of four possible choice pairings.
Typically a choice is made in isolation without knowledge
of the other player’s choice. Each choice pairing
has a different combination of payoffs or outcomes.
These payoffs or outcomes can be illustrated with U.S.
dollars. If both A and B choose X, they both receive a
moderate payoff, say $3.00. If on the other hand, one
player chooses Y, while the other player chooses X, the
player choosing Y, whether A or B, may receive $4.00
and the other player may receive only $1.00. Finally, if
both players choose Y, they may both receive $2.00.
The 2 X 2 matrix of four choice pairings thus presents
a dilemma. Either A or B can increase outcomes by
choosing Y, but if both A and B are guided by selfinterest,
they will receive lower outcomes than could
have been obtained by mutual X choices. The X choice
is a cooperative choice, and the Y choice is sometimes
referred to as a competitive choice and sometimes as a
defecting choice. If the Y choice is guided by greed, or
an interest in increasing outcomes, the competitive
label is appropriate. On the other hand, if the Y choice
is guided by fear, or an interest in minimizing the
reduction in outcomes resulting from the other player’s
Y choice, the defecting label is appropriate.
Common examples of PDG-like situations relate
to being honest versus cheating, over-fishing, and
pollution of the air and water. In general the PDG
models situations in which individual selfishness can
lead to collective detriment. Laboratory research has
demonstrated that when individuals communicate

prior to each trial, they tend to be fairly cooperative.
Sometimes the communication has involved face-toface
meeting, sometimes the exchange of notes, and
sometimes talking through an intercom. On the other
hand, groups who are required to reach consensus
regarding the X or Y choice on each trial generally
have been found to be less cooperative, or more competitive.
Typically the communication between groups
has involved the meeting of group representatives but,
as with individuals, sometimes has involved the
exchange of notes or talking through an intercom.
Three Questions
Three questions have been asked regarding the
discontinuity effect. First, what are the mechanisms
responsible for the effect? Second, what is the generality
of the effect across different situations? Third,
what are possible ways of reducing the effect by making
groups less competitive? These three questions
will be considered in turn.
Possible Mechanisms Producing the Effect
Comparison of intergroup relations with interindividual
relations uses interindividual relations as a
comparison control to identify the distinctive group
mechanisms that may lead to the discontinuity effect.
To date, evidence for five different mechanisms has
been obtained. Each of these possible mechanisms can
be formulated as a hypothesis. First, the schema-based
distrust, or fear, hypothesis suggests that there is greater
distrust in intergroup than in interindividual interactions
because the actual or anticipated interaction
with a group activates learned beliefs and expectations
that groups are competitive, deceitful, and aggressive.
Second, the social-support-for-shared-self-interest, or
greed, hypothesis suggests that, unlike separate individuals,
group members can obtain active support for a
competitive choice. Third, the identifiability hypothesis
proposes that the group context provides a shield of
anonymity, allowing group members to avoid personal
responsibility for a selfish-competitive choice. Fourth,
the ingroup-favoring-norm hypothesis suggests that
membership in a group implies normative pressure to
act so as to benefit the ingroup. Fifth and finally, the
altruistic-rationalization hypothesis proposes that
group members can rationalize their self-benefiting
competitiveness as flowing from a concern for benefiting
fellow group members.
Generality of the Effect
Research on the generality question has followed
either an atheoretical or a theoretical approach. Research
following the atheoretical approach has found, for
example, that the discontinuity effect occurs not only
in the United States but also in Europe and Japan, and
that the effect does not change significantly when the
values in the matrix vary from those that have frequently
been used to values that are increased by a factor
of 10 (e.g., $0.66 vs. $6.60 for the highest possible
outcome on 1 of 10 trials). Research following the
theoretical approach has looked at the correlation
between the outcomes for the two players across the
four cells of the 2 X 2 matrix. With the PDG, the correlation
is negative but can vary as a mathematical
function of the ratio of the difference between column
means to the difference between row means for the
column player (or the ratio of the difference between
row means to the difference between column means
for the row player). Research has found that as the correlation
becomes more negative (and higher outcomes
for one player are increasingly associated with lower
outcomes for the other player), intergroup competitiveness
and the discontinuity effect increases. This
result is consistent with the theoretical assumption that
as the correlation becomes more negative, the implication
of the ingroup-favoring norm becomes increasingly
obvious.
Reduction of Intergroup Competitiveness
Finally, research on possible ways of reducing
intergroup competitiveness has provided evidence that
one possible approach is to encourage group members
to think beyond the immediate situation to the longterm
consequences of their behavior.
Chester A. Insko
See also Cooperation; Group Decision Making; Intergroup
Relations; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Trust
Further Readings
Discontinuity Effect———251
Insko, C. A., Kirchner, J. L., Pinter, B., Efaw, J., &
Wildschut, T. (2005). Interindividual-intergroup
discontinuity as a function of trust and categorization: The
paradox of expected cooperation. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 88, 365–385.

252———Discounting, in Attribution
Wildschut, T., Pinter, B., Vevea, J. L., Insko, C. A., &
Schopler, J. (2003). Beyond the group mind: A
quantitative review of the interindividual-intergroup
discontinuity effect. Psychological Bulletin, 129,
698–722.
DISCOUNTING, IN ATTRIBUTION
Definition
Attribution is the way in which people explain the
causes of events or behaviors. At times, individuals
must choose among different possible causes as explanations
for a particular event or behavior. When people
can see more than one reason for something happening,
they discount, or minimize, the importance of each
reason because they are unsure what the real cause
actually is.
Background, History, and Evidence
Harold Kelley introduced the discounting principle in
1971 in his writings on attribution. He demonstrated
how people use discounting to explain how job candidates
present themselves to interviewers. When candidates
act ideal in every way, observers explain that
they may be showing their true personalities or may
be simply conforming to what the situation demands.
However, if they reveal themselves as not ideal for the
job, observers conclude that they are showing who
they truly are, since they could not have acted that
way to try to get the job. Multiple causes make for
uncertainty: For instance, how can you know if a
politician’s promises are because of his or her beliefs
or because of the potential for obtaining your vote?
Given the strong situational demands upon their
behavior, you might discount their beliefs.
The discounting principle has been confirmed by
many experiments since Kelley, with both adults and
children. As children grow older, they become more
sophisticated at differentiating when a person’s behavior
is due to a single cause or multiple causes and at
explaining the behavior in terms of these causes.
Importance and Implications
Discounting can be seen as a set of tradeoffs between
two explanations; if one is present, people discount
the other. For instance, the person/situation tradeoff
can be seen in Kelley’s initial demonstration of explaining
a job candidate’s behavior. Interestingly, observers
seem prone to correspondence bias, in which they
explain another’s behavior in terms of the individual’s
corresponding personal qualities rather than in terms
of situational factors that adequately explain the
behavior. This bias is seen less in Eastern cultures,
where people are more apt to discount the impact of
the person’s disposition when there are reasonable situational
explanations for their behavior.
Another tradeoff is whether people explain someone’s
success by their effort or their inherent ability.
As children get older, they become better at understanding
that effort and ability are different, concluding
that if someone works hard to succeed, they might
not be smart. Some people create or claim obstacles in
the way of their own success, such as drinking or not
studying the night before a test; this is called selfhandicapping.
By doing this, they create multiple
explanations for their failure at something. If they fail,
they can discount the role of their own ability or intelligence,
instead blaming the obstacle. If they succeed,
they can attribute their success to their own ability.
The implications of strategic discounting are quite
profound in that individuals can skillfully keep
ambiguous the explanations for the behavior of themselves,
other individuals, or other groups, exploiting
this uncertainty for their own purposes.
Maureen T. Steckler
Kathryn C. Oleson
See also Attributional Ambiguity; Attributions; Fundamental
Attribution Error; Self-Handicapping
Further Readings
Kelley, H. H. (1971). Attribution in social interaction.
In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett,
S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the
causes of behavior (pp. 1–26). Morristown, NJ: General
Learning Press.
DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
See DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY

DISCRIMINATION
Definition
Discrimination is the phenomenon of treating a person
differently from other persons based on group membership
and an individual’s possession of certain characteristics
such as age, class, gender, race, religion, and
sexuality. Discriminatory behavior can take various
forms from relatively mild behavior, such as social
avoidance, to acts of violence, including hate crimes
and genocide.
Issues Pertaining to the
Study of Discrimination
Social psychologists study several aspects of discrimination,
including overt or old-fashioned discrimination
and subtle or modern forms. For example, overt discrimination
might involve explicitly excluding job
applicants who are women or people of color. Subtle
discrimination occurs when, for example, the job interviewer
unwittingly might sit farther away, not make
eye contact, and conduct a shorter interview with a job
applicant who is a woman or person of color.
Social psychologists distinguish individual discrimination
from institutional discrimination. Individual
discrimination, which is typically studied by social
psychologists, includes discriminatory behavior by
one person toward another. Institutional discrimination
can take the form of government-sponsored laws
and practices such as the Jim Crow laws during the
post-Emancipation era in the United States that legally
segregated Blacks and Whites in public places and
denied African Americans many civil rights. Laws banning
same-sex marriage are more recent manifestations
of institutional discrimination.
Another area of study for social psychologists is
whether there are individual personality characteristics
associated with discriminatory behavior. That is,
are there certain types of people who are more likely
to discriminate? Individuals who emphasize submission
to authority and are conventional and traditional
in their values may discriminate against those who
are different from them. Also, those who have difficulty
with ambiguity and have a personal need for
order and structure in their environment may discriminate
more than those who have more tolerance
for ambiguity.
Finally, social psychologists may investigate the
extent to which discrimination (behavior) is related to
prejudice (negative feelings) and stereotyping (beliefs
and thoughts). Many assume that discriminatory behavior
is a product of prejudice and stereotyping—that the
prejudiced person discriminates, and those who are not
prejudiced do not discriminate. Or, those who are
stereotypical in their thinking will likely discriminate
against a target person about whom they hold stereotypes.
The relationship between these three constructs
is complicated, and discrimination, prejudice, and stereotyping
are not always related. For instance, a person
might be familiar with certain stereotypes of some
groups (e.g., Hispanics are thought to be lazy, lesbians
are believed to be masculine) but may not treat members
of those groups differently. Also, stereotyping and
prejudice could be a consequence, not a cause, of discrimination.
In an attempt to understand why some
people are treated worse than others, one might conclude
that the target of discrimination actually is worse
(prejudice), or actually possesses different characteristics
(stereotyping), than those who are not the targets
of discrimination. In other words, that discrimination
exists can justify or contribute to people’s prejudices
and stereotypes.
One issue worth noting is that discrimination,
because it is behavior, tends to be illegal, whereas
stereotyping and prejudice (thoughts and feelings) are
not. In other words, a supervisor might believe women
are not fit for management positions, but it is only
when and if that supervisor treats women and men differently
(e.g., in hires or promotions) that legality
becomes relevant.
Kristin J. Anderson
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Prejudice; Racism;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping; Symbolic Racism
Further Readings
Discrimination———253
Ayres, I. (2001). Pervasive prejudice? Unconventional
evidence of race and gender discrimination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Crosby, F. J. (2004). Affirmative action is dead; long live
affirmative action. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Garnets, L., & Kimmel, D. (2002). Psychological
perspectives on lesbian, gay, and bisexual experiences.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Tavris, C. (1992). Mismeasure of woman: Why women are
not the better sex, the inferior sex, or the opposite sex.
New York: Touchstone.

254———Discursive Psychology
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. (2001). The problem:
Discrimination. In P. S. Rothenberg (Ed.), Race, class,
and gender in the United States (5th ed., pp. 186–196).
New York: Worth.
DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Discursive psychology is an approach that focuses on
how people interact with one another and, in particular,
on the role of psychological words and issues in
that interaction.
The Development of
Discursive Psychology
Discursive psychology emerged in the early 1990s,
drawing on ideas from the subdisciplines of conversation
analysis, rhetoric, and constructionism. Early
work offered new ways of understanding topics in
social psychology, such as memory, attribution, and
attitudes. Studies showed how, for example, people
manage issues of motive, intention, and morality in
their descriptions of actions and events. To illustrate
what is involved in this kind of research, consider this
illustrative example from a rape trial (Witness is the
victim of the alleged rape, Counsel is the legal counsel
for the defense of the alleged rapist, and Mr O is
the defendant who has been accused of rape):
Counsel: And during the evening, didn’t
Mr O come over to sit with you?
Witness: Sat at our table.
We can, no doubt, recognize that counsel’s description
suggests a familiarity and prior relationship
between the defendant and the victim. It implies attitudes
and motives that might make a rape conviction
of the defendant harder to achieve. The witness’s
immediate correction offers an alternative that depersonalizes
and de-familiarizes the relationship. It
implies different attitudes and motives and perhaps a
different moral status for the witness. These psychological
matters are played out in the competing
descriptions offered by the two parties to this interaction.
This is the topic of discursive psychology.
Contemporary Discursive Psychology
Discursive psychology is unusual in social psychology
in that it works primarily with audio and video
recordings of actual interaction in natural settings
rather than using experiments, questionnaires, or
interviews. For example, recent work has focused on
relationship counseling, child protection helplines,
neighbor disputes, police interrogation, and different
kinds of therapy, as well as everyday phone calls and
interaction over family meals. Although it has continued
to develop alternatives to mainstream social psychological
topics, it has become increasingly focused
on how actions are coordinated in institutional settings.
For instance, how does a child protection officer
working on a child protection helpline manage
the possibly competing tasks of soothing a crying
caller and simultaneously eliciting evidence sufficient
for social services to intervene to help an abused
child?
Discursive psychology has developed a rigorous
methodological approach to records of interaction. It
uses a form of transcription that captures features of
speech delivery and has recently been able to exploit
advances in digital audio and video to provide more
powerful ways of working with large amounts of data.
Discursive psychology offers a very different way
of addressing psychological issues than is common in
much North American work. It has a different set of
theoretical assumptions about mind and action, a different
research method and even some rather different
ideas about the nature of science. Its success has been
based on a mix of theoretical innovation and a natural
history approach that studies what people actually do
in the settings in which they do it.
Jonathan Potter
See also Content Analysis; History of Social Psychology;
Integrative Complexity
Further Readings
Potter, J. (2003). Discourse analysis and discursive
psychology. In P. M. Camic, J. E. Rhodes, &
L. Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology:
Expanding perspectives in methodology and design
(pp. 73–94). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.

DISGUST
Definition
Although there is much dispute about exactly what
emotions are, everyone, starting with Charles Darwin
in the 19th century, agrees that disgust is one of them.
Disgust is almost always considered a basic emotion,
often along with anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and
surprise. Basic emotions, as defined most clearly by
the psychologist Paul Ekman, are differentiated from
more complex emotions on the grounds that basic
emotions have some presence in nonhuman animals,
are expressed and recognized universally in humans,
and have a distinct facial expression.
Although disgust was clearly described by Charles
Darwin in 1872 in his classic work, Expression of
Emotions in Animals and Man, unlike anger, fear, and
sadness, it was studied very little in psychology until
the past few decades.
Behavioral, Expressive, and
Physiological Responses
Like other basic emotions, the elicitation of disgust
causes a set of predictable responses. Behaviorally,
there is a withdrawal from the object of disgust. There
is a characteristic facial expression, including a closing
of the nostrils, a raising of the upper lip, and sometimes
a lowering of the lower lip (gaping). The lowered
lip is sometimes accompanied by tongue extension.
Physiologically, the signature of disgust is nausea.
Unlike fear and anger, the two most similar basic emotions,
disgust is not accompanied by physiological
arousal (e.g., increased heart rate). These three types of
response (behavioral, expressive, and physiological)
are generally accompanied by a feeling of revulsion.
Elicitors
It is in the domain of understanding the elicitors of
disgust that the greatest challenge is encountered. So
many things can elicit a disgust response. It is natural
to look at nonhuman animals to get an idea of the basic
core or origin of disgust. An expression very much like
the human facial expression of disgust is seen in many
mammals. It typically occurs in response to tasting a
food that is either innately unpleasant (like something
Disgust———255
very bitter) or something that has been associated with
nausea (e.g., a contaminated food). This fact, plus the
fact that the disgust facial expression functions to eject
things in the mouth and close off the nostrils, suggests
that disgust, in its primitive form, is about food rejection.
Further evidence for this comes from the very
name of the emotion, disgust, which means bad taste.
And the nausea that is part of the disgust response has
the very specific effect of discouraging eating. These
facts caused Darwin to describe disgust as a response
to bad tastes and caused the psychoanalyst Andras
Angyal to described disgust as a form of oral rejection
based on the nature of a particular food.
This type of bad taste or distaste disgust seems to be
the origin of disgust and may be a way that animals
both reject food and communicate to other members of
its species that a particular food should be rejected.
Similar expressions and functions for distaste can
be observed in human infants. However, by the age
of 5 years or so, humans show disgust responses to
many potential foods that neither taste innately bad nor
have been associated with illness. Feces is a universal
disgust, acquired in the first 5 years of life, along with
disgust responses to other body products, rotted foods,
and many types of animals (such as worms and insects,
depending on the culture). Almost all foods that produce
a disgust response are of animal origin. From
about age 5 on, the human disgust response shows a
uniquely human feature: contamination sensitivity. If a
disgusting entity (say, a cockroach) touches an otherwise
edible food, it renders that food inedible. This is
not true of distasteful substances (such as a bitter food)
for humans, and no animal (or human infant) has been
shown to show the contamination response. Some
believe that true disgust is a distinctly human response
that uses the same expressive system as the distaste
response seen in human infants and nonhuman animals
but is a response not to the sensory properties (e.g., bitterness)
of a food but rather to its nature or origin.
People find worms disgusting because of what they are
and not because of what they taste like (most people
don’t even know what they taste like).
Some researchers view basic disgust in humans as
Angyal described it, a form of oral rejection based on
the nature of a particular food, with animal foods
accounting almost entirely for disgusting foods. The
distaste system of animals has been appropriated for
expression of a related but more conceptual form of
food rejection, which is called core disgust.

256———Disgust
But many things are disgusting to humans besides
potential foods and body products. One category of
disgust elicitors includes things like dead bodies,
deformed or gored bodies, sexual activities between
inappropriate partners (such as humans with animals),
and filthiness (poor hygiene). This group of disgust
elicitors can be described as reminders of humans’ animal
nature; animals die, have disgusting substances
inside them, are perceived as filthy, and engage in what
people would call inappropriate sex (e.g., with other
animals). All of these elicitors, along with those related
to eating, are reminders of our animal nature. People,
cross-culturally, tend to be uncomfortable with the idea
that humans are just animals and are particularly upset
with one feature of animalness: mortality. The extension
of the disgust response to exposure of the animal
features of humans seems to be a way for humans to
pull away from reminders of their animal nature and
their mortality. Notably, the classic odor of disgust is the
odor of decay, which is, of course, the odor of death.
There are many other disgust elicitors besides foods,
body products, and other animal nature reminders. One
major class is other people. Contact with other people a
person doesn’t like, whether because of personal experience
with them or their membership in groups a
person doesn’t like, tends to elicit disgust. Disgust
responses are common to wearing the clothing of disliked
people, sharing food with them, and so forth.
Finally, people find certain types of moral offenses disgusting,
so that, in all cultures, some of the elicitors of
disgust have to do with immorality. One might say that
child abuse is disgusting, for example, and it has been
found that very few people feel comfortable even wearing
a sweater that had been worn by Adolf Hitler.
Notice that this is an example of contamination; by
contacting Hitler, the sweater took on negative Hitler
properties, just as if it had been contacted by a cockroach.
This cannot simply be a fear of illness or infection,
as might be the case for contaminated and rotten
meat. Hitler is no more likely to convey illness than
anyone else. Furthermore, research has shown that a
heat-sterilized cockroach, which is perfectly safe, is
almost as disgusting as the usual, less clean creature.
So, although disgust and contamination may have originated
as a way to avoid infection, in its full-blown cultural
form, it seems to have a life of its own.
Variations
This progressive extension from potentially contaminated
food to moral offenses can be described as a
shift from disgust as a response to protect the body to
disgust as a response to protect the soul, from “get this
out of my mouth” to “get this out of me.” It seems that
cultures have discovered that they can easily enforce
rejection of certain entities or activities by making
them disgusting. In this sense, disgust can be thought
of as the emotion of civilization; to be civilized is to
show disgust toward a wide class of objects and activities.
The evolution of disgust from food rejection is
beautifully described by Leon Kass in his book The
Hungry Soul, and the greater of expansion of disgust
into the moral world is very effectively described by
William Miller in The Anatomy of Disgust.
Disgust, as described here, is not present in infants
and probably originates in development in the process
of toilet training. This universally creates the first
offensive substance: feces. Within culture, individuals
vary greatly in disgust sensitivity: On the low sensitive
end, some Americans don’t mind eating insects;
on the very sensitive end, some people are disgusted
by sharing food even with close friends and will not
touch the door knob of a public restroom door. It is not
known what causes this variation.
While disgust is a universal emotion, and feces are
a universal disgust, there is a great deal of cultural
variation. Americans tend to find somewhat decayed
meat disgusting but enjoy rotted milk (cheese), Inuits
enjoy fairly rotten meat, Chinese enjoy rotted soy
beans (soy sauce) and eggs but find milk and cheese
disgusting, and so on. Japanese may be more sensitive
than Americans to the interpersonal disgust of contact
with strangers (hence not liking used clothing or handling
money), whereas they seem less sensitive to
contact within their close-knit group, as in sharing
their family bath. In India, disgust plays a major social
role in enforcing avoidance of lower castes; uppercaste
individuals are disgusted by food prepared by
individuals of lower castes. In general, in Hindu India,
disgust seems to be a more moral/interpersonal, and
a less animal–nature avoidance, emotion than it is in
the United States.
Disgust has recently come to the attention of neuroscientists,
who have discovered that people with
certain kinds of brain damage (e.g., Huntington’s disease)
show deficits in recognizing disgust. A few brain
areas have now been associated with disgust, such that
damage to these areas leads to poor disgust recognition
and probably low disgust sensitivity.
A final turn in this fascinating cultural history is
that disgust is often funny. Laughter is a common
response to encounters with disgusting objects or

situations—but only when they are at least moderately
distant. Disgust is a major component of jokes and
other forms of humor, and in this sense, the experience
of mild disgust is often sought by individuals.
Aren’t humans complex? They find a negative emotion
pleasant in certain situations. But then humans
also find sadness (as in sad movies) and fear (on roller
coasters) pleasant as well. Humans seem to like to
experience negative emotions when they are not really
threatened.
See also Emotion; Facial Expression of Emotion
Further Readings
Paul Rozin
Angyal, A. (1941). Disgust and related aversions. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, 36, 393–412.
Darwin, C. R. (1965). The expression of emotions in man and
animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original
work published 1872)
Haidt, J., McCauley, C. R., & Rozin, P. (1994). Individual
differences in sensitivity to disgust: A scale sampling
seven domains of disgust elicitors. Personality and
Individual Differences, 16, 701–713.
Kass, L. (1994). The hungry soul. New York: Free Press.
Miller, W. I. (1997). The anatomy of disgust. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Rozin, P., & Fallon, A. E. (1987). A perspective on disgust.
Psychological Review, 94, 23–41.
Rozin, P., Haidt, J., & McCauley, C. R. (2000). Disgust.
In M. Lewis & J. Haviland (Eds.), Handbook of emotions
(2nd ed., pp. 637–653). New York: Guilford Press.
DISPLACED AGGRESSION
Definition
Direct aggression follows the tit-for-tat rule that governs
most social interaction: A provocation or frustration
elicits verbally or physically aggressive behavior
that is directed toward the source of that provocation
or frustration, typically matching or slightly exceeding
its intensity. In displaced aggression, an aggressive
behavior is directed at a person or other target
(e.g., a pet) that is not the source of the aggressionarousing
provocation or frustration. Displaced aggression
occurs when it is impossible or unwise to respond
aggressively toward the source of the provocation or
frustration.
Displaced Aggression———257
History and Modern Usage
Sigmund Freud discussed displaced aggression. For
example, if a man receives strong criticism from his
boss, it would be unwise to retaliate by verbally or
physically assaulting him. Instead, at a later time, he
might insult his own wife or kick his dog. Each of
these behaviors can be viewed as a displacement of the
aggressive behavior that the man would have preferred
to direct at the original source of the provocation—his
boss.
In direct aggression, little time usually elapses
between the provocation and the aggressive response
to it. But in displaced aggression, the time between
the provocation and the aggressive response can range
from minutes to hours or days. After a provocation or
frustration, physiological measures (e.g., heart rate)
typically show increased arousal. This increase ordinarily
lasts about 5 or 10 minutes but can persist for
about 20 minutes. It may or may not contribute to displaced
aggression. Rumination (persistent thought)
about the provoking event, however, allows displaced
aggression to occur long after the physiological
arousal has subsided.
Triggered Displaced Aggression
Probably more common than displaced aggression is
triggered displaced aggression. Instead of being totally
innocent, the target of triggered displaced aggression
provides a minor irritation that is seen by the aggressor
as justifying his or her displaced aggression. As in
displaced aggression, the magnitude of the aggressive
act clearly violates the tit-for-tat matching rule.
The Relation Between
Triggered Displaced Aggression
and Excitation Transfer
Although the concept excitation transfer seems similar
to triggered displaced aggression, they differ. In
excitation transfer, arousal from another source (e.g.,
loud noise, exercise, or sexual stimulation) combines
with the arousal from a provocation or frustration and
produces a stronger retaliation than would have been
the case without that other source of arousal. Thus, the
increased arousal might be viewed as similar to a trigger.
For excitation transfer to occur, however, the
other source of arousal must have happened within
about 5 minutes of the provocation. Moreover, one
must be unaware that the other arousal still persists.

258———Distinctiveness, in Attribution
If aware, it will instead be properly attributed to its
source (e.g., the exercise) and thus not increase the
aggressive retaliatory response to a provocation. In
triggered displaced aggression, however, one is fully
aware of both the initial provocation or frustration and
the trigger. Other differences are that excitation transfer
consists of direct aggression toward the provocateur
and that, unlike excitation transfer, triggered
displaced aggression can occur with intervals between
a provocation and trigger that well exceed the 5- or
7-minute maximum for excitation transfer.
Scapegoating
When displaced aggression is directed at persons
who belong to an outgroup, it is called scapegoating.
Typically, members of a disliked group are made the
target of scapegoating.
Norman Miller
Vicki Pollock
See also Aggression; Excitation-Transfer Theory; Scapegoat
Theory
Further Readings
Bushman, B. J., Bonacci, A. M., Pedersen, W. C., Vasquez, E. A.,
& Miller, N. (2005). Chewing on it can chew you up:
Effects of rumination on triggered displaced aggression.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88, 969–983.
Denson, T., Pedersen, W. C., & Miller, N. (2006). The
Displaced Aggression questionnaire. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 90(6), 1032–1051.
Miller, N., Pedersen, W. C., Earleywine, M., & Pollock, V. E.
(2003). A theoretical model of triggered displaced
aggression. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
7, 75–97.
DISTINCTIVENESS, IN ATTRIBUTION
Definition
Distinctiveness, in attribution, refers to the extent to
which a specific action engaged in by an individual is
unusual or uncommon for that particular individual.
The judgment of whether an action is high in distinctiveness,
that is, uncommon for the individual who
engaged in it, or low in distinctiveness, common for that
individual, depends on knowledge of that individual’s
past behavior. Such information is referred to as
distinctiveness information.
Background
The concept of distinctiveness developed out of attribution
theory, which was originated by Fritz Heider.
Heider began by noting that to understand people, one
needs to understand how they view their own social
world—their naive psychology. Heider proposed that
people understand their social worlds largely in terms
of cause and effect. When observing a given action,
the individual typically decides the action was caused
either by an attribute of the individual(i.e., an internal
attribution) or by an aspect of the individual’s situation
(i.e., an external attribution). Heider further argued
that the attribution for the action would depend on the
observer’s knowledge of both the individual and the
situation.
Distinctiveness and Attribution
In 1967, Harold Kelley formalized some of Heider’s
ideas into a model of attribution which labeled the different
judgments people use to infer causal attributions
for another individual’s behavior. He proposed
that knowledge of the individual’s past actions, that is,
distinctiveness information, would affect the likelihood
of making an internal attribution. If this information
suggests that the individual has engaged in
similar behavior in the past in a variety of situations,
the behavior would be judged low in distinctiveness,
and an internal attribution, to some aspect of the individual,
would be more likely. In contrast, if the information
suggests the individual has rarely engaged in
similar behavior in other situations, the behavior
would be judged high in distinctiveness, and an internal
attribution would be less likely.
Consider a hypothetical example. If John gets into
a fight, information suggesting that John has often got
into fights likely would lead to an internal attribution
to his aggressive nature. Alternatively, information
suggesting that John had never previously fought
would be unlikely to lead to an internal attribution.
The Importance of Distinctiveness
As this example suggests, and research generally confirms,
distinctiveness plays a significant role in attributions,
and attributions affect the impressions people
form of others. This is important not only in daily

social life but in other domains of life, such as legal
settings, as well. In an assault case, if jurors decide
that the defendant’s action was a result of his violent
nature, a guilty verdict would be likely. In contrast,
if they decide that the action was caused not by the
defendant’s violent nature, but rather by severe provocation
from the victim (an external attribution), a not
guilty verdict would be likely. United States courts are
so aware of the role of distinctiveness information that
judges are very careful in determining whether information
concerning the defendant’s past behavior is
admissible in court.
Jeff Greenberg
See also Attribution Theory; Kelley’s Covariation Model
Further Readings
Kelley, H. H. (1973). Processes of causal attribution.
American Psychologist, 28, 107–128.
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE
Definition
Distributive justice refers to the perceived fairness of
one’s outcomes. When a reward is allocated or a decision
is made, people often make a judgment whether
or not the outcome was fair. This judgment is referred
to as a distributive justice judgment because it has traditionally
been an assessment of how resources are
distributed, or allocated, to individuals. Scholars have
sought to understand both how these judgments are
made and, once formed, what the consequences of
such judgments are. Distributive justice has received
considerable interest in a variety of different academic
disciplines including psychology, philosophy, business,
and law.
Theoretical History and Background
The notion of justice is a topic that has interested
scholars, philosophers, and psychologists for a long
time. Great thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and
Socrates were some of the first to ponder this question
of justice. Within the social sciences, the past halfcentury
has witnessed considerable attempts to better
understand justice. While philosophers speak of
Distributive Justice———259
justice as an objective truth about what is fair, scholars
in the social sciences seek to understand what individuals
perceive to be fair. Thus, when psychologists
speak of distributive justice, they are concerned with
what individuals perceive to be fair as opposed to a
logic-based, philosophical argument for whether
something is indeed fair or not.
The initial study of distributive justice within psychology
began in the late 1940s. The pioneering
research involved studying members of the U.S. army
during World War II. In examining survey data collected
from the troops, an interesting finding emerged.
Soldiers’ attitudes were influenced more not by objective
outcomes received but rather by the relative level
of their outcomes compared to others in their unit.
Indeed, members of Air Corps had less favorable perceptions
about promotion opportunities compared to
other units’ members despite the fact that they had a
much higher chance of being promoted than did members
of those other units. After examining the results
more closely, it became clear that Air Corps individuals
compared themselves to other members of their
unit as opposed to individuals in other units with
lower promotion rates. Thus, relative deprivation theory
was born, the notion that outcomes are not satisfying
or unsatisfying in and of themselves but rather
the comparison of one’s own outcomes to others’ outcomes
is what matters most.
In the early 1960s, some scholars moved forward
with the importance of comparing one’s own
treatment to that of others’ treatment in determining
whether outcomes are distributed fairly. A perspective
emerged that suggested that, over time, individuals
develop expectations in their relationships with others.
These expectations are based on the idea that an
individual’s costs should be proportional to their
rewards. People are keenly aware of whether they are
putting more into a relationship then they are getting
out of it. When individuals feel as if they put more
into an exchange relationship than they get out of it,
they tend to have negative reactions. A key point is
that not all people will perceived distributive (in)justice
the same way, because people have different referents
(other people individuals compare themselves
to) for determining whether there is an imbalance in
the relationship.
Building on this idea of expectations in exchange
relationships, other scholars further delineated between
types of exchanges. For example, an exchange can
be economic, whereby a tangible item of interest is
exchanged, like an employee who works for a salary;

260———Distributive Justice
or an exchange can be social, such that it is more subjective,
like how one should repay a friend that does
one a favor. Thus, this perspective suggests that distributive
(in)justice can occur whether economic or
social exchanges are violated in some way. And, in
addition to looking to other people and other relationships
to determine if an injustice occurred, one is
likely to consider societal norms with regard to how
people should be treated. For example, there is a norm
that if you help someone in need, they should reciprocate
in some way by acknowledging your help and
helping you when you are in need.
In the mid-1960s, the most detailed theory developed
to explain how people determine whether the outcomes
they receive are fair was introduced. Referred
to as equity theory, this theory builds on much of the
prior work on relative deprivation and expectations
in exchange relationships. Specifically, equity theory
posits that individuals in exchange relationships
develop a ratio in their head of their perceived outcomes
to their perceived inputs. They then compare
that ratio to their perceptions of someone else’s ratio or
to the ratio they have experienced in similar situations
in the past. When an individual’s output-to-input ratio
is lower than that of a referent, he or she is likely to
perceive distributive injustice. Importantly, this theory
goes on to explain what people tend to do when they
feel their ratio is less than it should be, given their
comparison base. Generally, people in “inequitable”
situations will try to restore balance in one of three
ways: by (1) altering one’s own outputs or inputs,
(2) altering a referent’s outputs or inputs, or (3) removing
oneself from the relationship.
In the 1970s, some scholars began to critique prior
work on distributive justice. One of the primary concerns
was that by describing distributive justice and
equity synonymously, it did not allow for any other
means to determine whether an outcome was fair.
Scholars questioned whether weighing output–input
ratios was the only way people could determine distributive
(in)justice. A result of this inquiry was the
identification of other principles, or rules, used to
govern distributive justice. Indeed, some individuals
are guided more by a principle of equality, the notion
that regardless of one’s input, everyone should receive
the same outcomes. For example, if individuals are on
a team, they should be given equal credit for success
as opposed to just praising the most productive members.
In addition, some individuals adhere to the principle
of needs, the notion that regardless of input,
those in need should get more favorable outcomes.
For example, our taxation system in the United States
is designed such that wealthier individuals pay more
and poorer individuals are supposed to reap more of
the benefits of social services. Other principles were
introduced over the years, but the principles of equity,
equality, and needs have remained. Thus, this perspective
on distributive justice highlights other principles
people use to determine whether an outcome
is fair.
To summarize, the initial work on distributive
justice began over a half-century ago. The preliminary
work focused on relative deprivation, or comparing
one’s own outcomes to the outcomes of a referent
other. The next set of work concerned economic and
social exchanges in relationships and expectations for
outcomes one should receive. The most comprehensive
and well-known theory about distributive justice,
equity theory, was introduced in the 1960s and provided
a specific formula for determining distributive
justice based on an output–input ratio and highlighted
what people do if they perceive inequity. Finally, in
the 1970s, the notion was introduced that in addition
to equity, other principles are often used by people to
determine distributive justice, such as equality (providing
the same outcomes to everyone) and needs
(providing more favorable outcomes to those that are
most in need).
Today, the study of distributive justice is alive and
well. In general, interest has shifted more toward
the procedures used to determine one’s outcomes
(referred to as procedural justice) and the fairness of
interpersonal treatment (referred to as interactional
justice). Despite this shift in interest, many scholars continue
to study distributive justice. And, while equity is
still the dominant paradigm for examining distributive
justice, most scholars acknowledge that other principles
such as equality and needs are also useful ways to
understand distributive justice.
Research Findings
In addition to all of the theoretical work that has
sought to explain what distributive justice entails and
how people form perceptions of distributive (in)justice,
there also has been a considerable amount of
research on how people react once they have formed
distributive justice judgments. For example, when
individuals have favorable distributive justice perceptions,
they are also likely to have more positive
emotions and more favorable attitudes and behaviors
directed toward the individual or organization that has

provided the outcomes. Specifically, outcomes of
distributive justice include the following: improved
affect, satisfaction, commitment, evaluations of others,
trust, willingness to help others, and performance.
Thus, this large body of research demonstrates that
perceptions of distributive justice are associated with
a variety of important outcomes.
See also Equity Theory; Procedural Justice
Further Readings
David M. Mayer
Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In
L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 267–299). New York: Academic
Press.
Colquitt, J. A., Greenberg, J., & Zapata-Phelan, C. P. (2005).
What is organizational justice? In. J. Greenberg &
J. A. Colquitt (Eds.), Handbook of organizational justice
(pp. 3–56). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Deutsch, M. (1975). Equity, equality, and need: What
determines which value will be used as a basis of
distributive justice? Journal of Social Issues, 31, 137–149.
Leventhal, G. S. (1980). What should be done with equity
theory? In K. J. Gergen, M. S. Greenberg, & R. H. Willis
(Eds.), Social exchange: Advances in theory and research
(pp. 27–55). New York: Plenum.
Leventhal, G. S., Karuza, J., & Fry, W. R. (1980). Beyond
fairness: A theory of allocation preferences. In G. Mikula
(Ed.), Justice and social interaction (pp. 167–218).
New York: Plenum.
DOMINANCE, EVOLUTIONARY
Definition
Virtually all human groups are characterized by some
sort of hierarchy, in which some individuals enjoy
relatively more respect and power than others do.
Dominance refers to a person’s rank or level in their
group hierarchy. The term dominance is also used to
refer to an individual’s potential for asserting power
and authority over more submissive members of his or
her group (i.e., those with less dominance).
The concept of dominance should be differentiated
from prestige or esteem. Although dominance and
prestige often go hand in hand, it is possible to have
prestige without power (e.g., a figurehead monarch
Dominance, Evolutionary———261
who has no real authority), just as it is possible to have
power without prestige (e.g., a disreputable dictator
who, although able to assert authority over others, is
neither liked nor respected by others).
Evolutionary Origins
Dominance in humans owes its importance, in part, to
a long history of biological evolution. Dominance regulates
the behavior of many species, from crickets and
crayfish to baboons and bonobo chimpanzees. The
term pecking order, for example, comes from the fact
that hens commonly fight with one another (using
their beaks to peck) to establish dominance over one
another. Over time, direct conflict gives way to a more
peaceful arrangement in which some hens are dominant
over others. Indeed, in humans and other species,
while immediate dominance competitions can be very
turbulent, with losing individuals sometimes suffering
injury or even death, most of the time members of a
group settle into a relatively stable hierarchical structure.
Relatively stable dominance hierarchies sometimes
emerge spontaneously, even among strangers,
with individuals settling into their relative positions
extremely quickly (some estimates say within just a
few minutes of interacting).
Dominance Striving
Dominance is a key characteristic in the social organization
of primates. Chimpanzees, for example, are
highly dominance oriented and will battle one another
for places atop the hierarchy. Dominant chimps tend
to puff themselves up, often strutting around as a way
of asserting their power over others, while chimps
lower in the hierarchy often grovel at their feet, exhibiting
submissive gestures and persuading dominant
chimps not to attack.
In many ways, humans are not all that different
from chimpanzees. Many humans are highly motivated
to achieve positions of dominance, and dominant
people assert their power over others in myriad
ways, from standing tall, speaking loudly, and looking
people in the eye to delegating unwanted responsibilities
to subordinate members of the group.
Why are humans—like members of other species—
so interested in attaining dominance? Throughout
evolutionary history, humans that achieved dominance
over their peers were rewarded with access to a bounty
of social and material resources that helped them
better survive and reproduce. Relatively dominant

262———Door-in-the-Face Technique
individuals, for example, generally had more and
better food, as well as protection from threats posed
by other groups. Thus, human ancestors who were
inclined to strive for dominance often reaped important
benefits and were therefore able to more effectively
pass their genes on to subsequent generations.
As a result, humans today exhibit a strong, biologically
based tendency to seek positions of high social
dominance.
Sex Differences
Men tend to be more interested in achieving dominance
than are women. Evolutionary psychologists
attribute this to differences in the reproductive challenges
faced by men and women throughout evolutionary
history. Whereas human females have had
almost invariably the opportunity to mate and have
children, opportunities for men to reproduce have
been much more variable, with some men mating
often with many different partners and other men not
having the chance to mate at all. As a result, men competed
with one another to achieve dominance, for
dominant men were better able to attain mates.
Throughout evolutionary history, women have been
attracted to dominant men because they have greater
access to resources, which help provide for the welfare
of offspring. Dominant males, in turn, tend to experience
relatively free access to mating partnerships.
Kings, maharajas, and noblemen throughout history,
for example, have routinely mated with dozens and
even hundreds of women. Thus, one of the reasons
men are so interested in attaining high levels of social
dominance is that, throughout evolutionary history,
dominance has increased their opportunities to mate
and, in turn, enhanced their reproductive success.
Although men are relatively more interested in
achieving dominance than are women, there are certainly
many cases in which women, too, achieve positions
of dominance. There is evidence, however, that
dominant women sometimes express their dominance
in different ways than men do. Whereas men are relatively
more inclined to express dominance through
acts of personal ascension (e.g., by directly asserting
authority over a subordinate), women are somewhat
more inclined to express their dominance in prosocial
ways. Dominant women, for example, often use their
authority to enhance relationships among group members
and to facilitate the functioning and well-being of
the group as a whole.
Implications
From relationships between parents and children to
interactions between managers and employees, everyone
at times is affected by their level of relative social
dominance. Dominance is a universal regulator of
human social interactions. Virtually every human society
has rules governing the manner in which dominance
hierarchies are to be arranged and expressed.
Moreover, a person’s level of dominance also has
important psychological implications. For example,
people with high levels of social dominance tend to be
happier, more confident and assertive, and tend to
attract the attention of those around them.
Jon K. Maner
Michael Baker
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Leadership; Power
Further Readings
Barkow, J. (1989). Darwin, sex, and status: Biological
approaches to mind and culture. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
De Waal, F. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Sex and power
among apes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
DOOR-IN-THE-FACE TECHNIQUE
Definition
The door-in-the-face is an influence technique based
on the following idea: If you want to make a request
of someone but you’re worried that they might say no,
get them to say no to a larger request first. Although
this approach may seem odd, psychologists have identified
two reasons why a “no” in response to a large
request often leads to a “yes” in response to a subsequent
smaller request.
The first reason is the powerful rule of reciprocity.
The rule of reciprocity states that if someone does
something for us, we feel obligated to do something
for him or her in return. If a friend sends us a holiday
card, we feel obligated to send them a holiday card in
return. To see how the door-in-the-face technique uses
the rule of reciprocity, imagine that a friend asks
to borrow $100, but we say no. The friend then says,
“I understand that $100 is a lot of money. Could you

lend me $25 instead?” The friend has done something
for us (he was asking for $100; now he’s asking for
only $25), and we feel obligated to do something for
him in return (we said “no” to his request for $100;
now we say “yes” to his request for $25).
This example also shows the second reason why
the door-in-the-face technique works. In contrast to
$100, $25 doesn’t seem like much money at all. Thus,
the door-in-the-face does two things: It invokes the
rule of reciprocity (when the requestor moves from a
large request to a smaller request, we feel a reciprocal
obligation to move from “no” to “yes”), and it creates
a contrast effect (the size of the large request makes
the smaller request seem even smaller in comparison).
Evidence
In one of the first scientific demonstrations of the doorin-the-face
technique, Robert B. Cialdini and his colleagues
had a researcher approach students on campus
and ask them to spend a day chaperoning juvenile
delinquents on a trip to the zoo. Only 13% agreed. The
researcher made the same request to another set of
students, but with these students, the researcher used
the door-in-the-face technique. The researcher first
asked these students if they would be willing to act as
counselors for juvenile delinquents for 2 hours a week
for 2 years. When the students said “no,” the researcher
asked if, instead, they would chaperone the juvenile
delinquents to the zoo for a day. This time, 50% agreed.
Limitations and Implications
The door-in-the-face technique does have its limits. If
the first request seems unreasonably large, then the
technique can backfire. However, as the results of
Cialdini and colleagues’ experiment show, requests
can get pretty big before they seem unreasonable.
(Two years of volunteer work with juvenile delinquents
is a pretty big request.)
So how do we feel when we’ve been hit by the
door-in-the-face technique? It turns out that we actually
feel better about the transaction than if the doorin-the-face
had not been used. It’s satisfying to win a
concession from a negotiating opponent. Because the
door-in-the-face begins with a concession on the part
of the requestor, we feel greater satisfaction with the
outcome. And because the door-in-the-face ends with
our agreement with the concession, we feel greater
responsibility for the outcome. Indeed, researchers
have found that the door-in-the-face increases not
only the number of people who say “yes” but also
the number of people who follow through with their
agreement and who volunteer for the same thing in the
future.
Brad J. Sagarin
See also Contrast Effects; Influence; Reciprocity Norm
Further Readings
Downward Social Comparison———263
Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Cialdini, R. B., Vincent, J. E., Lewis, S. K., Catalan, J.,
Wheeler, D., & Darby, B. L. (1975). Reciprocal
concessions procedure for inducing compliance: The
door-in-the-face technique. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 31, 206–215.
DOWNWARD COMPARISON
See DOWNWARD SOCIAL COMPARISON
DOWNWARD SOCIAL COMPARISON
Definition
Social comparison involves thinking about one or
more other people in relation to the self. Downward
social comparison involves making comparisons with
others who are inferior to, or less fortunate than,
oneself in some way.
History and Background
Leon Festinger’s theory of social comparison proposed
that because people seek accurate self-evaluations,
they compare themselves with other people who are
similar to themselves. People also make upward social
comparisons with others who are superior, in hopes of
learning how to improve. Early researchers discovered,
however, that people are not always unbiased selfevaluators.
Sometimes people wish to self-enhance—
to feel better about themselves—which may lead them
to compare downward. In a highly influential article

264———Downward Social Comparison
in 1981, Thomas Wills proposed that when individuals
are low in subjective well-being, they often make
downward social comparisons in an attempt to feel
better. They may make downward social comparisons
in several ways, including active derogation or simply
passively taking advantage of opportunities to compare
with people who are worse off. Wills also proposed that
downward comparisons are made especially frequently
by people who are depressed or low in self-esteem,
because of their greater need for self-enhancement. To
support his thesis, Wills reviewed an abundance of
evidence on topics ranging from aggression and social
prejudice to humor.
Wills’s article inspired considerable research on
downward social comparisons. Indeed, his article may
be credited with rekindling social psychology’s interest
in social comparison more generally.
Research on the Selection
and Effects of Downward
Social Comparisons
Much of that research has been consistent with Wills’s
original propositions. Laboratory experiments have
shown that people who are threatened in some way
make downward social comparisons—or at least,
fewer upward social comparisons. For example, in
one study, participants who had failed a test of social
sensitivity were more likely than those who had succeeded
to choose to look at the scores of others when
they expected those scores to be worse than their own.
Field studies have found similar evidence. For
instance, in an interview study of breast cancer
patients, the vast majority spontaneously brought up
ways in which they were superior to, or more advantaged
than, other people with cancer. They were much
less likely to describe upward social comparisons.
Other populations that have been shown to engage
in downward social comparison include mentally disabled
adolescents, victims of fire, arthritis patients,
and mothers of premature infants.
Considerable research also has examined the effects
of downward social comparisons. They have been
shown to increase positive affect, decrease negative
affect, heighten optimism about the future, increase
relationship satisfaction, and enhance self-esteem.
These benefits seem to be especially pronounced for
people who are low in self-esteem and who are strongly
disposed to make social comparisons.
Challenges to Downward
Social Comparison Theory
As is true of any theory that has inspired considerable
research, evidence has emerged that challenges
Wills’s theory or that at least identifies qualifications
to it. First, it has become clear that upward social comparisons
can benefit people under threat. Although traditionally
it has been assumed that comparisons with
superior others make people feel worse, upward social
comparisons can be self-enhancing and motivating.
For example, ex-smokers may seek contact with successful
ex-smokers to learn about their strategies or to
be inspired by their examples. People under threat
also may avoid social comparisons altogether. Cancer
patients sometimes schedule their oncologist appointments
first thing in the morning to avoid seeing others
whose conditions are worse.
Evidence that people under threat avoid social
comparisons or make upward social comparisons does
not contradict downward social comparison theory; it
merely suggests that those people have other comparison
strategies available to them. More challenging to
the theory is evidence that downward social comparisons
sometimes have deleterious effects. Specifically,
people may worry that they will suffer the same fate
as the downward target. Successful dieters, for example,
may not wish to hear about others who have gained
back all the weight they lost. People also may refrain
from making downward social comparisons for fear
of appearing boastful or as lacking in empathy.
Two important determinants of comparison effects
appear to be one’s level of (1) perceived control and
(2) identification with the comparison target. When
people perceive little control over the comparison
dimension, such as whether their illness will worsen,
they may fear comparisons with others who are worse
off. Similarly, when people identify with the downward
target, they may worry that they will suffer a
similar fate. In contrast, when they believe that they
do have control over the comparison dimension or feel
dissimilar to the target, they are likely to feel better
after making downward social comparisons.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to downward social
comparison theory comes from a study that investigated
social comparisons made by university students
in their everyday lives. Respondents were more likely
to report downward social comparisons when they
felt happy rather than unhappy. To explain this result,
the researchers drew upon the large literature on

mood-congruent cognition. They proposed that social
comparisons may operate in a mood-congruent fashion:
When people are happy, they tend to focus on
favorable thoughts about themselves and ways in
which they are superior to other people, which may
promote downward social comparisons. In contrast,
when people are sad or under threat, they may focus
on unfavorable information about themselves and on
ways that other people are better off, which may promote
upward social comparisons.
One way to reconcile these results with downward
social comparison theory may be that two forces drive
social comparisons under threat: both mood-congruent
priming and the motivated processes proposed by Wills.
That is, people may be prone to make upward social
comparisons when they are sad, because their moods
prime them to have unfavorable thoughts about themselves
and about their inferiority to others. These
mood-congruent effects may be especially likely to
drive the comparisons that people make unintentionally.
At the same time, people may combat their bad
feelings by deliberately seeking downward social
comparisons. The social comparisons they are motivated
to make, then, may be downward rather than
upward. One study of comparisons in daily life offered
support for these predictions.
Joanne V. Wood
Danielle Gaucher
Karen Choi
See also Control; Coping; Self-Enhancement; Social
Comparison
Further Readings
Suls, J., & Wheeler, L. (Eds.). (2000). Handbook of
social comparison: Theory and research. New York:
Plenum.
Taylor, S. E., & Lobel, M. (1989). Social comparison activity
under threat: Downward evaluation and upward contacts.
Psychological Review, 96, 569–575.
Wheeler, L., & Miyake, K. (1992). Social comparison in
everyday life. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 62, 760–773.
Wood, J. V., Michela, J. L., & Giordano, C. (2000).
Downward comparison in everyday life: Reconciling
self-enhancement models with the mood-cognition
priming model. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 79, 563–579.
Wood, J. V., & VanderZee, K. I. (1997). Social comparisons
among cancer patients: Under what conditions are
comparisons upward and downward? In B. P. Buunk &
F. X. Gibbons (Eds.), Health, coping, and well-being:
Perspectives from social comparison theory
(pp. 299–328). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
DRIVE THEORY
Definition
Drive refers to increased arousal and internal motivation
to reach a particular goal. Psychologists differentiate
between primary and secondary drives. Primary
drives are directly related to survival and include
the need for food, water, and oxygen. Secondary or
acquired drives are those that are culturally determined
or learned, such as the drive to obtain money,
intimacy, or social approval. Drive theory holds that
these drives motivate people to reduce desires by
choosing responses that will most effectively do so.
For instance, when a person feels hunger, he or she is
motivated to reduce that drive by eating; when there is
a task at hand, the person is motivated to complete it.
Background
Drive Theory———265
Clark L. Hull is the most prominent figure from whom
this comprehensive drive theory of learning and motivation
was postulated. The theory itself was founded
on very straightforward studies of rat behavior done
by Hull’s students, Charles T. Perin and Stanley B.
Williams. The rats were trained to run down a straight
alley way to a food reward. Thereafter, two groups of
rats were deprived of food, one group for 3 hours and
the other for 22. Hull proposed that the rats that were
without food the longest would have more motivation,
thus a higher level of drive to obtain the food reward
at the end of the maze. Furthermore, he hypothesized
that the more times an animal was rewarded for running
down the alley, the more likely the rat was to
develop the habit of running. As expected, Hull and
his students found that length of deprivation and number
of times rewarded resulted in a faster running
speed toward the reward. His conclusion was that
drive and habit equally contribute to performance of
whichever behavior is instrumental in drive reduction.

266———Drive Theory
Application to Social Psychology
When a person is hungry or thirsty, he or she feels tension
and is motivated to reduce this state of discomfort
by eating or drinking. A state of tension can also occur
when a person is watched by other people or simultaneously
holds psychologically inconsistent beliefs
or thoughts. The theory of cognitive dissonance, proposed
by social psychologist Leon Festinger, suggests
that when a person is faced with two beliefs or
thoughts that are contradictory, he or she feels psychological
tension. This psychological tension is a
negative drive state that is similar to hunger or thirst.
Once a person feels cognitive dissonance, he or she is
motivated to reduce this psychological tension, modifying
beliefs or thoughts to match one another.
An interesting application of drive theory to social
psychology is found in Robert Zajonc’s explanation of
the social facilitation effect, which suggests that when
there is social presence, people tend to perform simple
tasks better and complex tasks worse (social inhibition)
than they would if they were alone. The basis
for social facilitation comes from social psychologist
Norman Triplett, who observed that bicyclists rode
faster when competing against each other directly
than in individual time trials. Zajonc reasoned that this
phenomenon is a function of humans’ perceived difficulty
of the task and their dominant responses: those
that are most likely given the skills humans have.
When drives are activated, people are likely to rely on
their easily accessible dominant response, or as Hull
would suggest, their habits. Therefore, if the task
comes easy to them, their dominant response is to perform
well. However, if the task is perceived as difficult,
the dominant response will likely result in a poor
performance. For instance, imagine a ballet dancer
who was ill-practiced and often made several errors
during her routine. According to drive theory, when in
the presence of others at her recital, she will display
her dominant response, which is to make mistakes
even more so than when alone. However, if she spent
a substantial amount of time polishing her performance,
drive theory would suggest that she may have
the best performance of her dancing career (which she
might never match in solitude).
Behavioral and social psychological perspectives,
although addressing different phenomena, share an
important similarity. Humans experience arousal
(drive) to achieve a particular goal; habits (or dominant
responses) dictate the means for reaching that
goal. With enough practice, the perceived difficulty of
a task will decrease, and people are likely to perform
better.
How can the simple presence of other people in our
environment affect our behavior? We can never be
sure how others will react to us. Will they evaluate,
admire, or judge us? From an evolutionary standpoint,
because we do not know how people will respond to
us, it is advantageous for individuals to be aroused in
the presence of others. Our instinctive drive to notice
and react to other social beings provides the foundation
of Zajonc’s drive theory. For instance, imagine
walking down the street late at night when you see a
dark shadow approaching you. You will likely prepare
yourself for this unexpected encounter. Your heart rate
will increase, you might run, or you may even choose
to socialize. Nonetheless, Zajonc maintains that your
impulse is to become socially aware of those in your
proximity whose intentions are unknowable.
What does another’s presence make people feel?
One theory suggested by social psychologist Nickolas
B. Cottrell includes an evaluation apprehension model.
This model suggests that humans experience arousal in
the form of anxiety because of the fear of being evaluated
or judged by those around them. In several experiments,
it was found that the drive to present oneself as
capable to avoid negative evaluation was nonexistent
when the audience was blindfolded; thus, they were
inattentive to the task at hand. When the audience was
attentive to the task, however, instinctive drive promoted
better performance.
Implications
Drive theory combines motivation, learning, reinforcement,
and habit formation to explain and predict
human behavior. It describes where drives come from,
what behaviors result from these drives, and how
these behaviors are sustained. Drive theory is also
important in understanding habit formation as a result
of learning and reinforcement. For instance, to alter
bad habits, such as drug use (which can be seen as a
way to reduce the drive for euphoria), an understanding
of how habits are created is essential; drive theory
offers this insight.
In addition, drive theory as an explanation of instinctive
arousal in the presence of others is apparent in
people’s daily lives. Because humans do not exist in
a vacuum, it is imperative that they understand how

others influence them: their performance, their selfconcept,
and the impressions they make on the social
world.
Holly Ketterer
Kyunghee Han
See also Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Social Facilitation
Further Readings
Cottrell, N. B., Wack, D. L., Sekerak, G. J., & Rittle, R. H.
(1968). Social facilitation of dominant responses by the
presence of an audience and the mere presence of others.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 245–250.
Hull, C. L. (1943). Principles of behavior. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Platania, J., & Moran, G. P. (2001). Social facilitation as a
function of mere presence of others. Journal of Social
Psychology, 141, 190–197.
Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149,
269–274.
DUAL ATTITUDES
Definition
Dual attitudes refer to the idea that an individual can
have two different attitudes about something—both an
implicit attitude and an explicit attitude. The implicit
attitude refers to an intuitive response or gut reaction,
whereas the explicit attitude refers to a more deliberate,
thought-out response. Thus, a past love may evoke
both a positive intuitive response (a positive implicit
attitude) and a negative deliberated response (a negative
explicit attitude). When an individual has different
implicit and explicit attitudes toward something,
he or she is said to have dual attitudes.
Context
Debate exists about whether intuitive and deliberated
responses truly represent different attitudes. One
alternative theory is that intuitive and deliberated
responses are part of a single attitude. For example,
a positive intuitive response to a past love could
combine with deliberated thoughts to form a single
negative attitude. Another alternative theory is that
intuitive responses represent true attitudes, whereas
deliberated responses are inauthentic and tainted by
conscious concerns with appearance. For example,
an intuitive positive response to a past love would be
the true attitude, whereas a more negative deliberated
response would be inauthentic, perhaps tainted by
concerns with appearing to be over it. In contrast to
these theories, the view endorsed by dual attitudes
is that intuitive responses are one type of attitude
(implicit attitudes), deliberative responses are another
type of attitude (explicit attitudes), and individuals
may have both implicit and explicit attitudes toward a
single object or idea.
Evidence
The strongest evidence in favor of dual attitudes is
that implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes are related
to different types of behavior. Implicit attitudes appear
to be most strongly related to nonverbal behaviors and
behaviors that are not consciously controlled. Thus,
an individual with a positive implicit attitude toward
a past love would be expected to lean toward, and maintain
eye contact with, that past love during conversation.
In contrast, explicit attitudes appear to be most
strongly related to verbal behaviors and behaviors that
can be consciously controlled. Thus, an individual
with a negative explicit attitude toward a past love
would be expected to complain about and not return
the phone calls of that past love. The fact that some
behaviors can be predicted on the basis of implicit, but
not explicit, attitudes is consistent with the view that
implicit attitudes are indeed distinct from (not part of)
explicit attitudes.
Other evidence consistent with the dual attitudes
perspective is that there is often little relationship
between measures of implicit and explicit attitudes. If
implicit attitudes were actually a component of (or a
pure form of) explicit attitudes, then some relationship
between the two would be expected. Although a
dual attitudes model does not prohibit a relationship
between implicit and explicit attitudes, such a model
does not require a relationship between the two.
Distinctions
Dual Attitudes———267
The clearest distinction between implicit and explicit
attitudes is that the former are effortlessly and unintentionally
activated in the presence of the attitude

268———Dual Process Theories
object. For example, for an individual with a positive
implicit attitude toward candy, passing the candy store
on the drive home should elicit a positive response,
even when the individual is busy driving and is trying
to concentrate on the road. In contrast, explicit attitudes
are only activated with effort and intention.
Thus, implicit attitudes can be ascertained even if a
target person is busy or does not wish to express an
attitude; explicit attitudes can only be ascertained if
the target has resources and motivation to express an
attitude.
Equally as important and related to these distinctions
is that implicit attitudes, in contrast to explicit
attitudes, are extremely difficult to bring into conscious
awareness. Thus, people are often unaware of
their implicit attitudes but are typically quite aware of
their explicit attitudes.
A final distinction is that implicit attitudes reflect
long-term, habitual responses, whereas explicit attitudes
reflect more recently learned responses. A spouse whom
one loved for many years may become disliked after
one learns of the spouse’s infidelity. However, the new
explicit attitude of dislike does not necessarily replace
the old and habitual positive attitude. Instead, the latter
continues to exist as an implicit attitude. Ultimately,
explicit attitudes are easier to change than are
implicit attitudes.
Applications
Dual attitudes have been applied to the study of prejudice
with results that mirror those described earlier in
this entry. First, several studies have shown that there
is little correspondence between implicit and explicit
attitudes toward people of a different ethnicity.
Second, implicit and explicit attitudes are related
to different types of behaviors. For example, White
people with prejudicial implicit attitudes are more
likely than other White people to blink and look away
from Black people during a social interaction. White
people with prejudicial explicit attitudes are more
likely than other White people to verbally denigrate a
Black person and to say that Black people are guilty of
crimes. Thus, different types of prejudiced behavior
are related to different types of prejudiced attitudes.
Dual attitudes have also been applied to the study
of self-esteem with results that mirror those described
earlier. First, several studies have shown that there is
little correspondence between implicit and explicit
attitudes about the self. Second, implicit and explicit
self-attitudes are related to different types of behaviors.
For example, people with low implicit selfesteem
are more likely than their high self-esteem
counterparts to appear anxious in social situations. In
contrast, people with low explicit self-esteem are
more likely than their high self-esteem counterparts to
report anxiety felt during a social situation.
Implications
Contrary to popular opinion, gut reactions, slips of the
tongue, and nonverbal behaviors may reveal only an
implicit attitude, not a person’s true nature. A person’s
explicit attitude may be revealed through more direct
means. Indeed, many of the behaviors that make a difference
in life, such as decisions about whom to call
back, who to hire, or who to convict are more closely
related to explicit attitudes.
Max Weisbuch
See also Ambivalence; Aversive Racism; Dual Process
Theories; Implicit Attitudes
Further Readings
Wilson, T. D., Lindsey, S., & Schooler, T. Y. (2000). A model
of dual attitudes. Psychological Review, 107, 101–126.
DUAL PROCESS THEORIES
Definition
Dual process theories are a group of theories in social,
personality, and cognitive psychology that describe
how people think about information when they make
judgments or solve problems. These theories are called
dual process because they distinguish two basic ways
of thinking about information: a relatively fast, superficial,
spontaneous mode based on intuitive associations,
and a more in-depth, effortful, step-by-step mode
based on systematic reasoning. Dual process theories
have been applied in many areas of psychology,
including persuasion, stereotyping, person perception,
memory, and negotiation. In general, these theories
assume that people will think about information in a
relatively superficial and spontaneous way unless they
are both able and motivated to think more carefully.

Background and History
Dual process theories are built on several key ideas
that have a long history in psychology. For instance,
the two modes of thinking described by various dual
process theories can often be mapped onto a topdown,
idea-driven way of understanding the world
versus a bottom-up, data-driven way of understanding.
The notion that the way people understand the
world is critically influenced by the knowledge that
they bring to a situation (so that they begin at the
top—their heads—in their understanding), as well as
by the information provided within the situation itself
(the bottom), dates back to Wolfgang Kohler’s distinction
in the 1930s between perception and sensation.
For instance, when a person looks at a book on a
table, he or she senses both a pattern of colors and
lines with his or her eyes and actively labels the pattern
“book” by using his or her knowledge about what
a book is like.
Dual process theories also build on Gestalt principles
explored by psychologists in the 1930s and
1940s, which suggest that people have a natural tendency
to make experiences meaningful, structured,
and coherent. By focusing on how one thing relates to
the next and seeing patterns in the way that events
unfold, a person can understand and predict the social
world, which allows him or her to anticipate, plan, and
act effectively.
These and other elements were integrated into dual
process theories in a variety of fields, beginning in the
1980s, often as an attempt to understand and synthesize
conflicting findings or theories in the area. In persuasion,
for instance, the development of two dual
process theories (the elaboration likelihood model and
the heuristic-systematic model) allowed researchers to
organize complex findings in the field of attitudes and
attitude change and explain why certain variables
sometimes lead to attitude change and sometimes do
not. For instance, when people are relying on simple,
intuitive shortcuts in their thinking, they will be more
persuaded by an expert than by a nonexpert, even when
the expert’s arguments are not very good. However,
when people are relying more on systematic, bottomup
processing of all available information, they will
tend to be more persuaded by good arguments than by
someone’s title.
Similarly, in the field of person perception, the continuum
model of impression formation was developed
in an attempt to reconcile two competing viewpoints
Dual Process Theories———269
on how people perceive others: one proposing that
individuals form impressions in a bottom-up fashion,
adding up lots of specific evaluations about a target
person to form an overall average impression, and
another claiming that people form impressions based
on stereotypes or other social categories (e.g., race,
gender). The continuum model suggests that people
can use both of these modes, and the model identifies
when a perceiver will rely solely on an initial, general
categorization and when he or she will go on to think
more carefully about another person based on unique
information about that individual.
Importance and Consequences
As dual process theories became increasingly popular,
they were adopted by more and more areas of psychology
to describe how people think about information
and arrive at conclusions. Dual process theories
differ in various ways. For instance, some assume that
the two ways of thinking about information are mutually
exclusive (either/or), whereas others suggest that
they happen one after the other, or even at the same
time. However, the theories are more similar than different.
They typically distinguish between a quick,
superficial mode and an effortful, systematic mode of
thinking. They also identify factors that affect whether
people are able to and want to think carefully about
information. In addition, they predict how the use of
each mode will influence outcomes such as judgments,
attitudes, stereotyping, and memory. By focusing
on how people think about social information,
dual process theories allow psychologists to identify
the way in which a given variable (e.g., time pressure)
will influence these thought processes and how this
change in thinking will in turn affect the conclusions
and judgments that people make.
As an example, consider the heuristic-systematic
model of attitude change in the field of persuasion. Like
other dual process theories, the heuristic-systematic
model proposes two distinct modes of thinking about
information. Systematic processing involves attempts
to thoroughly understand any information encountered
through careful attention, deep thinking, and intensive
reasoning (e.g., thinking carefully about the arguments
presented, the person arguing, and the causes of
the person’s behavior). This information is combined
and used to guide subsequent attitudes, judgments,
and behaviors. For instance, a systematic approach to

270———Dual Process Theories
thinking about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict might
involve reading as many magazine and newspaper
reports as possible to learn and develop an opinion
about the best course of action for the Middle East.
Not surprisingly, such systematic thinking entails a
great deal of mental effort, and requires that a person
(a) can devote a certain amount of attention to thinking
about the issue and (b) wants to devote this attention.
Thus, systematic processing is unlikely to occur
unless a person is both able and motivated to
do it.
Relative to systematic processing, heuristic processing
is much less mentally demanding and much less
dependent on having the ability (e.g., enough knowledge
and enough time) to think carefully about information.
In fact, heuristic processing has often been
called relatively automatic because it can occur even
when people are not motivated and able to deliberately
think about a topic. Heuristic processing involves focusing
on easily noticed and easily understood cues, such
as a communicator’s credentials (e.g., expert or not),
the group membership of the communicator (e.g.,
Democrat or Republican), or the number of arguments
presented (many or few). These cues are linked to welllearned,
everyday decision rules known as heuristics.
Examples include “experts know best,” “my own group
can be trusted,” and “argument length equals argument
strength.” These simple, intuitive rules allow people to
form judgments, attitudes, and intentions quickly and
efficiently, simply on the basis of the easily noticed cues,
and with little critical thinking. A heuristic approach to
the Israeli–Palestinian conflict might involve simply
adopting the opinion of a noted Middle East political
expert. In other words, heuristic thinking is what a person
does when he or she does not have much ability or
time to think about something and wants to make a
quick decision.
The heuristic-systematic model suggests that
people’s ability and motivation to think carefully
about information influence whether they rely solely
on quick decision rules or go on to think about information
more carefully and deeply. Furthermore, this
model identifies three broad categories of motives that
influence whether thinking in either manner will be
relatively open-minded versus relatively biased.
Accuracy motivation is geared toward discovering
what is correct. Accuracy motivation leads to relatively
open-minded, evenhanded thinking. Defense
motivation refers to the need to protect oneself against
potential threats to one’s valued opinions and beliefs.
This self-focused motivation leads people to choose
heuristics that help protect their beliefs and to systematically
think about information in a biased way that
supports these beliefs. Finally, impression motivation
involves the desire to make a good impression on
another person or to maintain a positive relationship
with someone. This other-focused motivation also biases
thinking in favor of reaching a desired conclusion—in
this case, the one that will best serve the relationship.
Research on these three motivations reveals that people
can think about information in an open-minded way
when they have a lot of time and energy and really
want to, but they are also very good at thinking about
information in a way that lets them believe what they
want to believe or what they think others want them to
believe.
Dual process theories have been applied to many
other research areas in social psychology. For example,
the MODE model (motivation and opportunity as
determinants of the attitude–behavior relationship)
suggests that attitudes may guide behaviors in one of
two ways. Strong positive or negative attitudes can
guide behavior directly, without the individual thinking
very much. Or, individuals can construct their attitudes
in a more bottom-up, systematic fashion and
then use this new attitude to determine their behavior.
As another example, dual process models of how we
perceive other people suggest two sequential modes of
thinking about information when forming impressions
of others. First, individuals spontaneously categorize
the person (e.g., “She is a woman”; “He is Chinese”),
and then—if they are both motivated and able to do
so—they continue on to think more systematically
about individuating, unique features of the person.
Similarly, a dual process model of stereotyping suggests
that people have an automatic tendency to
stereotype others but can correct this stereotype if they
are motivated and able to deliberately modify their
views.
Perhaps most recently, a dual process perspective
has been applied to negotiation settings. Studies in
this field suggest that when negotiators have little
desire to think carefully (or are unable to think carefully),
they often rely on stereotypes about an opponent’s
group membership or the belief that if one side
wins the negotiation, the other has to lose. In contrast,
when motivation and ability to think carefully are
relatively high, reliance on these heuristics tends to

decrease, and systematic processing increases. This
allows negotiators to discover win–win solutions that
are better for both parties.
Shelly Chaiken
Alison Ledgerwood
See also Attitude Change; Elaboration Likelihood Model;
Heuristic Processing; Motivated Cognition; Need for
Closure
Further Readings
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., & Morris, K. J. (1983). Effects
of need for cognition on message evaluation, recall, and
persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
45, 805–818.
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (Eds.). (1999). Dual-process
theories in social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
Chen, S., Schlechter, D., & Chaiken, S. (1996). Getting at the
truth or getting along: Accuracy- versus impressionmotivated
heuristic and systematic processing. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 262–275.
de Dreu, C. K. W., Koole, S. L., & Steinel, S. (2000).
Unfixing the fixed pie: A motivated informationprocessing
approach to integrative negotiation. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 975–987.
DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS THEORY
Definition
Emotions go up and down over the course of days. But
sometimes emotions are more constant. For instance,
depression could be characterized with fairly constant
negative emotions across days. When will hearing some
negative information lead a person into a depressed
pattern? When will the same negative information just
lead to a bad day among the good days? Dynamical
systems theory (also known as dynamic systems theory
or just systems theory) is a series of principles and
tools for studying change. It is based on concepts from
mathematics and is a general approach applicable to
almost any phenomenon.
There are two types of change that are central to
this method. First, a systems approach focuses on how
a phenomenon changes over time. For example, a
systems approach to emotions concentrates on how
Dynamical Systems Theory———271
emotions evolve in time rather than whether a person
is happy or sad on a given day. It seeks to identify patterns
of change that can be reoccurring, constant, or
even ever-changing. For example, emotions might go
back and forth between good and bad days (reoccurring),
remain negative (constant, not unlike depression),
or constantly change in complex ways. A systems
approach often assesses the stability of those patterns.
For example, will receiving some negative information
knock a person out of a pattern of ups and downs?
Will the same negative information disrupt a constant
negative pattern such as depression? Dynamical systems
theory can also identify when the pattern of emotional
change will evolve into another pattern on its
own or in relation to other parts of the system. For
example, under what circumstances can only a constant
negative pattern of emotions exist? In summary,
dynamic systems can be used to identify what might
alter the entire long-term pattern of emotions that
follow.
The second type of change examined by systems
theory is that which occurs from the many interactions
among units (i.e., individuals, groups, aspects within
the individual). For example, a systems perspective of
emotions might simultaneously consider the interaction
of the differing emotions between a husband and
wife. These interactions are assumed to be multidirectional.
That is, the husband and wife mutually influence
one another so that each changes and limits the
emotions of the other. Because of these mutual influences
on emotions with other people, there is the
potential for each person to generate a very complicated
pattern of emotions in time. Surprisingly, these
multicomponent systems tend to generate relatively
simple patterns. For example, a pair of individuals
who begin with different emotions might converge on
the same emotional pattern and might even help each
other maintain that pattern (stability). That is, a couple
both in the same ups and downs of emotions might
make each person in the pair more resistant to negative
information. This order emerges because of the
multidirectional and reciprocal influences and tends
to promote a great deal of predictive power. For
example, you might need to know only the emotional
pattern of a single individual in a group to know
automatically the emotional changes of every other
individual in the group. Thus, part of a systems perspective
is identifying the qualities that depict the entire
multicomponent system.

272———Dynamical Systems Theory
Context and Importance
Within social psychology, systems theory has been
applied to a wide variety of topics. It is often called a
meta-theoretical perspective because its principles can
be applied to virtually any phenomenon. For this reason,
systems theory is often thought not to be theory at
all but instead a descriptive tool. Regardless, systems
theory is inherently an interdisciplinary approach found
in fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, architecture,
biology, chemistry, and psychology, sharing the
same language, tools, and concepts.
Applications
Systems theory tends to be applied in three main
ways. The first, dynamical systems modeling, consists
of generating simulations of the many interactions
functioning over time. The simulations describe the
phenomenon mathematically, testing out situations
that parallel the real world but that would be difficult
to study in the real world. For example, it is possible
to study the emotions of couples across days, but
modeling could be used to examine emotions at a
community level identifying the circumstances that
discriminate when depression is commonplace in a
community from when it is rare. Dynamical systems
models have revealed that very simple mathematical
equations of change are capable of producing a great
deal of complexity. The simulations need not be very
complicated to move beyond predicting patterns in
real life. However, both relatively simple equations
and very complex ones can also generate order.
The second way dynamic systems theory is used is
empirically. In empirical methods, mathematical concepts
are applied through longitudinal methods and
designs that measure changes over time. These studies
tend to be very data demanding, often collecting information
in real time over long periods of time. Mathematical
equations and systems concepts are then used
to describe the outcomes, often generating new predictions
for further empirical studies.
Lastly, systems theory is used as a metaphor
whereby the concepts are applied qualitatively without
use of mathematical relationships. Many phenomena
in psychology cannot easily be measured at the
quantitative level that is demanded by empirical systems
techniques. Nor can they be easily quantifiable
by a set of equations. Thus, the concepts are used as
heuristic examples of the phenomenon. Since a systems
approach focuses on change and complex interactions,
the concepts are still metaphorically informative
to the psychological sciences.
See also Emotion; Research Methods
Further Readings
Jonathan Butner
Gottman, J., Murray, J., Swanson, C., Tyson, R., & Swanson,
K. (2002). The mathematics of marriage: Dynamic
nonlinear models. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kauffman, S. (1995). At home in the universe: The search for
laws of self-organization and complexity. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Kelso, S. (1995). Dynamic patterns: The self-organization of
brain and behavior. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nowak, A., & Vallacher, R. (1998). Dynamical social
psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
Stewart, I. (2002). Does God play dice? The new
mathematics of chaos. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

ECOLOGICAL RATIONALITY
Definition
Human reasoning and behavior are ecologically rational
when they are adapted to the environment in which
humans act. This definition is in stark contrast to classical
definitions of rationality, according to which reasoning
and behavior are rational when they conform
to norms of logic, statistics, and probability theory.
History
The notion of ecological rationality, that is, the interaction
of cognition and environment, is highlighted in
Herbert Simon’s analogy of a pair of scissors: Human
rational behavior is shaped by a pair of scissors, with
one blade being the structure of the environment and
the other blade the computational capabilities of the
actor. This notion highlights two important aspects of
the concept of ecological rationality. First, just as one
cannot understand the function of scissors by looking
at a single blade, one cannot understand human cognition
by studying either the environment or cognition
alone. Second, the concept of ecological rationality can
be employed to evaluate more than just people’s behavior;
it is additionally presumed that people’s reasoning
is the result of an adaptation of the individual to his or
her environment.
The concept of ecological rationality has been
strongly influenced by the psychologist Egon
Brunswik’s work on human perception. Brunswik
argued that human perception cannot be understood
when it is studied in a nonrepresentative laboratory
E
273
setting that eliminates the ecological structure of
real-world environments. When following the common
experimental practice of using a factorial design,
objects are constructed or selected such that the cues
describing the objects, which are the focus of interest,
are independent of each other. This procedure does
not acknowledge that the same cues are often correlated
with each other in everyday life and that human
perception could take these correlations into account.
Ignoring these environmental aspects in an experimental
setting has profound consequences: It severely
limits the generalizability of the results and, in particular,
obscures the adaptation and ecological rationality
of cognitive mechanisms.
According to Brunswik, to understand cognition
one needs to explore the characteristics of the environment
on which cognition is based. This point has
inspired many researchers, including John R. Anderson,
James J. Gibson, Gerd Gigerenzer, David Marr, and
Roger Shepard. Anderson, for instance, argues that
any study of psychological mechanisms should be
preceded by an analysis of the environment. His point
is that such an analysis may help to identify the cognitive
mechanisms that underlie human behavior. This
process can be problematic, however, given that different
mechanisms often predict very similar behavior.
Therefore, the behavior alone does not allow one
to infer unambiguously which of the mechanisms produced
that behavior. However, when one also analyzes
what mechanisms are able to produce adaptive behavior
in a specific environment, the set of mechanisms
can be reduced. If a limited set of adaptive mechanisms
is focused on to explain cognition, the identification
of the most adequate mechanism is simplified.

274———Ecological Rationality
The identification of cognitive mechanisms that
govern human behavior can further be improved when
it is taken into account that people’s reasoning is
constrained by limited resources, such as time, memory,
or computational power. Faced with these limitations,
it is reasonable to assume that humans will aim
for solutions to a problem that do not require many
resources. Thus, when two potential cognitive mechanisms
are able to produce adaptive behavior in a
specific environment, it is likely that humans will
apply the mechanism that requires the least amount of
resources. In this vein, researchers such as Gigerenzer,
Peter Todd, and the ABC Research Group have argued
that people apply fast and frugal heuristics that are
adapted to an environment. A heuristic is frugal when
it does not require much information, and it is fast
when it relies only on simple computations. From the
perspective of ecological rationality, a heuristic that
does not require many resources and, in addition, is
able to solve a problem well is a very promising candidate
to describe the cognitive process that underlies
human behavior.
Classical Definitions of Rationality
The definition of ecological rationality stands in stark
contrast to classical definitions of rationality. According
to the classical definition, human behavior is rational
to the extent that it conforms to the norms of logic,
statistics, and probability theory. For example, according
to Jörg Rieskamp, Jerome Busemeyer, and
Barbara Mellers, most theorists use principles of consistency
and coherence when evaluating the rationality
of people’s preferences. For instance, if a person
prefers option A to option B, and option B to C, the
preference of option C to A would be intransitive and
violate consistency. Because of the violation of the
logical consistency principle, the person’s preferences
are perceived as a violation of rationality. The use of
this classical definition of rationality to evaluate cognitive
processes has prevailed in one of the most influential
psychological research programs on human
reasoning, judgment, and decision making of the past
3 decades, namely, the heuristics-and-biases program.
This program has illustrated for a large variety of reasoning
problems that human behavior often violates
basic norms of logic or probability theory. These violations,
following the classical definition of rationality,
have consequently been labeled as biases and have
been explained by the application of heuristics that
also violate the classical norms of rationality.
An Example of Classical and
Ecological Rationality
Consider a physician’s problem of inferring which of
two heart attack patients needs more urgent treatment.
This inference can be made on the basis of several
cues, for example, the patients’ systolic blood pressure
or age. A physician might consider blood pressure
as a more important indicator compared to age
when inferring a patient’s risk. When considering two
patients, A and B, the physician might decide that
although patient B has higher blood pressure than A,
due to a small negligible difference, the physician will
treat the older patient A first. The same might be the
case when the physician compares patient B with C,
where again patient C’s blood pressure is not substantially
higher than B’s, so the physician treats the older
patient B first. However, if the physician had compared
patients A and C, she might have treated patient
C first, because now C’s blood pressure is substantially
higher than A’s. Thus, the physician’s decisions
would be intransitive and thereby would violate the
consistency principle, a cornerstone of classical definitions
of rationality.
Consider the decision now from an ecological perspective,
and a different conclusion can be drawn. First,
the physician has to make decisions rather quickly
and his or her sequential inference strategy allows for
very quick decisions. Second, the hypothetical example
illustrating intransitive decisions might not occur
very often in real life: Blood pressure could be positively
correlated with age, so that when treating the
patient with the higher blood pressure, most likely the
older patient will be treated first. Thus, the ecologically
rational inference strategy of the physician, in
principle, violates classical definitions of rationality,
but in fact these violations might not occur frequently
in real life.
Jörg Rieskamp
Torsten Reimer
See also Behavioral Economics; Decision Making; Dual
Process Theories; Ecological Validity; Fast and Frugal
Heuristics

Further Readings
Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M., & ABC Research Group. (1999).
Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Rieskamp, J., Busemeyer, J. R., & Mellers, B. A. (2006).
Extending the bounds of rationality: A review of research
on preferential choice. Journal of Economic Literature,
44, 631–661.
ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY
Definition
Ecological validity is the extent to which research
findings would generalize to settings typical of everyday
life. As such, ecological validity is a particular form
of external validity. Whereas external validity refers to
the overall extent to which findings generalize across
people, places, and time, ecological validity refers
more specifically to the extent to which findings generalize
to the settings and people common in today’s
society.
Background and Distinctions
Validity has many faces, including internal validity
(accurate claims about cause), construct validity (accurate
claims about the nature of variables), and external
validity (accurate claims about how processes and
findings generalize across people, places, and time).
Ecological validity is one aspect of external validity in
which researchers ask whether research results represent
what happens in everyday life. More specifically,
ecological validity addresses whether an effect has
been shown to operate in conditions that occur often
for people in the population of interest.
In this regard, ecological validity is closely related
to the concept of mundane realism. Experimental tasks
are said to have mundane realism when they closely
resemble activities that are common in natural settings.
For example, activities in an experiment might
be realistic in this mundane way when participants are
asked to read a newspaper story about an obscure issue
in a foreign country. This study might be considered
as having a great deal of mundane realism because it
uses activities common in everyday life (reading a
newspaper). Yet the study may also be considered as
Ecological Validity———275
lacking in experimental realism (the extent to which
the activities are meaningful and have an impact on
participants) if the topic of the newspaper article is
uninteresting and fails to engage participants.
Ecological validity does not simply reflect an
absence of experimental realism, because there are certainly
many engaging and influential activities that
form core aspects of everyday life. In fact, one might
distinguish between mundane realism and ecological
validity by noting that, in the real world, people would
be relatively unlikely to spend time reading a newspaper
article about a topic about which they know
and care very little. Thus, although newspaper reading
itself seems to reflect everyday activities quite well
(mundane realism), the use of that activity in the experimental
setting may diverge from the ways and reasons
people typically read newspapers. That is, findings
based on the use of this activity may lack ecological
validity.
In this sense, ecological validity is also related to
psychological realism (the extent to which the psychological
processes operating in an experiment also
occur in everyday life). When discussing psychological
realism, it is important to distinguish between the
specific activities and materials used in a study (mundane
realism), the likely impact of the activities and
materials (experimental realism), and the types of
psychological processes that participants use to complete
the activities in the study. Even if the activities in
a study bear little resemblance to real-world activities
(low mundane realism) and have relatively little impact
on participants (low experimental realism), the thought
processes that participants use in the study may be
quite common in the real world (high psychological
realism). For example, if a study involves judging
words as quickly as possible as they appear on a computer
screen, this would not be a typical activity in
everyday life, and the words may not create strong
reactions in research participants. However, if the
words are activating concepts that then help people to
quickly comprehend the next word on the screen, this
may demonstrate a psychological process (concept
activation) that is extremely common in everyday life.
Researchers might reasonably ask whether ecological
validity is always valued. To be sure, all else
being equal, researchers would prefer that their findings
replicate in real-world settings. However, as noted
earlier, psychological processes that would operate in
many everyday settings may be more efficiently and

276———Effort Justification
effectively tested using methods that remove much of
the messiness (lack of experimental control) of realworld
settings. Especially when one is testing specific
psychological theories and doing so by isolating particular
variables within the theory, ecological or even
external validity more generally may not be of the
utmost importance. When seeking to intervene in specific
applied settings, however, one would certainly
want to make sure that the intervention of interest is
able to influence behavior even with all of the messiness
of the natural environment. This may be more
likely if the intervention is developed on the basis of
research that incorporates as many features of the
real-world environment as possible.
Despite ecological validity being relevant to which
settings a result might generalize, the reader should
note that ecological validity is not the same as external
validity. There is no guarantee that an effect found
in a specific, ecologically valid setting is more likely
to generalize across settings (a key aspect of external
validity) than is an effect found in a more artificial
laboratory setting. Although a study conducted in
a coffee shop might produce results that are more
likely to generalize to coffee shops, the results of
the study may be no more likely to generalize across
many settings (such as courtrooms, boardrooms, or
classrooms) than a study conducted in a laboratory
where background noise is more carefully controlled.
Support for external validity can be garnered from
replications of an effect at different points in time and
in different places, even if all of those places are quite
artificial and all lack ecological validity.
See also Mundane Realism; Research Methods
Further Readings
Duane T. Wegener
Kevin L. Blankenship
Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Brewer, M. B. (1998).
Experimentation in social psychology. In D. Gilbert,
S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., pp. 99–142). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Reis, H. T., & Judd, C. M. (Eds.). (2000). Handbook of
research methods in social and personality psychology.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sansone, C., Morf, C. C., & Painter, A. T. (Eds.). (2004). The
SAGE handbook of methods in social psychology.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
EFFORT JUSTIFICATION
Definition
Effort justification is the idea that when people make
sacrifices to pursue a goal, the effort is often rationalized
by elevating the attractiveness of the goal. In
other words, people sometimes come to love what
they suffer to achieve. The effort justification hypothesis
is derived from cognitive dissonance, one of the
best-known theories in social psychology. Dissonance
theory emphasizes how inconsistencies among important
cognitions can be motivating, often by bringing
one’s attitudes in line with one’s behavior. It has been
broadly applied. With effort justification, the potentially
dissonance-arousing question is whether the
sacrifices one is making to achieve a goal are worth it.
The definition of effort used by dissonance theorists
has been broad. It includes not only the literal
expenditure of physical and mental energy but also
sacrifices such as payment of a fee and enduring
embarrassment. From the standpoint of the effort justification
hypothesis, the exact nature of the effort is
less important than its magnitude. In fact, some evidence
suggests that, once a person is committed to a
course of action, the mere anticipation of effort can
lead to justification even before the effort is actually
undertaken. Regardless of the nature of the effort
or whether it is actual or anticipated, the underlying,
dissonance-based logic is the same: motivated thinking
to rationalize the effort.
A straightforward effort justification prediction
that has been supported by research is that the more
effort that is expended on a task, the more the task will
be liked. For example, when participants in an experiment
are asked to perform a task such as circling
numbers, the task is subsequently liked more when
undertaken with instructions that make it high (vs.
low) in effort.
Applications: Group Initiation Rituals
The relevance of effort justification for such processes
as initiation into groups was evident early in cognitive
dissonance research. In a classic experiment, participants
were asked to pass an embarrassment-based
screening test before being admitted into a discussion
group on sex. The test was in fact bogus (all participants
passed), but it allowed for a manipulation of effort
required to enter the group. Participants who underwent

a highly embarrassing screening subsequently rated
both the group members and the discussion as significantly
more interesting than did participants who
undertook a mildly embarrassing screening (or no
screening at all).
If effort enhances liking for, and commitment to,
the group, it is easy to understand why many groups
have initiation rituals that one must pass before becoming
a full-fledged member. Hazing is a long-standing
practice associated with Greek organizations in college
and sports teams more generally. Military boot
camps are grueling trials through which soldiers must
pass. And anthropology provides many examples of
societies that require difficult, and sometimes dangerous,
rites of passage between adolescence and adulthood.
From the standpoint of effort justification, these
diverse activities accomplish a common outcome:
greater attraction to the group.
Applications: Psychotherapy
Although psychotherapy can be undertaken for many
reasons and can take many forms—cognitive behavioral,
psychodynamic, individual, group—in each case
the client is required to expend effort to achieve a
goal. If effort justification results in enhanced goal
attractiveness, then the process might serve as a common
factor that contributes to the success of diverse
therapies.
Evidence for this comes from several studies that
use therapies that are bogus from the standpoint of traditional
theories of psychotherapy but which require
the expenditure of effort. For example, people with
snake phobia or who are underassertive might be asked
to engage in physical exercise; overweight women
might be asked to speak into a machine that makes fluent
speech difficult; or speech-anxious participants might
be asked to proofread. In each case, on subsequent
behavioral assessments, the bogus therapy produced
significant improvement compared to a lower-effort version
of the same therapy or a no-therapy control group.
An interesting implication of this perspective is that
if therapies are free, the motivation to engage in effort
justification will be reduced. Even a nominal fee might
take better advantage of cognitive dissonance.
Boundary Conditions
Effort does not always enhance goal attractiveness.
If it did, more children would like school and fewer
marriages would end in divorce. Cognitive dissonance
research has shown that people’s tendency to rationalize
their behaviors is greatest when they see themselves
as freely choosing the behavior (especially by
public commitment), when the expected sacrifice is
known beforehand, and when external justifications
for the behavior are low. In the psychotherapy studies
described previously, for example, the beneficial
effects of effort therapies are seen only when participants’
choice for undertaking the procedures (as well
as their aversive nature) is emphasized beforehand.
Even when conditions are ripe for dissonance,
effort may not always lead to enhanced goal attractiveness.
Other ways to rationalize the effort (suggested
by decades of dissonance research) include
minimizing one’s perception of the sacrifice being
made or retrospectively minimizing one’s perceived
choice for undertaking the effort.
Implications
At least two important implications seem to follow
from effort justification. First, it is likely to have functional
benefits for groups. By increasing attraction and
commitment to the group, group cohesion and stability
are enhanced. Second, effort justification is likely
to increase persistence at tasks that are not altogether
pleasant, especially when such tasks are seen as chosen.
Many worthwhile outcomes in life require short-term
sacrifice to achieve longer-term gain. By encouraging
such sacrifice, effort justification is functional to the
individual and the group.
Of course, what is functional is not always good.
Attractive, cohesive groups may be more prone to groupthink,
and persistence at lost causes can be destructive.
For example, the persistence of the American war effort
in Vietnam in the face of escalating costs and decreasing
likelihood of success has been analyzed using
effort justification.
Danny Axsom
See also Autonomy; Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Group
Dynamics; Motivated Cognition; Motivated Reasoning
Further Readings
Effort Justification———277
Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (1999). Cognitive dissonance:
Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

278———Egocentric Bias
EGOCENTRIC BIAS
Definition
Most people know more about themselves than they
know about others. This is true in part because people
tend to pay more attention to themselves than to others
and in part because people have privileged access
to information about themselves (e.g., private thoughts,
emotions) that is unavailable to others. Because it is
so plentiful, information about the self can exert a
disproportionate influence on various kinds of judgments.
When it does, that tendency is known as an
egocentric (i.e., self-centered) bias.
As an example of an egocentric bias, consider how
people divide up the credit for collaborative endeavors.
When individuals work together on a task, such as
a sales team that works to market a new product or
students who collaborate on a class assignment, each
person, on average, tends to assign him- or herself a
bit more of the credit for the group’s output than the
others feel he or she deserves. Thus, if you add up the
proportion of the work that each collaborator claims
to have contributed, you usually end up with a sum
that exceeds 100%. (Logically, of course, this cannot
be; if three collaborators each believe they have done
50% of the work—a total of 150%—then one or more
of them are mistaken.) Why does this happen? Some
of it is an unscrupulous “grab for credit” in which
people falsely claim to have done an inflated share of
the work to claim an inflated share of the rewards (a
sales bonus or a course grade). But it also stems in
part from an egocentric bias in recalling one’s own
contributions. Simply put, people have an easier time
remembering their own inputs than those of others.
The ideas we contributed at a sales meeting or the
hours we spent in the library are easier to remember
than those that others contributed.
When it comes time to determine each collaborator’s
share of the credit, then, the relative ease with
which our own contributions come to mind makes
them seem as though they were more numerous than
they actually were, causing us to overestimate them.
Indeed, because one’s own inputs are easier to recall
even when they are unflattering, this bias occurs even
when people wish to minimize their role in a collaborative
endeavor. Married individuals in one study who
were asked to divide responsibility between themselves
and their spouse for several household activities
claimed more than their fair share of the credit not
only for positive activities (“cleaning the dishes”) but
also for negative ones (“causing arguments”).
This is just one example of an egocentric bias. Our
self-centered perspectives give rise to many others,
including a tendency to overestimate how successfully
we communicate with others (assuming others understand
what we understand), a tendency to overestimate
how much others share our attitudes and preferences
(assuming others feel as we do), and a tendency to
believe others are paying attention to us more than
they are (assuming we stand out to others as much as
we do to ourselves).
Ken Savitsky
See also Accessibility; Availability Heuristic; Self; Self-
Reference Effect; Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The
spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias
in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and
appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
78, 211–222.
Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in
availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 37, 322–336.
EGO DEPLETION
Definition
Ego depletion refers to the loss of a personal resource
(and associated breakdown in performance) due to the
previous exertion of self-control or other effortful and
willful acts of the self. Ego depletion may be especially
important in understanding why self-control fails and
what the processes are that underlie self-control.
The model of ego depletion suggests that individuals
have a fixed amount of resource to exert selfcontrol
or perform other effortful and willful acts of
the self. This resource, called ego strength, is required
for any and all self-directed efforts (in particular, selfcontrol
and making choices that are relevant to the
self). This ego strength is consumed or depleted in
the process of self-control, however. In addition, this
ego strength is recovered slowly, so that it remains
depleted for some time after the exertion itself. Thus,

the process of exerting self-control or making choices
reduces the amount of ego strength available for future
self-control efforts. Moreover, the success of selfcontrol
depends on ego strength: When ego strength is
depleted, self-control is more likely to fail. Hence,
individuals whose ego strength has been depleted
through the previous exertion of the self’s will are
more likely to suffer a loss of self-control, because the
success of self-control depends on having enough
strength to fight off the temptation. In short, the exertion
of self-control can lead to poorer self-control
subsequently, through the exhaustion of self-control
strength, a process known as ego depletion.
Evidence
Although a direct measurement of individual’s ego
strength is not yet possible, scientists can investigate
the effects of ego depletion by examining self-control
performance. In particular, researchers have focused
on how exerting self-control affects subsequent selfcontrol
performance. Consistent with the process outlined
in the previous section, individuals perform more
poorly on a task that requires self-control after exerting
self-control, as compared to individuals who worked
on an equally frustrating, arousing, and unpleasant
task that did not require self-control. For instance, in
one experiment, individuals who were asked not to eat
freshly made chocolate chip cookies (a highly tempting
food that requires a great deal of self-control not
to eat) subsequently quit working on a difficult puzzle
sooner than individuals who were asked not to eat
radishes (a less tempting food that requires only a
little self-control not to eat). Despite the differences in
final self-control performance, the groups did not differ
in mood or arousal; the differences in persistence
on the frustrating puzzle appeared to be the result of
how much self-control was required by the initial task.
Subsequent research illustrates the importance of
ego strength in self-control. Underage drinkers were
asked to record their alcohol intake on a palm-top
computer for more than 2 weeks. They also reported
their moods, urge to drink, and self-control demands
on this computer. On days that they reported greater
self-control demands than average (and hence were
more ego depleted), they were more likely to drink
alcohol, consumed more alcohol when they did drink,
and became more intoxicated. Most important, when
they were ego depleted, these drinkers reported consuming
more alcohol than they intended. In other words,
Ego Depletion———279
they had trouble controlling their alcohol intake when
ego depleted. Additional analyses indicated that selfcontrol
demands did not increase the urge to drink, but
instead undermined their ability to self-regulate.
Importance and Implications
Ego depletion may help explain why self-control
breaks down, despite a person’s best intentions. If a person’s
level of ego strength is depleted, he or she may
find it difficult to resist temptations, as demonstrated
in the research on underage drinkers. Because many
important behaviors require self-control, the process
of ego depletion can have broad ranging effects, from
increased criminal behavior and prejudice to picking
fights with significant others and even a decline in intellectual
performance. Likewise, everyone has many
demands on his or her ego strength throughout the day.
Besides resisting temptations, research has found that
making personally difficult choices, controlling moods
and thoughts, trying to make a good impression, and
even ignoring someone depletes ego strength. Indeed,
there is evidence that individuals are more likely to
suffer a breakdown in self-control in the evening as
compared to the morning because of the amount of selfcontrol
that everyone has to exert throughout the day.
Because of the many demands on our ego strength
and the importance of self-control, self-management
of ego strength is key. Individuals may decide what
self-control tasks are important (and hence will deplete
ego strength on) and which are less important. Both
external and internal motivators likely shape this decision.
This means that the conservation of ego strength
is critical and can help explain the difference between
individuals and situations in self-control outcomes.
It is also important to realize that exerting selfcontrol
may lead to eventual increases in ego strength.
In the same way that lifting a heavy weight fatigues a
muscle and leads to weakness until the person has had
a chance to rest, exerting self-control appears to deplete
ego strength. However, much as lifting weights leads
to greater strength and increased resistance to fatigue
with rest and proper training, the judicious regular
exertion of self-control may lead to better self-control
performance in the long run.
Mark Muraven
See also Executive Function of Self; Self; Self-Regulation

280———Ego Shock
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M.
(1998). Ego-depletion: Is the active self a limited
resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
74, 1252–1265.
Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and
depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble
a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247–259.
Muraven, M., Collins, R. L., Shiffman, S., & Paty, J. A.
(2005). Daily fluctuations in self-control demands and
alcohol intake. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors,
19, 140–147.
EGO SHOCK
Definition
Ego shock refers to feeling mentally paralyzed or frozen
in response to severe self-esteem threats. Individuals
in a state of ego shock have trouble thinking; they feel
distant from themselves; the world seems distant or
strange; they feel emotionally numb. The experience
of ego shock is temporary, usually only lasting for
seconds or minutes.
Context and Importance
Ego shock typically occurs when individuals experience
extreme blows to their self-esteem. One of the
most common causes of ego shock is rejection by
friends or romantic partners. For example, having a
girlfriend or boyfriend unexpectedly say that you are
worthless and ugly might lead to an experience of
ego shock. There might be an immediate experience
of mental paralysis or strangeness that comes over
you. The ego shock then passes and other thoughts
and feelings, such as anger, sadness or blame, may
emerge. Other causes of ego shock include academic
failure (such as being turned down for admission by a
prestigious university), athletic failures (such as missing
a free throw at the last second of a championship
game and causing your team to lose), and moral failures
(stealing something from a store and then being
caught). Fortunately, these are rare experiences: Ego
shock does not occur frequently.
Ego shock can have both negative and positive
consequences for the person. In the short term, people
who are in a state of ego shock have difficulty controlling
themselves. Because of this, they are more easily
influenced by social circumstances. For example, if
someone hands them a bottle of whiskey and says,
“Drink this,” the person in a state of ego shock is more
likely to do so. In the long term, the experience of ego
shock can also have negative consequences. People
may respond to ego shock by giving up on what had
caused the blow to their self-esteem. For example, a
person may swear off dating or quit playing basketball.
On the other hand, ego shock can have certain benefits.
It is possible that the experience of ego shock
actually protects the person psychologically in the
short term following self-esteem threat. Rather than
mentally disintegrating or behaving destructively, the
person goes numb. In the longer term, individuals who
experience ego shock often change their lives in positive
ways. After the shock of a major academic failure
wears off, for example, students may redouble their
efforts to succeed and actually become better students
than they were before.
No one knows the exact cause of ego shock. It may
be an adaptive or protective feature that has evolved
to help preserve the personality in the face of threatening
information. Ego shock may also simply reflect
a mechanical failure in the brain. When information
comes in that is too extreme and negative to process
effectively, the brain simply shuts or slows down
temporarily.
W. Keith Campbell
Amy B. Brunell
See also Rejection; Self; Self-Esteem; Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Campbell, W. K., Baumeister, R. F., Dhavale, D., & Tice, D. M.
(2003). Responding to major threats to self-esteem: A
preliminary, narrative study of ego shock. Journal of
Social and Clinical Psychology, 22, 79–96.
ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL
Definition
The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion
is a theory about how attitudes are formed and
changed. This theory organizes the many different
attitude change processes under a single conceptual
umbrella. The ELM was created to provide a framework
to help explain the many seemingly inconsistent

findings in the persuasion literature. Sometimes a
variable (e.g., distracting the person reading a message
or associating the message with an attractive source)
would enhance persuasion, sometimes it would reduce
persuasion, and sometimes it would have no effect.
Furthermore, sometimes attitude change would last
over time and would predict behavior, but sometimes
it would not. The ELM provides a framework to help
researchers understand the factors responsible for
these conflicting findings.
Elaboration Continuum
The extent to which people elaborate in response to a
message is reflected in the extent to which they generate
their own thoughts or reactions to the message.
The generation and consideration of these thoughts
will vary, depending on how much mental effort the
person is willing and able to exert. That is, the ELM
recognizes that sometimes people think a lot about an
issue or message, and sometimes they hardly pay any
attention to it at all. Depending on the extent of elaboration,
different processes can be responsible for attitude
change, often with different outcomes.
Two Routes to Persuasion
The ELM also distinguishes between two routes to
persuasion: the central route and the peripheral route.
Central route processes are those that require a great
deal of thought and therefore are likely to occur under
conditions that promote high elaboration. Central route
processes involve careful examination of a persuasive
communication (e.g., a speech, an advertisement) to
determine the merits of the evidence presented. Under
these conditions, a person’s thoughts in response to
the communication and their confidence in these
thoughts determine the persuasive outcome (i.e., the
direction and amount of attitude change). The more
positive thoughts people have to a message, such as a
proposal to cut taxes (e.g., “I’ll make more money if
taxes are cut”) and the more confidence they have in
these thoughts, the more persuaded they will be by
the message. On the other hand, the more negative
thoughts that people have to a message (e.g., “the tax
cut will hurt poor people”) and the more confidence
they have in these thoughts, the less persuaded they
will be by the message.
Because people are carefully assessing the information
in a persuasive communication for its merits under
the central route, the perceived quality of this evidence
Elaboration Likelihood Model———281
is a very important determinant of persuasion. If the
evidence for some proposal is seen as strong, a person
is more likely to have favorable thoughts about the
position and is likely to form a proposal-consistent
attitude. If the evidence is seen as weak, however, then
the person is likely to have unfavorable thoughts with
regard to the message position and may even form an
attitude that is opposite to the advocated position. The
thoughts that occur in the central route can be relatively
objective (fairly evaluating each argument), or
they can be biased by other factors (e.g., a sad mood).
A number of factors will determine whether people
have confidence in the thoughts that they generate,
such as how quickly the thoughts come to mind (more
easily accessible thoughts are held with more confidence)
and the credibility of the person who presents
the arguments (people have more confidence in
thoughts generated to a credible source).
Peripheral route processes, on the other hand, require
relatively little thought and therefore predominate under
conditions that promote low elaboration. In the peripheral
route, the strength of the evidence presented matters
less. Instead, in peripheral route processes, people often
rely on judgmental heuristics (e.g., “experts are always
right”) or cues taken from surface features of a message
(e.g., the number of arguments presented), its source
(e.g., their attractiveness), or other factors (e.g., being in
a good or bad mood). That is, people might go along
with a proposal just because they like the source and not
because they have considered the merits of the issue. In
addition, peripheral route processes can occur without
awareness, such as in classical conditioning or mere
exposure.
Determinants of Elaboration
Which route a message recipient takes is determined
by the extent of elaboration. When elaboration is high,
central route processes will predominate, but when
elaboration is low, peripheral route processes will predominate.
Under conditions of moderate elaboration,
a mixture of central and peripheral route processes
will be responsible for attitudes. Both motivational
and ability factors determine elaboration. Motivational
factors include (among others) how personally relevant
the message seems, how accountable the person
feels for evaluating the evidence presented, and the
person’s need for cognition (i.e., his or her intrinsic
enjoyment of thinking). Factors affecting one’s ability
to process a message include how much distraction is
present, the time pressure to decide, and the amount of

282———Elaboration Likelihood Model
issue-relevant knowledge one has regarding the proposal
(e.g., when a message uses a lot of technical jargon
that requires specific knowledge to understand).
Consequences of Persuasion
Not only can the processes that occur under high and
low elaboration be different, but the consequences of
these processes also differ. Attitudes formed under
high elaboration are stronger in that they are more predictive
of behavior and information processing, more
stable over time, and more resistant to future persuasion
than those formed under low elaboration. This is
because careful thought about an issue leads to the
development of a more consistent, coherent, accessible
(i.e., comes to mind readily), and confidently held representation
of the attitude object.
Multiple Roles for
Persuasion Variables
One of the most important features of the ELM is the
proposition that variables can serve multiple roles in
a persuasive setting depending on other contextual
factors. The variables that serve multiple roles can
include any aspect of the persuasive communication,
such as the message itself (e.g., number of arguments,
complexity of language), its source (e.g., credibility,
attractiveness), the recipient (e.g., their mood, preexisting
attitudes), or other contextual variables (e.g.,
the color of paper on which the message is printed).
For example, under high elaboration, a given variable
(e.g., source attractiveness) will be processed as an
argument and examined as to whether it provides
compelling evidence for the position advocated (e.g.,
“If she looks that good after using that shampoo,
maybe I will too”). In addition, the same variable can
sometimes serve to bias the ongoing thinking. Some
variables, like source attractiveness or a positive mood
will typically bias the information processing in a positive
way (e.g., “I really want to like her so I’ll see if
I can agree with the message”), whereas others will
introduce a negative bias. Among the latter variables
are the knowledge that the message source is attempting
to persuade you or a preexisting attitude toward
the issue (e.g., if your original attitude disagrees with
a speaker, you may defend your existing attitude and
focus on finding the flaws in the speaker’s arguments).
If, however, a person becomes aware that something
may be biasing his or her thinking, and the person
wishes to correct for the bias, attitudes can be corrected.
That is, people can adjust their attitude in the
direction and magnitude opposite to the perceived
direction and magnitude of the biasing factor. Thus, if
one person thinks that an attractive source produces a
huge bias, he or she will make a large adjustment to
his or her attitude in a direction opposite the perceived
bias. This correction process is likely to occur under
high elaboration, because it requires both motivation
and ability to perform.
A third role that variables can play under high
elaboration is to affect a person’s confidence in the
thoughts that were generated (e.g., “That model really
knows about fashion so I can trust my thoughts”).
Confidence is a metacognition because it is a thought
about a thought. In this case, one thought is the thought
in response to the message (e.g., “this product sounds
very useful”), while the other thought is about the first
thought (e.g., “I am confident that my thoughts about
this product are valid”). Many variables have been
shown to affect thought confidence. In one study, for
example, students who were induced to nod their
heads (as if saying “yes”) during the presentation of a
message had more confidence in their thoughts than
people who were induced to shake their heads (as if
saying “no”) during the message. When the message
contained strong arguments, nodding led to more persuasion
than shaking because people had more confidence
in their favorable thoughts to these strong
arguments, but when the message contained weak
arguments, nodding led to less persuasion than shaking
because people had more confidence in their unfavorable
thoughts. This confidence effect only occurred
when elaboration was high.
Under conditions of low elaboration, the same
variable that served as an argument, biased thoughts
in response to the message, or affected thought confidence
can act as a cue or heuristic (e.g., “if she likes
the car, so do I”). Note that if an attractive person were
processed as an argument for a car, it would not be
a very compelling argument and might lead to no persuasion,
whereas when this attractive person is processed
as a simple cue, more persuasion would result.
Under conditions where elaboration is not constrained
to be high or low, a given variable can serve
to increase or decrease the extent of elaboration (e.g.,
“I am curious as to what this attractive person thinks,
so I’ll pay careful attention”). When variables affect
elaboration, they can increase or decrease persuasion,
depending on the strength of the arguments presented.

For example, if a variable (e.g., source attractiveness)
increases elaboration, persuasion will be enhanced when
strong arguments are presented but decreased when
weak arguments are presented. With the multiple roles
postulate, the ELM explains how the same variable
can bring about attitude change in different ways (e.g.,
serving as a cue, biasing processing) with different
consequences.
Kenneth G. DeMarree
Richard E. Petty
See also Attention; Attitude Change; Attitude Strength; Dual
Process Theories; Motivated Cognition; Need for
Cognition; Persuasion; Resisting Persuasion
Further Readings
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration
likelihood model of persuasion. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 19,
pp. 123–205). New York: Academic Press.
Petty, R. E., Cacioppo, J. T., Strathman, A., & Priester, J. R.
(2005). To think or not to think? Exploring two routes to
persuasion. In T. C. Brock & M. C. Green (Eds.),
Persuasion: Psychological insights and perspectives
(2nd ed., pp. 81–116). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
ELEVATION
Definition
Novels, films, religious texts, and popular books often
provoke a feeling in the viewer of being moved by the
moral excellence of another person. Drawing upon
Thomas Jefferson’s own analysis of this emotion,
Jonathan Haidt has called this emotion elevation.
According to Jefferson, elevation is the desire to perform
acts of charity or gratitude when presented with
same and, on the contrary, the sense of abhorrence
when presented with an appalling deed.
Usage and Analysis
Elevation is elicited by acts of charity, gratitude,
fidelity, generosity, or any other strong display of
virtue that runs counter to current expectations. In this
way, elevation differs from a closely related emotion,
awe, which occurs when the individual encounters
something that is vast and beyond current expectations.
People experience awe in response to transcendent
and vast objects in art, in nature, and for some, in
religious experience. People experience elevation, in
contrast, in response to the morally virtuous actions of
others.
Jefferson’s analysis points to other hypotheses that
are beginning to be investigated. What is the physiological
sensation of elevation? People report feelings
of the opening and swelling in the chest. These sensations
may trace back to the activity of the vagus nerve,
which is a bundle of nerves originating in the top of
the spinal cord. Research finds that when the vagus
nerve is activated, shifts in breathing and heart rate
occur, and people tend to feel prosocial sentiments,
such as compassion, as well as engage in prosocial
behavior aimed at attending to the needs of others.
Perhaps more intriguing is the question of whether
the experience of elevation inspires morally virtuous
action? For Jefferson, elevation was a source of charity
and gratitude. Does witnessing another’s selfless
action inspire altruism and benevolence in the viewer?
As yet there is no evidence to support this, but the
answers to this question will have important implications
for the study of how people learn to be moral
actors and how cooperative communities form.
See also Awe; Emotion; Helping Behavior
Further Readings
Dacher Keltner
Christopher Oveis
Haidt, J. (2000). The positive emotion of elevation
[Electronic version]. Prevention and Treatment, 3.
Jefferson, T. (1975). Letter to Robert Skipwith. In
M. D. Peterson (Ed.), The portable Thomas Jefferson
(pp. 349–351). New York: Penguin.
EMBARRASSMENT
Embarrassment———283
Definition
Embarrassment is the emotion that results when social
predicaments increase the threat of unwanted evaluations
from real or imagined audiences. It occurs when
people realize that they are making undesired impressions
on others, and it usually strikes without warning

284———Embarrassment
when some misstep or abrupt change in fortune puts
people in awkward situations. It is characterized by
feelings of startled surprise, ungainly awkwardness,
and sheepish abashment and chagrin. Embarrassed
people typically feel painfully conspicuous and clumsy;
they rue their circumstances and may be mortified or
even humiliated by the unwelcome judgments they
presume from others.
Context and Importance
Embarrassment is clearly an emotion: When it occurs,
it strikes quickly and automatically in a manner that
people cannot control, but it lasts only a short time.
Moreover, embarrassment is a distinctive emotion that
is unlike any other: It has unique antecedents and physiological
effects, it elicits singular feelings and behaviors,
and it has particular effects on people’s interactions
with others.
The events that cause embarrassment range from
individual blunders—in which people rip their pants,
spill their drinks, or forget others’ names—to more
complex circumstances in which interactions take
awkward turns or innocent victims are made the butt of
practical jokes. The common element in these events is
that they all convey to other people unexpected, unwelcome
information that threatens to make an unwanted
impression. Because embarrassment arises from acute
concerns about what others are thinking, it is unlikely
to occur if one genuinely does not care what one’s present
audience thinks.
When it occurs, embarrassment engenders a notable
physical reaction, blushing, which is caused by dilation
of veins in the neck and face that brings blood
closer to the surface of the skin. A distinctive pattern of
nonverbal behavior also occurs: When embarrassment
strikes, people avert their gazes and try not to smile,
but they usually break into sheepish grins that are recognizably
different from smiles of real amusement.
They may bring their hands to their faces, bow their
heads, gesture broadly, and stammer, and when this
sequence of behavior is accompanied by a blush, embarrassment
is easy to detect.
The feelings that result from embarrassment are
less painful than those that result from shame.
Embarrassment causes sheepish discombobulation,
whereas shame (which follows darker, weightier
wrongdoing) is characterized by spiteful disgust and
disdain for one’s flaws. Embarrassment is also quite
different from shyness, the state of fretful trepidation
over potential disapproval that has not yet occurred.
Shyness operates as a mood that may persist for long
periods of time, whereas embarrassment strikes suddenly
in response to actual predicaments but then
quickly fades.
Abashed and chagrined, people who are embarrassed
are usually contrite and eager to please. Their
behavior is typically helpful and conciliatory as they try
to repair any insult or damage they may have caused.
Perhaps for that reason, embarrassment usually elicits
positive reactions from those who witness it. Audiences
routinely respond to someone’s obvious embarrassment
with expressions of sympathy and support, and when
some public transgression occurs, observers like people
who become embarrassed more than those who remain
unruffled and calm. Embarrassment that is proportional
to one’s predicament actually elicits more favorable
evaluations after some misbehavior than poised imperturbability
does.
Evidence
Embarrassment’s links to social evaluation emerge
from three types of evidence. First, people who lack
the self-conscious ability to understand what people
are thinking of them—such as very young children or
adults with damage in certain areas of the prefrontal
lobes of their brains—do not experience embarrassment.
Second, it takes years for our cognitive abilities
to develop fully, and only when they are able (around
10 years of age) to comprehend others’ points of view
do children become embarrassed by the same subtle
situations that embarrass adults. Third, some people
are more susceptible to embarrassment than others
are, and people who embarrass easily tend to be sensitive
to social evaluation; they dread disapproval and
they fear that others’ judgments of them are more negative
and rejecting than they really are.
Importantly, if audiences are shown tapes of shoppers
who clumsily cause damage in a grocery store,
they like those who respond to their predicaments with
evident embarrassment more than those who remain
cool and calm. Furthermore, diary studies demonstrate
that, as it unfolds in actual interactions, a person’s
embarrassment is usually met with kindly responses
from those who encounter it. Evidently, embarrassment
is a desirable reaction to social missteps that
threaten to portray a person in an unwanted manner.
Implications
Embarrassment’s nature and its interactive effects
are consistent with the provocative possibility that

embarrassment evolved to help forestall social rejection
that might otherwise threaten one’s survival in difficult
ancestral environments. In occurring automatically
when a person becomes aware of some misbehavior,
embarrassment interrupts the person’s activity and
focuses his or her attention on his or her predicament.
It also provides a reliable nonverbal signal that shows
others that a person both recognizes and regrets his or
her misconduct: A blush cannot be faked or consciously
controlled, so it demonstrates that a person’s abashment
is authentic and his or her contrition sincere. That may
be why others then routinely respond to a person’s
embarrassment with kindly support, despite the person’s
missteps; a person’s embarrassed emotion reassures
them of his or her good intentions. It is sometimes
goofy and usually unpleasant, but embarrassment provides
a handy mechanism with which to manage the
inevitable pitfalls of social life.
See also Emotion; Moral Emotions
Further Readings
Rowland Miller
Miller, R. S. (1996). Embarrassment: Poise and peril in
everyday life. New York: Guilford Press.
EMOTION
Definition
Emotions can be defined as psychological states that
comprise thoughts and feelings, physiological changes,
expressive behaviors, and inclinations to act. The
precise combination of these elements varies from
emotion to emotion, and emotions may or may not
be accompanied by overt behaviors. This complex of
states and behaviors is triggered by an event that is
either experienced or recalled. Someone insults you.
Depending on the nature of the insult and your perception
of the extent to which it was or was not intended
to hurt you, you might feel angry or annoyed. If you
feel angry, your face may redden, your heart may beat
faster, your fists clench, and thoughts of retribution
occur to you. In some cases you might take action
against the person who was insulting. Days later,
recalling the insult may re-evoke at least some features
of the original emotional reaction. Similarly, clear-cut
cases of emotion could be given for fear, joy, love, disgust,
and sadness, among many others. However, there
are also emotions that are less clear-cut, in that they do
not always involve changes in physiological or motivational
states and do not always result in behavioral
change. Take the example of regret. Having made a
decision or taken a course of action that turns out
badly, one may well feel strong regret, but this subjective
experience will typically not be accompanied by
changes in physiology or behavior.
Further complications arise when considering psychological
states that seem to be borderline cases of
emotion: physical pain, generalized or free-floating
anxiety, sexual arousal, boredom, depression, irritability,
all of which can be seen as examples of affective
states. Psychologists who study emotion tend to distinguish
between affective states that have a clear
object and those that do not, arguing that emotion is a
term that should be reserved for psychological states
that have an object. On this basis, chronic pain, general
states of boredom, depression, or irritability
would not be classed as emotions, whereas sexual
arousal—to the extent that it has a clear object—
would be treated as an emotional state. The distinction
between affective states that have an object and those
that do not is one that separates emotions, on one
hand, from moods (e.g., irritability, boredom) and
affective dispositions (depression, generalized anxiety),
on the other.
Recognizing the difficulties inherent in trying to
arrive at watertight definitions of what constitutes an
emotion, theorists are generally agreed in regarding
emotion as a set of states that has a fuzzy boundary
with other psychological states, such as beliefs, attitudes,
values, moods, and personality dispositions.
What is not in dispute is that the set of states called
emotion is defined by good examples, such as anger,
fear, and passionate love. Where there is room for
doubt, at or near the fuzzy boundary with neighboring
states, psychologists are generally unconcerned with
whether the state in question is an emotion. The difficulty
of defining emotion is thereby finessed.
History and Background
Emotion———285
Modern emotion theory is usually traced back to the
writings of Charles Darwin or William James. Writing
in the second half of the 19th century, these authors
focused on issues that are still the subject of research
and debate nearly 150 years later. Darwin’s focus was
on the relation between subjective emotion and overt

286———Emotion
behavior. He argued that three principles explain the
relation between emotions and expressive behavior.
Of these, the first, the principle of serviceable associated
habits, is the one most commonly linked to
Darwinian explanations for expressive behavior. Here
the argument is that movements of the face that originally
served a purpose during emotional experiences
have become automatic accompaniments of those
emotions. Thus, the frowning that often accompanies
anger might help to protect the eye socket by drawing
the brows forward and together, or the eye widening
that often accompanies surprise might help to take in
more visual information when sudden, novel events
occur. Surprisingly, given the general theory of evolution
for which Darwin is better known, his writings on
emotional expression did not treat this expression as
the outcome of a process of natural selection. Rather,
he saw the emotion–expression link as a learned habit
that then gets passed on to one’s progeny. However,
modern evolutionary theory can readily be applied to
this issue, resulting in the view that it was the adaptive
significance for the individual or the group that led to
emotions being outwardly expressed. The notion that
there is a close relation between emotional experience
and bodily expression is certainly one that is echoed
in modern emotion theory.
James focused on the fundamental question of the
determinants of emotion. James advocated what has
come to be called a peripheral theory of emotion, in
which he argued that the perception of an arousing
stimulus causes changes in peripheral organs, such as
the viscera (heart, lungs, stomach, etc.) and the voluntary
muscles, and that emotion is quite simply the perception
of these bodily changes. To use James’s own
example, it is not that people tremble and run because
they are afraid; rather, they are afraid because they
tremble and run. This raises the question of how the
bodily changes come about. Here James argued for a
direct link between perception and bodily change,
using the analogy of a lock and a key. The fit between
the perception of emotion-arousing stimuli and the
human mind is, in James’s view, such that the stimuli
automatically unlock physiological changes in the
body, and it is the perception of these changes that is
the emotion. The idea that there is a close link between
perception and emotion, relatively unmediated by conscious
cognition, is still found in modern emotion theory,
as is the notion that changes in the peripheral
activity of the body results in changes in emotion.
A third major plank in the theoretical analysis of
emotion in psychology came with the rise of cognitivism
(i.e., close study of mental processes) in the 1960s.
The first proponent of a view that came to be known
as appraisal theory was Magda Arnold. She argued
that what makes people experience an emotion is not
bodily change, but rather the cognitive process that
makes one kind of stimulus emotionally arousing
while another kind of stimulus leaves people cold.
The difference, she argued, is that the emotionally
arousing stimulus is personally meaningful and matters
to people. Unless the stimulus matters to people,
they will not become emotional. Clearly, what matters
to one person may leave another person cold. This
emphasis on subjective meaning in appraisal theory
led researchers to shift their attention from the objective
properties of emotional stimuli to the subjective
processes (appraisal processes) by which perceivers
attach significance and meaning to stimuli. Modern
emotion theory is very much concerned with this
process of meaning making.
Notice that these three key sources of influence on
modern emotion theory map rather neatly onto three
of the supposed components of emotion: expression,
physiological activity, and cognitions. Before examining
each of these three components in greater detail,
consider the connection between emotion and social
psychology.
Social Psychology and Emotion
Emotion is a topic studied within many subdisciplines
of psychology, including clinical psychology,
biological psychology, and developmental psychology.
Yet if one reviews the history of psychological
theory and research on emotion, it is noticeable that
social psychologists have played a prominent role. In
one sense this is surprising. There are certainly emotional
reactions that have little or nothing to do with
the social world that is the primary concern of social
psychologists: Think of fear of heights, of snakes, or
of grizzly bears. Yet these emotions are not typical
of the range of emotions that people experience in
everyday life. As noted earlier, emotions are always
about something: They have an object. This object is
very often social. It is a person (a rival for your loved
one’s affection), a social group (an organization that
does inspiring work in developing countries), a social
event (your favorite sports team winning a trophy), or
a social or cultural artifact (a piece of music). It turns
out that these social objects are much more likely
than nonsocial objects to be the source of our everyday
emotions.

Furthermore, many emotions are either inherently or
functionally social, in the sense that they either would
not be experienced in the absence of others or seem to
have no other function than to bind people to other
people. Emotions such as compassion, sympathy, maternal
love, affection, and admiration are ones that depend
on other people being physically or psychologically
present. Fear of rejection, loneliness, embarrassment,
guilt, shame, jealousy, and sexual attraction are emotions
that seem to have as their primary function the
seeking out or cementing of social relationships.
A final point concerning the link between emotion
and social life is that when people experience emotions,
they have a strong tendency to share them with
others. In research on what is called the social sharing
of emotion, investigators have shown that the overwhelming
majority of emotional experiences are
shared with others, are shared with several others, and
are shared soon after the triggering event. Moreover,
this sharing of emotion with others elicits emotional
reactions in the listeners, which is itself an interesting
phenomenon, depending as it does on the listener’s
tendency to empathize with the sharer. And the emotions
experienced by the listeners tend to be shared
with third parties, a phenomenon called secondary
social sharing. There is an interesting paradox here.
People tend to share their emotional experiences, some
of which may be painful or shaming, with intimates
because they trust them not to share their secrets with
others. And yet these intimates are the very ones who
are likely to empathize with other people and therefore
to experience emotions themselves as a result of listening
to what others divulge. This makes it likely that
they will engage in secondary social sharing.
These points make it clear that emotions are invariably
social in nature: They are about social objects,
their function seems to be social, and they have social
consequences. A parallel point is that the subject matter
of social psychology is invariably emotional in
nature: Topics such as close relationships, aggression
and hostility, altruism and helping behavior, prejudice
and stereotyping, and attitudes and persuasion entail
concepts and processes that are often explicitly emotional.
In short, there is an intimate connection between
emotion and social psychology, which in turn helps to
account for the prominent role that social psychologists
have made to emotion theory and research.
This entry will now return to the three components of
emotion identified earlier, namely, physiological changes,
cognitions, and expressive behaviors, and review modern
developments in research on each component.
Physiological Change
Emotion———287
The theory of emotion proposed by James, already
referred to, is one that places physiological change at
the center of emotion. As James put it, if people could
imagine themselves perceiving an emotional stimulus
without any accompanying bodily changes, the result
would be a pale and colorless imitation of the real
emotion. This seems correct in the case of emotions
such as fear and anger: What would such experiences
be if they were stripped of all the accompanying physiological
changes? For James, this was evidence of
the necessary role played by such bodily activity.
However, there are several possible problems with
James’s approach, one of them being the fact that the
large variety of emotion terms found in English and
many other languages is not matched by an equally
large variety of distinguishable patterns of physiological
activity during emotion. This is one of five problems
noted by Walter Cannon who focused his
attention on that aspect of James’s theory concerning
visceral changes in organs such as the heart, as
opposed to changes in voluntary muscles such as
those in the face or the limbs. Another of the problems
noted by Cannon is that visceral changes tend to be
rather slow, whereas emotional reactions can be, and
often are, rather fast. If this is the case, how can the
experience of an emotion be the perception of the
bodily changes that occur on exposure to the right
emotional stimulus?
These were some of the considerations that Stanley
Schachter took into account in developing his twofactor
theory of emotion. Schachter had previously
conducted research on the way in which people who
were made to feel anxious and uncertain liked to be in
the company of other people who were in the same
situation, so that they could compare their own emotional
reactions with those of other people. This suggests
that social context may play an important role in
emotion, by helping people to interpret their stirredup
internal state. Rather than there being a particular
pattern of bodily change associated with each subjectively
distinguishable emotion, Schachter suggested
that the key role played by bodily change was to energize
emotion; without a state of physiological arousal,
no emotion would ensue. Bodily change, on this
account, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for
emotion. For emotion to be experienced, the second of
the two factors is also needed. This factor is cognition,
and the role it plays in Schachter’s model is that of
labeling the general state of arousal. In theory, then,

288———Emotion
exactly the same physiological state of arousal could
be interpreted in quite different ways and therefore
experienced as quite different emotions.
Despite its elegance, this bold prediction made by
two-factor theory did not attract enough experimental
support for the theory to be able to remain as influential
as it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. What has
survived relatively unscathed is the proposition that
people can misattribute the cause of any felt arousal,
with the result that they will tolerate more pain if they
are led to believe that at least part of the arousal they
experience when exposed to a painful stimulus is due
to a drug (in fact a placebo, which means a drug that
has no genuine effect, like fake pills) that they have
swallowed. Equally, if they are led to think that they
have ingested a tranquilizer (again, in fact a placebo,
so it has no tranquilizing effect) then any arousal they
experience will tend to be overattributed to the most
plausible source of arousal. If the most plausible
source of the arousal is the fact that they have just
written an essay advocating a position that runs contrary
to their beliefs, and they are concerned about the
effect this essay may have on others, they change their
attitudes even more than they would in a no-tranquilizer
control condition, apparently because they believe
themselves to be experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance
as a result of writing the essay; and the most
effective way to reduce the dissonance is to change
one’s attitude to bring it more into line with the position
taken in the essay.
The focus both of Cannon’s critique of James and
of Schachter’s attempt to build a theory that took
account of this critique was the state of arousal of the
individual’s autonomic nervous system. Yet bodily
change clearly can involve more than how fast one’s
heart is beating, how dry one’s mouth is, and how
much tremor there is in one’s hands—all of which are
perceptible signs of autonomic nervous system
arousal. James’s theory was as much concerned with
the activity of the voluntary muscles as with visceral
changes, as is evident from his assertion that we feel
angry because we strike (rather than striking because
we feel angry). This aspect of James’s theorizing was
taken up by researchers interested in the effects of
manipulating the feedback individuals receive from
their facial or postural musculature. A series of studies
has shown, for example, that people tend to find
humorous stimuli more amusing if their faces are
induced to smile during exposure to these stimuli, that
they find painful stimuli more noxious if they are led
to adopt more negative facial expressions while
exposed to these stimuli, and that they feel more
dejected if they are induced to adopt a stooping posture.
Thus modern research has provided support for
one feature of James’s theory, even if that evidence is
more consistent with the view that the perception of
bodily change moderates (rather than mediates) the
experience of emotion.
Cognition and Emotion
Although cognition was given a central role in
Schachter’s two-factor theory, that role was distinct
from the role it has in appraisal theories of emotion. In
Schachter’s theory, the role of cognition was to label
arousal that was already present. In appraisal theory,
the role of cognition is to interpret the significance
and meaning of the unfolding emotional event.
Imagine that you hear a strange noise coming from
your ground-floor kitchen in the middle of the night.
The sense you make of this event through a process of
appraisal is regarded as determining whether and how
you will react emotionally. Interpreting the noise as
caused by a human intruder will give rise to a very different
set of emotions than will interpreting the noise
as caused by your cat or by the wind blowing something
off the window sill. Another important factor,
in the view of appraisal theorists, is your sense that
you will be able to cope with any possible threat to
your well-being. A young, physically able person will
experience less threat under these circumstances than
will an elderly or disabled person. The essence of the
appraisal theory view of the role played by appraisal
is nicely summarized in Nico Frijda’s law of situational
meaning, which states that emotions arise from
the meanings people ascribe to situations and that if
the meaning changes (such that your initial thought
that the noise from your kitchen was made by an
intruder now changes as you remember that your cat
had been outside when you went to bed, and the noise
is the sound of her entering the house), so too will be
emotion (in this case from fear to relief).
The singular term appraisal theory makes it seem
as though there is one theory to which all appraisal theorists
subscribe. In fact there are several appraisal theories,
all of which share the view that emotions arise
from cognitive appraisals. Where they differ is with
respect to the details of how this common assumption
is worked into a full-fledged theoretical position.
Some theorists, like Richard Lazarus, emphasize the
importance of a relatively small set of core relational
themes. These are, in effect, clusters of configured

appraisals that capture the essence of an emotion.
Thus, the core relational theme of irrevocable loss is
one that holistically defines sadness, whereas the core
relational theme of other blame is one that holistically
defines anger. The advantage of these core relational
themes is that they capture the key relational meaning
of a situation and are therefore likely to be predictive
of physiological and behavioral changes. Other
appraisal theorists, like Frijda, emphasize the readiness
for action that appraisals entail. Even if one does not
act on these so-called action tendencies, the felt tendency
to aggress, to retreat, to freeze, to cry, to laugh,
and so on, represents an important element of the experienced
emotion. Still other theorists, such as Klaus
Scherer, emphasize the importance of the temporal
dimension of appraisal. On this view appraisal is a
sequential business, starting with rudimentary checks,
such as whether the stimulus is novel, pleasant, and
expected (in that order), and ending with more complex
assessments, such as whether the stimulus conforms
to personal or social norms.
There is a wealth of evidence showing that individual
emotions are associated with distinct appraisals or
patterns of appraisal. There is no doubt, then, that people
are able to make connections between emotions and
appraisals in much the same way that appraisal theorists
propose. Less plentiful is good evidence showing
that appraisals are causally linked to emotions. This
leaves open the question of whether appraisals are
causes, constituents, or even consequences of emotion.
This turns out to be a critical issue, because the most
sustained attack on appraisal theory, initiated by
Robert Zajonc, has argued that affective reactions (in
the sense of like, approach, dislike, avoid) often precede
cognitive reactions (such as beneficial or detrimental
to one’s goals), and therefore cannot be caused
by them. The sheer speed of emotional reactions is an
important component of Zajonc’s critique, raising
doubts about the potential for relatively time-consuming
cognitive processes to mediate these reactions. Also
important for Zajonc’s argument is evidence that people
are able to arrive at evaluations of stimuli without
being aware of having been exposed to them, as in the
mere exposure effect, which again raises questions
about the necessity of appraising a stimulus before
having an emotional response to it.
A compromise position on the role of cognitive
appraisal in emotion is one that recognizes that there is
more than one route to an emotional response. Take
fear as an example. Modern animal and clinical
research shows that there are two distinct ways in
which fear can be triggered in the brain, one of which
is cortically mediated (thereby implying a role for
appraisal), the other of which is mediated by the amygdala
(implying a fast response that would be adaptive in
predator–prey situations). Note that this subcortical
route harks back to one of James’s central assumptions,
namely, that there is an automatic link between perception
and bodily change. The two-routes argument
works best for emotions such as fear, which have clear
implications for the survival of the individual. It is less
plausible to argue for two routes in the case of an emotion
such as guilt, for example. Yet here, too, there is
debate about the extent to which the appraisal that is
assumed by many theorists to be a necessary condition
for guilt, namely, perceived responsibility for harm to
another, is in fact necessary. Roy Baumeister, for example,
has argued that the root cause of guilt is loss of love
in a valued relationship and that people who experience
this loss of love feel guilty and, as a component or consequence
of these guilt feelings, feel responsible for the
hurt experienced by the other party to the relationship.
Expression and Emotion
Emotion———289
It is obvious that emotions can be expressed in the face
and other parts of the body. If someone is intensely
angry, sad, afraid, or surprised, others are likely to be
able to see signs of the emotion in question in that person’s
face. The outward expression of inner emotional
experience is, of course, of particular interest to social
psychologists because it affords others the opportunity
to understand how someone is feeling without this
person needing to explain the feeling in words. It is
sometimes argued that the nonverbal means of communicating
emotion are more important and effective
than the verbal means. Clearly, this is true of interpersonal
communication whereby one or both persons
are unable to communicate verbally, because they are
prelingual (as in the case of infants) or deaf or simply
unable either to speak or to hear each other because of
the context (as in a silent Trappist Order or in noisy
working environments). It is known that babies are
especially interested in faces and that there is a tendency
for humans to mimic each other’s nonverbal
behaviors. People tend to like other people more when
others mimic them in this way. To the extent that
people do what others do, facially and posturally, and
to the extent that feedback from the face and from
body posture moderates their emotional experience, it is
likely that people come to feel what others are feeling,
thereby strengthening understanding of and bonding

290———Emotion
with those others. However, all of this depends to an
important degree on the extent to which subjective
experience of emotion translates into overt expression.
It may well be obvious that there are conditions under
which this does happen, but it is also obvious that
people are capable of appearing to feel one thing when
they really feel something else. To avoid giving offense,
people pretend to like things that they do not; actors
pretend to feel things that they do not so as to produce
a convincing portrayal of a character in a particular
setting. To what extent is bodily behavior a reliable
reflection of someone’s emotional state?
Paul Ekman and his colleagues have tested the
notion that there is a close relation between emotion
and facial behavior, which is what Ekman’s notion of
a facial affect program, a hardwired system linking
experienced emotion to facial behavior, would predict.
Their research program employs two kinds of
methods. The first is based on Darwin’s idea that the
ways in which emotions are expressed are universal
and therefore independent of culture. To provide more
scientific support for this idea than Darwin had been
able to muster, Ekman and colleagues took photographs
of faces that were recognized by Westerners
as clearly expressing certain emotions, and they
showed these to persons in a variety of other cultures.
The most telling studies are those conducted in preliterate
cultures, such as the highlands of Papua New
Guinea. What the researchers found was that members
of tribes living in these remote cultures, who had had
little exposure to Westerners or to Western media
images, could match the photographs to short stories
of an emotional nature in ways that showed that they
broadly understood the emotional meaning of the
faces. This is taken as evidence that emotions are
expressed facially in the same way across the world:
How else could researchers account for the ability of
those living in isolated cultures to attribute the same
meaning to faces as Westerners do? However, it is
important to recognize that these findings relate to a
limited set of emotional expressions—happy, sad,
angry, afraid, disgusted, and surprised—and that the
stimuli used in this type of research are still photos
taken at the apex of an extreme, iconic version of an
expression. It is also worth noting that although
members of remote tribes could match the photos to
emotional stories with above-chance accuracy, their
performance on average tends to be worse than that of
their Western counterparts. Bearing in mind that the
expressions they are asked to judge in these studies
are of Western faces, this raises the possibility that
people may be better at recognizing emotions in own
ethnicity faces than in other ethnicity faces. Recent
research suggests that this is the case, pointing to the
existence of emotional dialects that are easier for persons
who are familiar with the dialect to decode.
The second line of research pursued by Ekman and
colleagues has directly examined the extent to which
different emotions are accompanied by measurable
differences in facial behavior. In this line of work,
researchers have made use of the Facial Action Coding
System (FACS), a measurement system for coding all
visible movement in the human face, which was developed
by Ekman in collaboration with Wallace Friesen.
This sort of research has shown, for example, that happiness
and disgust, as induced by film clips, are associated
with different facial actions. This seemingly
uncontroversial finding has been the subject of some
debate in the literature. Various researchers have used
films and other types of stimulus to induce emotional
states, surprise being a recent example, and have failed
to find that these states are accompanied by the distinct
facial actions (brow-raising, eye-widening, jaw-dropping)
that would be expected if the notion of a facial affect
program were correct. Other researchers have questioned
the assumption that there is a close relation
between emotion and facial action, arguing instead
that facial actions evolved to communicate intentions
or motives, not emotions, to conspecifics. This line
of argument leads one to predict that facial behavior
should vary as a function of how social a situation is,
rather than how emotional it is. The debate concerning
the closeness and robustness of the relation between
emotion and overt behavior is far from settled, but it is
evident to most commentators that the strength of the
relation is variable. The challenge for future researchers
is to identify the factors that moderate this relation.
The Social Life of Emotion
Although much of the research on emotion has a distinctly
social psychological flavor, emotion researchers
have started to address more explicitly social psychological
issues, and social psychologists have started to
incorporate emotional concepts and measures into their
study of mainstream social psychological issues. Thus,
on the one hand, there are emotion researchers who
study social or self-conscious emotions, such as shame,
guilt, embarrassment, envy, and jealousy—emotions
that depend on a real or imagined social context. The
importance of this work is that it treats emotion as
embedded in a social context and thereby helps to

counterbalance the tacit assumption in much theorizing
that emotion is essentially a private experience that
arises from socially isolated individuals’ assessments of
the implications of events for their personal well-being.
Also noteworthy in this connection are emotion
researchers who study the impact of culture on emotional
experience and expression. What this type of
research makes clear is that the ways in which cultures
promote certain kinds of values (e.g., honor) or selfconstruals
(e.g., the self as an autonomous agent) have
an impact on the conditions under which emotions are
experienced and communicated.
On the other hand, there are social psychologists
who study phenomena such as interpersonal, group, or
intergroup relationships and who have found that by
taking emotional processes into account they gain a
richer understanding of these phenomena. Harmony
and discord in close personal relationships can be better
understood by examining the quality and quantity
of emotional communication in those relationships.
Variations in productivity in work groups can be better
understood by examining the emotional climates
that prevail in these groups. Acceptance or rejection of
other social groups can be better understood by taking
account of the emotions that are felt toward members
of those groups.
Although social psychologists have played a
central role in emotion research, it is only relatively
recently that emotion has become a central topic of
research for social psychologists, but there is every
indication that the relationship between emotion and
social psychology will be mutually beneficial.
Antony S. R. Manstead
See also Affect; Affect-as-Information; Arousal; Coping;
Deception (Lying); Emotional Contagion; Emotional
Intelligence; Facial Expression of Emotion; Facial-Feedback
Hypothesis; Intergroup Emotions; Mere Exposure Effect;
Misattribution of Arousal; Moral Emotions; Nonconscious
Emotion; Nonverbal Cues and Communication; Opponent
Process Theory of Emotions; Positive Affect; Stress and
Coping; Stress-Appraisal Theory (Primary and Secondary
Appraisal)
Further Readings
Ekman, P., & Rosenberg, E. (Eds.). (1997). What the face
reveals: Basic and applied studies of spontaneous
expression using the facial action coding system (FACS).
New York: Oxford University Press.
Kitayama, S., & Markus, H. R. (Eds.). (1994). Emotion and
culture: Empirical studies of mutual influence.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Leach, C. W., & Tiedens, L. Z. (Eds.). (2004). The social life
of emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Parkinson, B., Fischer, A., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2005).
Emotion in social relations: Cultural, group and
interpersonal perspectives. New York: Psychology Press.
Parrott, W. G. (Ed.). (2000). Emotions in social psychology:
Essential readings. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Philippot, P., Friedman, R. S., & Coats, E. J. (Eds.). (1999).
The social context of nonverbal behavior. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Russell, J. A., & Fernández-Dols, J. M. (Eds.). (1997). The
psychology of facial expression. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Scherer, K. R., Schorr, A., & Johnstone, T. (Eds.). (2001).
Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods,
research. London: Oxford University Press.
EMOTIONAL CONTAGION
Emotional Contagion———291
Definition
Emotional contagion is the phenomenon that individuals
tend to express and feel emotions that are similar to
those of others. When someone tells you with a big
smile that she passed an important test, you smile as
well. If, on the other hand, your friend tells you his
father passed away last week, you feel depressed, not
so much because of the recollection of your friend’s
father, whom you don’t know, but mainly because your
friend is so sad. In other words, you do not only observe
your friend’s emotions, but they also affect your own
emotional expressions and emotional state. Thus, emotional
contagion is a form of social influence.
Context and Function
Emotional contagion may occur between two persons
but also in larger groups. Think of collective rage that
spreads among a group of workers when facing their
superiors, who argue that the financial cuts are a necessary
measure to make the organization healthy again;
or the panic that flows through a community, because
of a series of crimes committed in the neighborhood;
or of the shared sentiments of a crowd moved by a
speech of their leader. In all of these cases, emotions
are, in large part, elicited because people catch each
other’s emotions: People are sad, elated, frightened, or

292———Emotional Contagion
angry because they see others in their immediate
surroundings experiencing these emotions.
Why would emotional contagion occur? The most
important function of emotional contagion is that it
smoothens social interactions and facilitates mutual
involvement and emotional closeness, because it
helps to synchronize and coordinate the interaction.
Communication is simply better when you have the
feeling that another person understands your feelings
and feels with you rather than when the other person
is completely unaware of your emotions. This not
only would lead to a better conversation, but it may
also improve feelings of intimacy or friendship with
the other person. A similar function applies to larger
groups where emotional contagion enhances positive
feelings between ingroup members (and sometimes
negative feelings toward outgroup members) and thus
strengthens social bonds.
Explanations and Evidence
Emotional contagion has been described as a multiply
determined process, consisting of both automatic processing
of others’ nonverbal displays as well as more
conscious information processing of others’ emotional
expressions and behavior. To date, most research has
been focused on the first aspect of emotional contagion,
which has been referred to as automatic mimicry:
We unconsciously tend to mimic and synchronize our
own nonverbal expressions with the nonverbal expressions
of other people. Thus, we smile, frown, move,
cry, sit, or stand in the same way as others, without
necessarily being aware of our copying behavior. The
bodily feedback from this mimicry would change our
subjective feelings accordingly. In other words, we do
not merely smile, or frown, but our smiling or frowning
makes us feel happy, or angry, in accordance with
these nonverbal displays. Various studies have provided
support for automatic mimicry. For example,
individuals show more happy and sad faces in response
to movie characters or mere photos showing the same
expressions; they start yawning or laughing when seeing
others yawn or laugh; individuals even imitate others
by tapping their feet, stuttering, or expressing pain.
It is less clear, however, to what extent persons also
feel similar emotions as a result of this mimicry.
In addition to this more automatic mimicking
behavior, individuals may try to empathize or identify
with another person at a more conscious level, resulting
in feeling and expressing similar emotions.
There are different factors that may facilitate emotional
contagion. The first factor relates to the nature of
the relationship between persons, namely, empathy.
When individuals love, like, or identify with others or
share their goals, they are more likely to catch the
other person’s emotions. More intimate relationships
are therefore characterized more by emotional contagion
than are relations between professionals or between
strangers. Indeed, it has been shown that dating partners
and college roommates became more emotionally
similar over a year. This emotional contagion effect
applied to both positive and negative emotional reactions
to events and could not be explained by increasing
similarity in personality variables. In addition, the
amount of empathy one may feel with the other person
also reflects individual differences: Some individuals
are simply better able to empathize than others.
Finally, empathy may also occur in less intimate relations.
Here, empathy may depend on whether one shares
goals or not. For example, the expectation to cooperate
with another person leads to more empathy.
Other potential determinants of emotional contagion
have hardly been studied empirically. One factor
may relate to the nature of the event eliciting the emotions
in the first place. We may expect others’ emotions
to be more contagious when the nature of the eliciting
event can be interpreted in different ways. For example,
should one feel anxious (or calm) when in a waiting
room for a medical test, or should one feel angry
(or sad, or happy) at the George W. Bush administration
for the war in Iraq? Still another important factor
may be the intensity of others’ emotional expressions
and the nature of these emotions. When expressions
are more intense, they may be more contagious; on the
other hand, some emotions may be more contagious in
nature than other emotions. For example, it is harder
not to smile when someone smiles at you than it is not
to frown when someone frowns at you.
Implications
Emotional contagion may explain specific group
behaviors, as well as the emotional development of
interpersonal relations. Most research has focused on
automatic mimicry, testing this phenomenon in different
contexts and with various nonverbal behaviors.
However, the phenomenon is still rather unexplored
and needs further examination, in particular with respect
to the conditions under which it occurs.
Agneta H. Fischer

See also Affect-as-Information; Emotion; Empathy;
Influence; Mimicry
Further Readings
Anderson, C., Keltner, D., & John, O. P. (2003). Emotional
convergence between people over time. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 1054–1068.
Barsade, S. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion
and its influence on group behavior. Administrative
Science Quarterly, 47, 644–675.
Hatfield, A., Cacioppo, J., & Rapson, R. L. (1994).
Emotional contagion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Lunqvist, L., & Dimberg, U. (1990). Facial expressions are
contagious. Journal of Psychophysiology, 9, 203–211.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the processes
involved in the recognition, use, understanding, and
management of one’s own and others’ emotional states
to solve emotion-laden problems and to regulate behavior.
EI, in this tradition, refers to an individual’s capacity
to reason about emotions and to process emotional
information to enhance reasoning. EI is a member of
an emerging group of mental abilities alongside social,
practical, and personal intelligences.
Research on EI is as an outgrowth of two areas of
psychological investigation that emerged toward the
end of the 20th century. In the 1980s, psychologists
and cognitive scientists began to examine how emotion
interacts with thinking and vice versa. For instance,
researchers studied how mood states can assist and
influence autobiographical memory and personal judgment.
At the same time, there was a gradual loosening
of the concept of intelligence to include a broad array
of mental abilities. Howard Gardner, for instance,
advised educators and scientists to place a greater
emphasis on the search for multiple intelligences (e.g.,
interpersonal intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence).
Gardner was primarily interested in helping
educators to appreciate students with diverse learning
styles and potentials.
The term emotional intelligence was introduced to
the scientific literature in two articles published in
1990. The first article, by Peter Salovey at Yale University
and John (Jack) D. Mayer at the University of
Emotional Intelligence———293
New Hampshire, formally defined EI as the ability to
monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions,
to discriminate among them, and to use emotion-laden
information to guide one’s thinking and actions. The
second article presented an empirical demonstration
of how EI could be tested as a mental ability. This
study demonstrated that emotion and cognition could
be combined to perform sophisticated information
processing. Daniel Goleman popularized the construct
in a best-selling 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence:
Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. EI quickly captured
the interest of the media, general public, and researchers.
Goleman’s claims about the importance of EI went
beyond the available data on the construct, however;
for example, he claimed that EI was as powerful and
at times more powerful than general intelligence in
predicting success in life. Goleman’s definition of EI
also encompassed a broad array of personal attributes,
including political awareness, self-confidence,
and conscientiousness, among other desirable personality
attributes.
In the following years, educators, psychologists, and
human resource professionals began to consult and
write about EI. Many of these individuals used the term
to represent the traits and skills related to character and
achieving success in life. However, other researchers
have focused the definition of EI on a set of mental
skills. They define EI as a set of four abilities pertaining
to (a) accurately perceiving and expressing emotion,
(b) using emotion to facilitate cognitive activities,
(c) understanding emotions, and (d) managing emotions
for both emotional and personal growth.
Perceiving emotion refers to the ability to perceive
and identify emotions in oneself and others, as well
as in other stimuli, including people’s voices, stories,
music, and works of art. Using emotion refers to the
ability to harness feelings that assist in certain cognitive
enterprises, such as problem solving, decision
making, and interpersonal communication, and also
leads to focused attention and, possibly, creative thinking.
Understanding emotions involves knowledge of
both emotion-related terms and of the manner in which
emotions combine, progress, and transition from one
to the other. Managing emotions includes the ability to
employ strategies that alter feelings and the assessment
of the effectiveness of such strategies.
There also are a number of published tests to measure
EI. Performance-based tests, such as the Mayer-
Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT)
for adults and the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional

294———Empathic Accuracy
Intelligence Test–Youth Version (MSCEIT–YV) for
adolescents (ages 12–17), have been developed. These
tests are performance-based measures of EI because
they require individuals to solve tasks pertaining to
each of the four abilities that are part of the theory (i.e.,
the perception, use, understanding, and management of
emotion). For example, to measure the ability to perceive
emotion, respondents examine a picture of a person
expressing a basic emotion and indicate the extent
to which the person is expressing each of five emotions
(e.g., happy, sad, fear, anger, and surprise) using a
5-point scale. Each respondent’s score is then compared
to scores from the normative sample (5,000 individuals)
or from a group of emotions experts who have dedicated
their careers to studying human emotions.
Evidence is quickly accumulating that EI, measured
by the MSCEIT, is related to a wide range of important
social behaviors in multiple life domains. For example,
individuals with higher MSCEIT scores report betterquality
friendships, and dating and married couples with
higher MSCEIT scores report more satisfaction and
happiness in their relationship. In addition, EI is associated
(negatively) with maladaptive lifestyle choices. For
example, college students with lower MSCEIT scores
report higher levels of drug and alcohol consumption
and more deviant acts, including stealing and fighting.
Moreover, among college students and adolescents,
lower MSCEIT scores are associated with higher levels
of anxiety and depression. Finally, EI is associated with
a number of important workplace outcomes. For example,
business professionals with high EI both see themselves
and are viewed by their supervisors as effectively
handling stress and creating a more enjoyable work
environment.
EI was only introduced to the broader psychological
audience about 15 years ago, and performancebased
measures of the construct have been used in
scientific investigations for about 5 years only. Future
research will certainly expand on the theory of EI, and
new tasks will be developed to measure the construct.
There is much to be learned about EI, and the fate of
EI is, in part, in the hands of investigators who will
explore the topic in greater detail.
See also Emotion; Self-Monitoring
Marc A. Brackett
Peter Salovey
Further Readings
Brackett, M. A., & Geher, G. (2006). Measuring emotional
intelligence: Paradigmatic shifts and common ground. In
J. Ciarrochi, J. P. Forgas, & J. D. Mayer (Eds.), Emotional
intelligence and everyday life (2nd ed., pp. 27–50).
New York: Psychology Press.
Brackett, M. A., & Salovey, P. (2004). Measuring emotional
intelligence as a mental ability with the Mayer-Salovey-
Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test. In G. Geher (Ed.),
Measurement of emotional intelligence (pp. 179–194).
Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science.
Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1997). What is emotional
intelligence? In P. Salovey & D. J. Sluyter (Eds.), Emotional
development and emotional intelligence: Educational
implications (pp. 4–30). New York: Basic Books.
Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. (2004). Emotional
intelligence: Theory, findings, and implications.
Psychological Inquiry, 15, 197–215.
EMPATHIC ACCURACY
Definition
Empathic accuracy refers to the degree to which
people can accurately infer the specific content of
other people’s thoughts and feelings. The ability to
accurately read other people’s thoughts and feelings
(everyday mind reading) is a fundamental skill that
affects people’s adjustment in many different aspects
of their lives.
For example, one researcher found that mothers
who were more accurate in inferring their child’s
thoughts and feelings had children with more positive
self-concepts. Other researchers have found that
young adolescents who were good at reading other
people’s thoughts and feelings had better peer relationships
and fewer personal adjustment problems
than those who were poor at reading others. And, with
regard to people’s dating and marriage relationships,
other researchers have found that accurately reading a
relationship partner to anticipate a need, avert a conflict,
or keep a small problem from escalating into a
large one is likely to be healthy and adaptive.
History, Measurement, and Validation
Empathic accuracy is a subarea of interpersonal perception
research—a field of study that has had a long

tradition in psychology. As a broad generalization, it
can be argued that interpersonal perception research
began with the study of accuracy regarding stable and
enduring dispositions, such as traits and attitudes, and
then gradually turned to the study of accuracy regarding
more unstable and transient dispositions such as
current thoughts and emotions (feelings).
The study of empathic accuracy emerged in the late
1980s when psychologist William Ickes and his colleagues
at the University of Texas at Arlington devised
a method for measuring the degree to which research
participants could accurately infer the specific content
of other people’s thoughts and feelings. The essential
feature of their method is that a perceiver infers a target
person’s thoughts or feelings either from a videotaped
record of their spontaneous interaction together
(the unstructured dyadic interaction paradigm) or from
a standard set of the videotaped interactions of multiple
target persons (standard stimulus paradigm). In
each case, the target persons have previously reported
the actual thoughts and feelings they had at specific
points during the videotaped interaction, thereby
enabling the researchers to compare the perceiver’s
inferred thoughts and feelings with the target person’s
actual thoughts and feelings to assess the perceiver’s
empathic accuracy.
To obtain a measure of empathic accuracy, independent
raters make subjective judgments about the
similarity between the content of each actual thought
or feeling and the content of the corresponding
inferred thought or feeling. Then, the number of each
perceiver’s total accuracy points is divided by the maximum
number of possible accuracy points to obtain a
percent-correct empathic accuracy measure that can
range from 0 to 100.
Across many studies conducted since 1988, this
method of measuring empathic accuracy has proved to
be both reliable and valid. Raters typically agree with
each other in their judgments of how many accuracy
points should be assigned to each of the various
thought/feeling inferences. In addition, perceivers
tend to be quite consistent in how well or how poorly
they infer the specific content of different target persons’
thoughts and feelings. That is, some perceivers
are consistently good at reading others, other perceivers
are consistently average, and still other perceivers
are consistently poor.
A number of predictive validity studies have been
conducted to date. One of the first predictions tested
Empathic Accuracy———295
was that, if the method for measuring empathic accuracy
was indeed valid, close friends should display
higher levels of accuracy than strangers when inferring
the content of each other’s thoughts and feelings.
This prediction was confirmed in studies which revealed
that, on average, the empathic accuracy scores of close,
same-sex friends were about 50% higher than those of
same-sex strangers.
The predictive validity of the empathic accuracy
measure received further support in a clinically relevant
study in which perceivers tried to infer the
thoughts and feelings of three female clients who each
appeared in a separate videotaped psychotherapy session.
The perceivers’ empathic scores were significantly
greater at the end of the psychotherapy tapes
than at the beginning, reflecting their greater acquaintance
with the clients and their problems. In addition,
perceivers who were randomly assigned to receive
immediate feedback about the clients’ actual thoughts
and feelings during the middle portion of each tape
should subsequently achieve better empathic accuracy
scores by the end of the tape than perceivers who did
not receive such feedback.
Establishing the convergent validity of the empathic
accuracy measure has proven to be more difficult and
complicated. Self-report measures of empathically relevant
dispositions generally fail to predict performance
on interpersonal accuracy/sensitivity tests, and this
conclusion certainly applies to the performance measure
of empathic accuracy. Accordingly, researchers
have instead concentrated on establishing the predictive
validity of the empathic accuracy measure.
Facts and Fictions About
Everyday Mind Reading
In studies conducted during the past 2 decades, some
beliefs about everyday mind reading have been supported
as fact, whereas other beliefs have been exposed
as apparently fictional. For example, it now seems reasonable
to claim the following as established facts:
Empathic accuracy improves with increasing acquaintanceship.
Empathic accuracy also improves following immediate,
veridical feedback about the target person’s actual thoughts
and feelings.
Perceivers’ levels of empathic accuracy tend to be stable
across different target persons.

296———Empathy
Highly inaccurate perceivers tend to have poorer-quality
relationships and more personal adjustment problems than
highly accurate perceivers.
On the other hand, there is no consistent support
for the following apparently fictional beliefs:
There are empathic superstars who can read other people’s
minds with perfect accuracy.
Women, in general, have greater empathic ability than men.
Longer-married couples are more accurate in reading
each other than are newlywed couples.
Telepathy (ESP or psi) is the basis of our everyday mind
reading ability.
Practical Applications
The research on empathic accuracy promises to have
many practical applications, including the following:
The screening and selection of potential counselors and
therapists, physicians and caregivers, diplomats and
negotiators, police and social workers, teachers, and
salespersons
Empathy training for people in all of these professions
that can be tailored to the specific target group(s) they
serve
Empathy training for people with significant empathic
deficits, such as abusive men and at-risk children and
adolescents
Mutual empathy training for those in various types of
distressed relationships.
See also Empathy; Inference
Further Readings
William Ickes
Marianne Schmid Mast
Ickes, W. (2003). Everyday mind reading: Understanding
what other people think and feel. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
EMPATHY
Definition
Empathy has many different definitions, some with
multiple parts. However, most definitions share the
idea of one person’s response to his or her perceptions
of another person’s current experience. Use of the
word in English is relatively new, appearing at the
beginning of the 20th century, often in discussions of
art. Its origins are traced to the German word
Einfühlung, which translates literally as “feeling into”
(as in projecting oneself into something else). Besides
generating research within the field of social psychology,
the study of empathy has also figured prominently
in client-centered psychotherapy.
Much has been made of the distinction between
empathy and sympathy, but the two terms are often
used interchangeably. When a distinction is made
(particularly in philosophical contexts), empathy is
often defined as understanding another person’s experience
by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation:
One understands the other person’s experience
as if it were being experienced by the self, but without
the self actually experiencing it. A distinction is maintained
between self and other. Sympathy, in contrast,
involves the experience of being moved by, or
responding in tune with, another person. Another
common distinction is to use sympathy when referring
specifically to the emotional side of empathy.
Emotional and Cognitive Empathy
Within social psychology, empathy may refer to an
emotional or cognitive response—or both. On the
emotional side, there are three commonly studied components
of empathy. The first is feeling the same
emotion as another person (sometimes attributed to
emotional contagion, e.g., unconsciously “catching”
someone else’s tears and feeling sad oneself). The second
component, personal distress, refers to one’s own
feelings of distress in response to perceiving another’s
plight. This distress may or may not mirror the
emotion that the other person is actually feeling. For
example, one may feel distress, but not specifically
depression, when another person says he or she is so
depressed he or she wants to kill himself; similarly, one
feels distress, but not actual pain, when one sees someone
fall. The third emotional component, feeling compassion
for another person, is the one most frequently
associated with the study of empathy in psychology.
It is often called empathic concern and sometimes
sympathy. Empathic concern is thought to emerge later
developmentally and to require more self-control than
either emotional contagion or personal distress, although
these earlier components (along with the ability to imitate)
probably lay the groundwork for later, more
sophisticated forms of empathy.

Empathic concern merits special attention for its
role in triggering prosocial and helping behaviors.
Research consistently finds a positive correlation
between how much empathic concern individuals
report feeling for another person (or group of people)
and their willingness to help those people, even when
helping requires some sacrifice (e.g., time, effort, or
money). Many of the most noble examples of human
behavior, including aiding strangers and stigmatized
people, are thought to have empathic roots (although
humans are not the only species that helps others in
distress). Research on empathic helping has prompted
an animated (and perhaps never-to-be-resolved) debate
about whether empathic helping is truly altruistic
(motivated by an ultimate goal to benefit the other
person) or whether it is motivated by selfish rewards,
such as reducing one’s own distress caused by seeing
another person’s situation, saving one’s kin (and thus
some portion of one’s genes), or securing public
respect or the promise of reciprocal help in the future.
Attempts to decide whether the helping behavior is
selfless or selfish are complicated by the fact that selfinterest
and benefits to the other person may overlap.
The other side of empathy, the cognitive side, centers
on the ancient philosophical “other minds problem”:
Our thoughts are ours alone, and we can never
directly access the contents of another person’s mind.
Cognitive empathy refers to the extent to which we
perceive or have evidence that we have successfully
guessed someone else’s thoughts and feelings. The
spectrum of cognitive empathy includes very simple
tasks such as visual perspective taking (e.g., standing in
one’s living room and imagining what a person outside
can see through the window) and extends up to very
complex mental challenges, such as imagining another
person’s guess about what a third person believes (e.g.,
“I think Fiona still believes that Seth doesn’t know
about what happened in Taiwan”). Whereas greater
emotional empathy is associated with more intense
emotions, greater cognitive empathy (often called
empathic accuracy) entails having more complete and
accurate knowledge about the contents of another person’s
mind, including how that person feels. Thus, cognitive
empathy still requires sensitivity and knowledge
about emotions. However, cognitive empathy generally
does not include any reference to caring about the other
person, thus allowing for the possibility of a kind of
Machiavellian cognitive empathy that can be used to
harm others (e.g., “know thy enemy”). This concept
runs counter to most, if not all, conversational uses of
the term empathy.
Cognitive empathy is intimately linked to the development
of a theory of mind, that is, understanding that
someone else’s thoughts may differ from one’s own. In
a typically developing child, a coherent theory of mind
emerges between ages 3 and 5 (although rudiments of
this skill, such as following another person’s gaze to
understand what she is looking at, appear earlier).
Theory of mind deficits is one major symptom of
autism, a psychological disorder that usually appears
early in life (other psychological disorders or brain
injuries can also produce empathy deficits).
Exactly how people accomplish cognitive empathy
has produced some debate. The simulation view postulates
that people imagine themselves in the other
person’s place, a view that meshes nicely with false
consensus effects and other egocentric phenomena
studied in social psychology. The theory view argues
that people develop theories about human thought and
behavior that they then use to predict and explain
other people’s actions, explaining humans’ ability to
tailor their perspective taking to a particular other
person. Successful perspective taking probably frequently
requires drawing on both strategies.
Measuring Empathy
Empathy———297
A variety of methods have been developed to measure
empathy and its various components. Many are selfreport
measures (i.e., people subjectively rate the
extent to which they think they have traits or feelings
related to empathy), but researchers have also created
innovative and more objective measures, particularly
for measuring empathic accuracy and counselors’
empathy toward clients in therapy. Physiological measures
(e.g., skin conductance, heart rate) and the
coding of facial expressions are often used to assess
emotional empathy. Most recently, researchers have
used brain-imaging techniques to explore the brain
areas and pathways that are activated when one is emotionally
responding to another person’s experience
or trying to cognitively represent what that person is
experiencing. These techniques have led to hypotheses
about mirror neurons. These brain cells (initially found
in monkeys) respond the same way when an action is
performed by the self and when similar actions are
observed being performed by another person (thus,
possibly suggesting a neural basis for empathy’s most
primitive mechanisms).
Outcomes in empathy studies vary depending on
which components of empathy are being assessed (e.g.,
factors that increase empathic concern may not also

298———Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis
affect empathic accuracy). The study of sex differences
in empathy provides an example of the complexities
of empathy: A prevalent gender stereotype exists that
women are more empathic than men. Results consistent
with this stereotype have been found when collecting
self-report measures of empathic concern, but the pattern
is less clear when using more objective measures,
and sex differences generally are not found with measures
of empathic accuracy except under certain conditions.
Furthermore, although evidence has been found
for stable empathic traits in people, empathy is perhaps
better conceptualized as something that emerges from a
complex interaction between (a) characteristics of the
target of empathy and that target’s situation and (b) the
traits, experiences, and motivation of the empathizer,
all embedded in a larger cultural context. Subjective
perceptions of all of these variables, such as the perceived
similarity between the empathizer and the target
of empathy, are at least as important as objective reality
in determining the experience of empathy.
Sara D. Hodges
Michael W. Myers
See also Altruism; Empathic Accuracy; False Consensus
Effect; Projection; Theory of Mind
Further Readings
Batson, C. D., Ahmad, N., & Stocks, E. L. (2004). Benefits
and liabilities of empathy-induced altruism. In A. G. Miller
(Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (pp. 359–385).
New York: Guilford Press.
Davis, M. H. (1994). Empathy: A social-psychological
approach. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark.
Hodges, S. D., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2007). Balancing the
empathy expense account: Strategies for regulating
empathic response. In T. F. D. Farrow & P. W. R. Woodruff
(Eds.), Empathy in mental illness and health (pp. 389–407).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ickes, W. (2003). Everyday mind reading: Understanding
what other people think and feel. Amherst, NY:
Prometheus Books.
EMPATHY–ALTRUISM HYPOTHESIS
Definition
The empathy–altruism hypothesis states that feelings
of empathy for another person produce an altruistic
motivation to increase that person’s welfare. In the
empathy–altruism hypothesis, the term empathy refers
to feelings of compassion, sympathy, tenderness, and
the like. Altruism refers to a motivational state in
which the goal is to increase another person’s welfare
as an end in itself. (Altruistic acts are what are ordinarily
called “good deeds.”) Note that this definition of
altruism is different from the typical usage of the term,
which is usually defined to mean an act of helping that
involves considerable personal costs to the helper.
Overall, the empathy–altruism hypothesis has generated
a large body of research that answers important
questions about why people help and fail to help, and
offers insights into the roles played by different types
of motives underlying human social behavior.
Background and Importance
The empathy–altruism hypothesis arose out of a longstanding
debate in Western philosophy and psychology
about whether humans possess the capacity for altruism.
For centuries, it was assumed that all human
behavior, including the helping of others, is egoistically
motivated. The term egoism refers to a motivational
state in which the goal is to increase one’s own
welfare as an end in itself. Although there is little
doubt that egoism can be a powerful motivator of helping
behavior, some researchers have questioned whether
all human behavior is motivated by self-interest.
Specifically, some have suggested that people may
help because they feel empathy for another person’s
welfare, which may lead to altruism. Those who have
argued that empathy may be a source of altruism include
naturalist Charles Darwin, philosophers David Hume
and Adam Smith, as well as psychologists Herbert
Spencer, William McDougall, Martin Hoffman, and
Dennis Krebs. Social psychologist C. Daniel Batson
formulated the empathy–altruism hypothesis as a revision
and extension of the ideas developed by these
philosophers and psychologists.
Evidence and Alternative Explanations
The empathy–altruism hypothesis predicts that those
feeling high levels of empathy for a person in need will
be more likely to help than will those feeling less empathy.
This prediction is well supported by research.
However, a number of egoistic alternative explanations
have been proposed to explain these findings.
For example, those feeling high levels of empathy
may feel more distress and, consequently, may be more
likely to help because they are egoistically motivated

to reduce their own distress. Another possibility is that
those feeling high levels of empathy are more likely to
help because they are more egoistically motivated to
avoid feeling bad about themselves or looking bad in
the eyes of others should they fail to help. Similarly,
those feeling high levels of empathy may be more
likely to help because they are more egoistically motivated
to feel good about themselves or to look good
in the eyes of others should they help. Determining
whether these and other egoistic explanations can
explain the high rates of helping among those feeling
high levels of empathy has generated much scientific
debate and empirical research. With few exceptions,
evidence from dozens of experiments over the past 30
years has provided support for the empathy–altruism
hypothesis over all the available egoistic explanations
and, by extension, for the claim that humans are indeed
capable of altruism.
Implications
In addition to investigating the nature of the motivation
associated with empathy, researchers studying the
empathy–altruism hypothesis have discovered a number
of other interesting phenomena. For example, those
feeling high levels of empathy tend to experience
more negative mood than those feeling low levels of
empathy when their attempt to help the person for
whom empathy is felt is unsuccessful. These findings
suggest that feeling high levels of empathy for others
may lead to negative outcomes for those feeling
empathy when altruistic goals are unattainable. Other
findings show that those feeling high levels of empathy
tend to behave unjustly or are willing to harm the
welfare of a group to which they belong when such
behavior will benefit a person for whom empathy is
felt. These findings demonstrate that, at least under
certain conditions, altruism can undermine other prosocial
objectives, such as maintaining justice or working
for the common good.
Although altruism at times may be harmful to those
feeling empathy, it does appear to be very beneficial
to those individuals for whom empathy is felt. For
example, research shows that individuals who feel
high levels of empathy will actually avoid helping the
person for whom empathy is felt in the short term
when doing so promotes the long-term welfare of that
individual. These findings suggest that altruistically
motivated individuals may be more sensitive to the
needs of those for whom empathy is felt compared to
individuals who are not altruistically motivated to
help. Finally, leading individuals to feel empathy for
members of stigmatized or disadvantaged groups
appears to produce not only a tendency to help members
of those groups, but also promotes positive attitudes
toward the groups as a whole. These findings
suggest that empathy may be useful for reducing prejudice
and discrimination.
The available research offers strong support for the
claim that humans are indeed capable of altruism.
Even though altruism appears to be beneficial to individuals
for whom empathy is felt, it may lead to negative
outcomes for the altruistically motivated person in
some circumstances. Also, altruism may lead helpers
to benefit the person for whom empathy is felt at the
expense of others. Although the debate over human
altruism may not be completely resolved any time
soon, the empathy–altruism hypothesis nonetheless
presents an intriguing and complex picture of human
motivation worthy of continued scientific attention.
David A. Lishner
E. L. Stocks
See also Altruism; Compassion; Empathy; Group Dynamics;
Helping Behavior; Intergroup Relations; Prosocial
Behavior; Stigma
Further Readings
Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Towards a
social-psychological answer. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Batson, C. D., & Shaw, L. L. (1991). Evidence for altruism:
Toward a pluralism of prosocial motives. Psychological
Inquiry, 2, 107–122. (Also note commentaries in same
issue)
ENCODING
Definition
Encoding———299
Encoding is the process by which we translate information
collected from the outside world by our sensory
organs into mental representations. We tend to
think of our eyes, ears, and other senses as analogous
to video recorders—faithfully translating the outside
world into mental products inside our head. However,
encoding involves construction of what must be out
there in addition to faithful duplication of what is
indeed out there. While there are various reasons for
this constructive process, the most important reason is

300———Entitativity
that information from the environment can often be
interpreted in multiple ways, and the mind must choose
the most likely meaning to enable us to respond
appropriately. The mind solves this problem by relying
on context to adjust the incoming information so
that it conforms to the most likely interpretation of
what is being seen, heard, tasted, and so forth.
As an example of this constructive process, think
back on a time when someone said something to you
that you didn’t completely hear. You might have asked
the person to repeat the statement, only to realize that
you did not need the statement to be repeated. You
might have berated yourself for asking for clarification
too quickly, thinking that you actually heard the
person the first time. In all probability, however, you
did not hear the complete sentence when it was first
spoken but were able to reconstruct it very rapidly
after the fact. You could achieve this later reconstruction
because once the entire utterance was complete,
you had more information at your disposal to clarify
what was originally heard. As a consequence, your
mind could now replay it for you properly, without the
added noise or confusion that caused you not to hear
it the first time.
This example illustrates how constructive encoding
can allow us to make sense of a world that might
otherwise be too noisy or confusing. Nevertheless,
constructive encoding has its pitfalls as well. Because
most constructive processes at encoding are unconscious
and inaccessible, we are often oblivious to their
effects and tend to believe that what we see and hear
represents objective reality. In actual fact, people
interpret information based on their personal experiences
and idiosyncratic understanding of the world.
Thus, two people can walk away from the same event
and occasionally hear or see different things, particularly
if the people come from different cultural backgrounds.
Despite these potential costs of constructive
encoding processes, it is worth keeping in mind that
the goal of encoding is to create a clear and accurate
representation of reality, and evidence suggests that
people are very good at this process most of the time.
Indeed, people can sometimes form reasonably accurate
representations of others after viewing just a few
seconds of behavior.
See also Attention; Memory
William von Hippel
Karen Gonsalkorale
Further Readings
Kunda, Z. (1999). Social cognition: Making sense of people.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Zebrowitz, L. A. (1997). Reading faces: Window to the soul?
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
ENDOWMENT EFFECT
See MERE OWNERSHIP EFFECT
ENTITATIVITY
In his or her social world, a person continually encounters
collections of individuals in various social contexts.
Sometimes a person perceives these other people
to be a meaningful group; other times, as a mere aggregate
of persons. What determines when a person sees
other people as meaningful groups, and what are the
consequences of perceiving people as a tightly knit
group versus a loose collection of individuals?
In 1958, Campbell theorized about the nature of
groupness, which he called entitativity. He proposed
that groups could be considered meaningful entities if
their members were similar and in close proximity
and if they shared common goals and common outcomes.
At an intuitive level, it seems obvious that
individuals who are similar in some respect (e.g., skin
color or nationality), in close proximity (e.g., neighbors),
and who share a common fate (e.g., members of
a basketball team) would be more likely to be perceived
as a meaningful group. Yet empirical support
for these ideas was not provided until decades after
Campbell’s original suppositions.
Although the factors proposed by Campbell seem
important for perceiving groupness, there is such a
diverse array of groups in one’s social world that a
more systematic differentiation and understanding of
what entitativity means for each group seemed necessary.
Research by Lickel and his colleagues in 2000
addressed this issue. Participants in their study rated a
variety of different groups on different stimulus cues
thought to be related to entitativity. Statistical analyses
revealed that the extent to which the members
were a meaningful group (entitative) was most closely

elated to the extent of interaction among group members,
how important group membership was to them,
whether the members shared similar goals and outcomes,
and the extent of similarity among members.
When participants were asked to sort the groups
into as many different categories as they wished, it
was found that participants consistently sorted the
various groups into four specific types, and each was
characterized by a specific pattern of the aforementioned
cues. The first group type, intimacy groups,
consisted of family members and other small groups
whose members interacted a lot and are very important
to the members. The next type, task groups,
comprised committees, coworkers, and other smaller
interactive groups that exist to get a job done. The third
group type, social categories, consisted of groups
such as gender, racial, and national groups, which are
large and whose members are similar but do not have
extensive interaction. Finally, loose associations are
made up of people who go to the same school and
other groups that are large in size, easy to join or
leave, and typically not as important to their members.
In addition to the cues that characterize each group
type, Lickel and his colleagues also found that the
group types vary in level of perceived entitativity.
Intimacy groups are perceived to be highest in entitativity,
followed by task groups, social categories, and
loose association groups.
As a person maneuvers through his or her social
worlds, how might these factors influence the way the
person perceives groups? Later research has shown
that perceivers spontaneously categorize people into
these group types and are more likely, for example,
to confuse members of a task group (e.g., a jury member)
with another task group member (e.g., a coworker)
than to confuse a task group member with a social category
member (e.g., a Presbyterian). These withingroup-type
errors occur with each of the group types,
suggesting that perceivers organize information about
group members based on the type of group to which
they belong.
Once a person categorizes people into groups,
there are a number of consequences for the way he or
she processes information and forms impressions
about the groups. Unlike individuals, about whom a
person routinely seeks to form meaningful and coherent
impressions, group members are generally thought
to be less entitative targets. If a person see an individual
person acting in a rude way, he or she might
assume that the person is rude. In contrast, if a person
Entitativity———301
sees a member of a group behaving in a rude way, he
or she would probably be less likely to assume that
the group as a whole comprises rude individuals.
Research has shown that perceivers engage in more
integrative processing when considering individual
targets in contrast to group targets. That is, perceivers
are more likely to infer dispositional qualities, assume
consistent actions over time, and attempt to resolve
any inconsistencies in the behavior of individual, in
contrast to group, targets.
Yet groups vary in their level of perceived entitativity.
If perceivers engage in integrative processing of
entitative targets (such as individuals), then the same
processing should occur for highly entitative groups.
In one representative study, researchers varied the
entitativity of individual or group targets and found
that participants did engage in more integrative processing
for both entitative individual and group targets
and less integrative processing for groups and individuals
that were described as low in entitativity.
A consequence of engaging in more integrative
processing of highly entitative groups is that perceivers
will spend more time thinking about information presented
by groups that are high, in contrast to low, in
entitativity. In fact, research has demonstrated that
perceivers are more likely to be persuaded by highly
entitative groups than by groups low in entitativity.
These results were attributed to an increase in elaboration
of strong messages when presented by high entitativity
groups. In contrast, less attitude change was
found when messages were weak or presented by groups
low in entitativity.
Another consequence of integrative processing is
that once a person perceives a group to be highly entitative,
he or she is more likely to see individual group
members as similar to each other and hence as essentially
interchangeable. Attributes learned about one
group member are assumed to be characteristic of
other group members as well. This generalization across
group members is important because it is a basis for
stereotyping the group. Research has also shown that
perceivers make more extreme or polarized judgments
about highly entitative targets.
The groups that people encounter in their social
world are diverse and ever changing. Yet from this
sea of diversity, they perceive meaningful, entitative
groups in their midst. Regardless of the type of group,
perceptions of entitativity allow people to categorize
aggregates of individuals into meaningful units. In
this way, they are able to process information more

302———Environmental Psychology
effectively and to better maneuver through the complex
social world in which they live.
David L. Hamilton
Sara A. Crump
See also Fundamental Attribution Error; Group Identity;
Groups, Characteristics of; Person Perception; Social
Categorization
Further Readings
Campbell, D. T. (1958). Common fate, similarity, and other
indices of the status of aggregates of persons as social
entities. Behavioral Science, 3, 14–25.
Hamilton, D. L., & Sherman, S. J. (1996). Perceiving persons
and groups. Psychological Review, 103, 336–355.
Hamilton, D. L., Sherman, S. J., & Castelli, L. (2002).
A group by any other name ...:The role of entitativity
in group perception. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.),
European review of social psychology (Vol. 12,
pp. 139–166). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Hamilton, D. L., Sherman, S. J., & Rodgers, J. S. (2004).
Perceiving the groupness of groups: Entitativity,
homogeneity, essentialism, and stereotypes. In V. Yzerbyt,
C. M. Judd, & O. Corneille (Eds.), The psychology of
group perception: Perceived variability, entitativity, and
essentialism (pp. 39–60). New York: Psychology Press.
Lickel, B., Hamilton, D. L., Wieczorkowska, G., Lewis, A.,
Sherman, S. J., & Uhles, A. N. (2000). Varieties of groups
and the perception of group entitativity. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 223–246.
Sherman, S. J., Castelli, L., & Hamilton, D. L. (2002). The
spontaneous use of a group typology as an organizing
principle in memory. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 82, 328–342.
ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Why is it so traumatic to be confronted with a burglary
in one’s own home? Why, in spite of a wide
consensus concerning the necessity to protect our
environment, do so few people really engage in conservation
behaviors? Why, in the same city, are there
clean and secure neighborhoods and nearby run-down
and dangerous ones? Why do people insist on returning
to their destroyed homes after a natural disaster in
spite of the dangers? Why is living in cities seen as so
stressful? Why are natural environments so restorative?
All these questions can be answered only by
looking at the relationship the individual has with the
environment in which he or she lives; these are the
concerns of environmental psychology. It is therefore
not surprising that the discipline emerged in the
1970s, as a response to questions about the architectural
layout of psychiatric wards and the fit between
building design and users’ needs.
Definition
There are a number of important defining characteristics
of environmental psychology. Environmental psychology
deals with the relationships between people
and their physical and social settings. Environmental
psychology studies individuals and groups in their
physical and social context, by giving a prominent
place to environmental perceptions, attitudes, evaluations,
and representations and accompanying behavior
to address the nature and impact of these interrelations.
Environmental psychology studies environment–
behavior relationships as a unit, rather than separating
them into distinct elements. Environmental psychology
investigates the psychological processes that facilitate
understanding of the meaning that environmental
situations have for people acting individually or in
groups and how people create and use places. In dealing
with the relationship between the individuals and
groups and their life-space, environmental psychology
considers not only the environment as providing
humans with all that they need to survive but also the
spaces in which to appreciate, understand, and act to
fulfill higher needs and aspirations.
Environmental psychology focuses on both the
effects of environmental conditions on behavior and
how the individual perceives and acts on the environment.
The point of departure of analysis is often the
physical characteristics of the environment (e.g.,
noise, pollution, planning and the layout of physical
space) acting directly on the individual or groups or
mediated by social variables in the environment (e.g.,
crowding). But physical and social factors are inextricably
linked in their effects on individuals’ perceptions
and behavior.
Why an Environmental Psychology?
Although environmental psychology can justly claim
to be a subdiscipline in its own right, it clearly has an
affinity with other branches of psychology such as
cognitive, organizational, and developmental psychology.
But it is most closely allied to social psychology.

Examples of where environmental psychology has
been informed by, and contributed to, social psychology
are intergroup relations, group functioning, performance,
identity, conflict, and bystander behavior.
However, social psychology often minimizes the role
of the environment as a physical and social setting,
and treats it as simply the stage on which individuals
and groups act rather than as an integral part of the
plot. Environmental psychology adds an important
dimension to social psychology by making sense of
differences in behavior and perception according to
contextual variables, differences that can be explained
only by reference to environmental contingencies.
Furthermore, social psychology finds it difficult to
explain why there is such a poor relationship between
attitudes and behavior. Often it is only by reference to
the individual’s relationship to the environment that a
plausible explanation can be made of the presence or
absence of behavior in accordance to one’s attitudes:
The environment facilitates or impedes certain behaviors,
and it is within specific contexts that cognitions,
emotions, and behaviors take place and gain meaning.
It is hardly surprising that people throw garbage on
the streets when there are no waste bins and when all
the evidence is that no one cares for the environment.
Since environmental psychologists consider that
behavior gains meaning only when it takes place in
the natural setting, the discipline mainly functions in
an inductive way; that is, it studies people in their real
context (e.g., shopping mall, neighborhood, parks,
city streets). As a consequence, it is often considered
as being applied psychology. Besides using surveys
by means of interviews or questionnaires and classic
behavioral observations, the discipline also relies on
Environmental Psychology———303
a wide range of specific methods like mental mapping,
simulations, commented trailing, and behavioral
cartography.
Although there are strong links to other areas
of psychology, especially social psychology, environmental
psychology is unique among the psychological
sciences because of the relationships it has forged
with the social (e.g., sociology, human ecology, demography),
environmental (e.g., environmental sciences,
geography), and design (e.g., architecture, planning,
landscape architecture, interior design) disciplines.
Environmental psychologists routinely work with
architects and planners, environmental scientists, and
even professionals such as archaeologists.
What Is the Scope of
Environmental Psychology?
Environmental psychology, because of its very focus,
has been and remains above all a psychology of space,
to the extent that it analyzes individuals’ and communities’
perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors in explicit
relation to the physical and social contexts within
which people and communities exist. Notions of space
and place occupy a central position. The environment
can be our city, office, factory, school, hospital, where
we shop or work, where we take our leisure—be it a
national park or city park, our neighborhood, home, or
even a small and personal space such as our bedroom.
The discipline operates, then, at several levels of
spatial reference enabling the investigation of people–
environment interactions (at the individual, group, or
societal level) at each level (see Table 1).
Table 1 Physical and Social Aspects of the Four Levels of Environmental Analyses and Type of Control
Physical Aspects of Social Aspects of Type of Space
the Environment the Environment and Control
Level 1 Micro environment Individual Private space
(habitat, workplace) (family) (extended control)
Level 2 Proximal environment Communities Semi-public space
(neighborhood, spaces
open to the public)
(users, clients) (shared control)
Level 3 Public environments Inhabitants Public space
(villages, towns, cities) (aggregates of individuals) (mediated control)
Level 4 Global environment Society Country, nation, planet
(natural resources) (population) (lack of control)

304———Environmental Psychology
Private spaces like the house, the workplace, or the
office, which are not shared or shared by a restricted
number of people, do not generate the same relations
as semi-public or public environments like blocks of
apartments, the neighborhood, parks, or green spaces
shared with a community. Public environments,
involving both built spaces (villages, towns, cities) as
well as the natural environment (the countryside,
landscape, etc.) involve relations with strangers at
the societal level. Furthermore, at each of these levels
people do have more or less control over the physical
and social aspects of the environment. In the private
sphere, the individual’s control is absolute; in semiprivate
and public environments, it is shared with the
neighborhood community. In the urban environment,
control is delegated to elected or designated organizations,
such as the police, the local municipality, and so
forth, whereas control over global environmental
features may be a matter of international negotiation.
Environmental psychology analyzes and characterizes
people–environment interactions and/or transactions
at these different environmental levels. These relations
can best be understood through perception,
needs, opportunities, and means of control.
One of the shortcomings of so much psychological
research is that it treats the environment simply as a
value-free backdrop to human activity and a stage on
which people act out their lives. In essence, the environment
is regarded as noise. It is seen as expedient in
psychological investigations and experiments to
remove or reduce as much extraneous noise as possible
that will affect the purity of the results. This is
understandable and desirable in many situations, but
when it comes to understanding human perceptions,
attitudes, and behaviors in real-world settings, the
environment is a critical factor that needs to be taken
into account. For example, as it is not possible to
understand the architecture and spatial layout of a
church, mosque, or synagogue without reference to
the liturgical precepts which influenced their design,
so it is no less possible to understand any landscape
without reference to the different social, economic,
and political systems and ideologies which inform
them.
Helping behavior is a good example of the influence
of environmental context on the interpersonal
behavior. The conclusions of numerous research studies
undertaken since the 1970s consistently demonstrate
that the conditions of urban life reduce the attention
given to others and diminish one’s willingness to help
others. Aggressive reactions to a phone box out of
order are more common in large cities than in small
towns. These findings have been explained by the levels
of population densities, such as in large urban
areas, which engender individualism and an indifference
toward others, a malaise noted as long ago as
1903 by the German sociologist Georg Simmel, who
suggested that city life is characterized by social withdrawal,
egoistic behaviors, detachment, and disinterest
toward others. The reduction of attention to others
can also be observed when the individual is exposed
to a more isolated supplementary stressful condition.
Thus, excessive population density or the noise of a
pneumatic drill significantly reduces the frequency of
different helping behaviors. If politeness, as measured
by holding the door for someone at the entry of a large
department store, is less frequent in Paris than in a
small provincial town, then this would suggest that
population density and its immediate impact on the
throughput of shoppers will affect helping and politeness
behavior.
One World or Many?
People often assume that other people see the environment
the same way as they do. However, each person
holds a unique view of the place where he or she
lives and works because of what it means to him- or
herself. Certain places are more meaningful than others:
the restaurant in which marriage was proposed,
the street where one saw a boy fatally knocked off his
bicycle, the office building of one’s first job. These are
all intensely personal experiences and therefore map
uniquely onto each person’s perception and image of
his or her local environment. Some experiences though
are held in common—nobody can look at Ground
Zero in New York without thinking of their collective
experience of that day in September 2001. Of course,
everyone also holds a collective perception and image
of the world, but it does not necessarily have equal
meaning for everybody—one might cite 9/11 again as
an example of this. At a more prosaic level, some
areas are attractive, some are run-down, some dangerous
at night and others peaceful, some noisy and
polluted.
Different groups perceive the environment in different
ways for different reasons. There is a growing
interest in the contrasting perceptions of different
groups such as children, the disabled, the mobilitypoor,
and women. It is claimed, for example, that by

failing to appreciate how women see the environment,
urban planners have not taken into account gender
differences, with its consequences for both community
planning and social and community life. When
such differences occur, conflicts arise. Such conflicts
may be because the perceptions and preferences of
one group have not been communicated to another
and so have not been acted on. Alternatively, conflicts
could be due to differences in values between one
group and another.
Psychologists have paid some attention to the different
perceptions of planners, designers, and managers
and users of the environment. For example, a
study of wilderness users’ and managers’ perception of
Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area found that
both groups possessed very different perceptions of the
spatial extent of the wilderness area, and both sets of
perceptions were inaccurate. Canoeists saw the wilderness
area larger than it actually was, while the managers
saw it as smaller. In another study of the same
wilderness area, it was found that managers had positive
attitudes toward hunting, beaver trapping, and the
use of motorized boats, whereas canoeists objected to
these activities on the grounds that they would not only
damage the very qualities of wilderness but also tarnish
their image of what a pure wilderness is. Some
people who visit national parks and other natural areas
may be looking for a wilderness experience in which
the presence of the hand of humans is not much in evidence.
But others may only seek the illusion of naturalness,
desiring modern urban comforts while
seeming to get away from it all.
Importance of Place
Place is an important concept in environmental psychology.
Places not only are important physical referents
with which people relate to the physical world but
also become part of the way people define themselves.
Research on place-identity is concerned with the
acquisition, meaning, and loss of people’s relationships
with places that are psychologically significant
to them as individuals and as members of the social
groups to which they belong. It has been shown that
unwanted and personally uncontrollable change in the
physical environment may cause a grief or loss reaction.
Such grieving may be long-lasting. The inhabitants
of a village in Slovakia who had been forcibly
moved in order that the valley in which the village was
situated could be flooded for a reservoir were still
Environmental Psychology———305
distressed 40 years after the event. When asked to
recall their life and environment through interviews
and drawing a map of the village, they were able to
recall in fine detail environmental features and who
lived where in the village.
When place is destroyed, personal identity is damaged.
The construction of the Channel Tunnel linking
England with France had a devastating impact on the
villages which were destroyed to enable the tunnel
entrance and approaches to be built. Although much
care was taken to protect environmentally sensitive
areas, the psychological effects of the impact of loss
of home, community, and countryside on the local
inhabitants were given less attention. This harmony
between self and the environment can be detected
from the inhabitants’ remarks, especially those who
lost their homes; the most feeling comments about
displaced birds and animals came from respondents
whose own homes had been demolished.
The psychological effects on people experiencing
the gradual destruction of their environment on such
a traumatic scale are not well understood, although
they are now receiving attention from environmental
psychologists.
Policy-Oriented Discipline
Environmental psychology’s strongest feature is its
capacity to respond to societal problems based on solid
scientific knowledge and sophisticated methods.
Indeed, environmental psychology has always been
an applied and policy-oriented discipline as well as a
scientific subject that seeks to understand and explain
human behavior in an environmental context. Consequently,
it is not surprising to find that the issues at the
forefront of the political and environmental agenda
at the beginning of the 21st century—human rights,
well-being and quality of life, globalization and
sustainability—are being addressed by environmental
psychologists. A healthy environment is not only an
environment that is free of substances that threaten the
individual’s health, but it is also an environment to
which individuals are attached and in which individuals
feel themselves at home, indispensable conditions
for sustainable citizenship.
Gabriel Moser
David Uzzell
See also Group Performance and Productivity; Intergroup
Relations

306———Envy
Further Readings
Bonnes, M., & Bonaiuto, M. (2002). Environmental
psychology: From spatial-physical environment to
sustainable development. In R. Bechtel & A. Churchman
(Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology
(pp. 28–54). New York: Wiley.
Gifford, R. (2002). Environmental psychology: Principles and
practice (3rd ed.). Victoria, BC, Canada: Optimal Books.
Moser, G. (2004). Urban environments and human behavior.
In C. Spielberger (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied
psychology (Vol. 3, pp. 621–633). London: Elsevier.
Moser, G., & Uzzell, D. (2003). Environmental psychology.
In T. Millon & M. J. Lerner (Eds.), Comprehensive
handbook of psychology: Vol. 5. Personality and social
psychology (pp. 419–445). New York: Wiley.
ENVY
Definition
Envy refers to the often-painful emotion caused by an
awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another person.
It is a complex, socially repugnant emotion made up of
a mix of inferiority feelings, hostility, and resentment.
Envy is different from admiration, which is delight and
approval inspired by another person. Admiration can
foster a desire to emulate another person’s success,
whereas envy breeds a competitive desire to outdo and
even bring the envied person down in some cases.
Envy may seem like greed, but greed involves an insatiable
desire for more and more of something, rather
than a desire for a particular thing possessed by a particular
person. Envy is also different from jealousy.
Envy involves two people and occurs when one lacks
something enjoyed by another. Jealousy typically
involves three people and occurs when one fears losing
someone, usually a romantic partner, to a rival. Thus,
we say that Cassius envied Caesar’s power and prestige,
whereas Othello was jealous because Desdemona
appeared interested in Cassio.
Whom and What Do People Envy?
Envy is a universal emotion, but it is not the inevitable
response to another person’s superiority. People envy
those who are similar to themselves on attributes such
as gender, age, experience, and social background.
These similarities enable people to imagine what it
would be like if they had the envied person’s advantage.
However, envy results when, in fact, the chances
of having the desired attribute seem slim, despite this
similarity. Also, people envy those whose advantages
are on self-relevant domains. If Salieri envied Mozart,
it was because Salieri’s self-worth was linked to doing
well as a composer, and Mozart’s superior musical talent
diminished Salieri’s own abilities on a domain that
mattered dearly to him.
Hostile Nature of Envy
Advantages enjoyed by other people can have powerful
consequences for the self. Other people’s superiority
grants them better access to culturally valued
resources in school, the workplace, and in romantic
relationships or, indeed, in any domain where the best
outcomes are determined by competition. Therefore,
when another person enjoys a relative advantage in an
important domain of life, a blend of negative feelings
characteristic of envy often naturally follows. A major
part of these feelings is hostile because hostility can
serve as a necessary spur for self-assertion. In the long
run, submissive reactions probably lead to losing out
in the game of life.
It is important to recognize the hostile nature of
envy. This hostility explains why envy is associated
with so many historical cases of aggression (such as the
horrific bloodletting between the Tutsi and Hutus in
Rwanda), as well as innumerable literary and biblical
accounts of murder and sabotage (such as the assassination
of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play and the slaying
of Abel by Cain). Laboratory studies show this link as
well. Envy, for example, has been shown to create the
conditions ripe for malicious joy, or Schadenfreude, if
the envied person suffers a misfortune.
Suppression of Envy
and Its Transmutations
People resist confessing their envy, perhaps more so
than any other emotion. After all, envy is one of
the seven deadly sins. People are taught to rejoice in
the good fortunes of others. To admit to envy is to
announce that one is feeling both inferior and hostile,
which is shameful. Envy is also extremely threatening
to the self, which means that people often fail to
acknowledge it privately as well. Consequently, envy is
likely to be suppressed or transmuted into other more
socially acceptable emotions, tricking both observers
and the self alike. Although the first pangs of the
emotion may be recognizable as envy, because of the
threat to the self that is inherent in the emotion, people

feeling envy may give it a different label for public and
private consumption. They usually find ways to justify
their hostility by perceiving the advantage as unfair or
the envied person as morally flawed. What begins as
envy can then become transformed into indignation and
outrage. Over time, even the desired attribute itself may
become devalued, as an attitude of sour grapes takes
over. Because people feeling envy sense that open hostility
violates social norms, they usually avoid acting on
their hostility in direct ways. They tend to take the route
of backbiting and gossiping and are primed for secret
pleasure if misfortune befalls the envied person. Sometimes,
their behavior will suggest the opposite of
their feelings (such as effusive compliments), so that
observers (and perhaps the envying people themselves)
will not attribute their actions to envy.
Envy and Unhappiness
Envy is thought to be a potent cause of unhappiness.
Part of the reason is that feeling envy means that one
is determining self-worth by how one compares with
others. This is a likely road to discontent, because for
most people, there will always be others who compare
better. Ultimately, envy can poison a person’s capacity
to enjoy the good things in life and snuff out feelings
of gratitude for life’s many gifts. People who are
envious by disposition appear especially likely to
perceive an unflattering comparison as showcasing
their inferiority and may become especially bitter and
resentful. Such tendencies are hardly conducive to
happiness and smooth interactions with others.
Physical as well as mental health may suffer. Thus,
people are well advised to find ways to curtail their
envy by focusing on reasons for feeling grateful and,
in general, avoiding judging themselves using standards
derived from social comparisons.
See also Emotion; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Richard H. Smith
Parrott, W. G. (1991). The emotional experiences of envy and
jealousy. In P. Salovey (Ed.), The psychology of jealousy
and envy (pp. 3–30). New York: Guilford Press.
Smith, R. H. (2004). Envy and its transmutations. In
L. Z. Tiedens & C. W. Leach (Eds.), The social life of
emotions (pp. 43–63). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
EQUALITY MATCHING
See RELATIONAL MODELS THEORY
EQUITY THEORY
Definition
Equity Theory———307
Equity theory posits that when it comes to relationships,
two concerns stand out: (1) How rewarding are
their societal, family, and work relationships? (2) How
fair and equitable are those relationships? According
to equity theory, people feel most comfortable when
they are getting exactly what they deserve from their
relationships—no more and certainly no less.
Equity theory consists of four propositions:
Proposition I. Men and women are “wired up” to try to
maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
Proposition II. Society, however, has a vested interest in
persuading people to behave fairly and equitably.
Groups will generally reward members who treat others
equitably and punish those who treat others inequitably.
Proposition III. Given societal pressures, people are
most comfortable when they perceive that they are getting
roughly what they deserve from life and love. If
people feel overbenefited, they may experience pity,
guilt, and shame; if underbenefited, they may experience
anger, sadness, and resentment.
Proposition IV. People in inequitable relationships will
attempt to reduce their distress via a variety of techniques:
by restoring psychological equity, actual equity,
or leaving the relationship.
Context and Importance
People everywhere are concerned with justice.
“What’s fair is fair!” “She deserves better.” “It’s just
not right.” “He can’t get away with that: It’s illegal.”
“It’s unethical!” “It’s immoral.” Yet, historically, societies
have had very different visions as to what constitutes
social justice and fairness. Some dominant
views include the following:
• All men are created equal.
• The more you invest in a project, the more profit you
deserve to reap (American capitalism).
• Each according to his need (Communism).
• Winner take all (dog-eat-dog capitalism).

308———Equity Theory
Contentment/Distress
5.0
Contentment
4.5
4.0
3.5
3.0
Distress
Overbenefited
Figure 1 The Impact of Equity on Contentment With the Relationship
Nonetheless, in all societies, fairness and justice
are deemed important. This entry will consider the
consequences for men and women when they feel fairly
or unfairly treated. Although equity has been found
to be important in a wide variety of relationships—
societal relationships, romantic and family relationships,
helping relationships, exploitative relationships,
and work relationships—this entry will focus
on the research in one area: romantic and marital
relationships.
Measuring Equity
Although (technically) equity is defined by a complex
formula, in practice, in love relationships, equity has
been assessed by a simple measure:
Considering what you put into your (dating relationship)
(marriage), compared to what you get out of
it...and what your partner puts in compared to what
he or she gets out of it, how does your (dating relationship)
(marriage) “stack up”?
+3: I am getting a much better deal than my partner.
+2: I am getting a somewhat better deal.
+1: I am getting a slightly better deal.
0: We are both getting an equally good, or bad, deal.
Equitably Treated Underbenefited
–1: My partner is getting a slightly better deal.
–2: My partner is getting a somewhat better deal.
–3: My partner is getting a much better deal than I am.
On the basis of their answers, persons can be
classified as overbenefited (receiving more than they
deserve), equitably treated, or underbenefited (receiving
less than they deserve).
Equity in Love Relationships:
The Research
There is considerable evidence that in love relationships,
equity matters. Specifically, researchers find
that the more socially desirable people are (the more
attractive, personable, famous, rich, or considerate they
are), the more socially desirable they will expect a
mate to be. Also, dating couples are more likely to fall
in love if they perceive their relationships to be equitable.
Couples are likely to end up with someone
fairly close to themselves in social desirability. They
are also likely to be matched on the basis of selfesteem,
looks, intelligence, education, mental and
physical health (or disability). In addition, couples
who perceive their relationships to be equitable are
more likely to get involved sexually. For example,

couples were asked how intimate their relationships
were—whether they involved necking, petting, genital
play, intercourse, cunnilingus, or fellatio. Couples in
equitable relationships generally were having sexual
relations. Couples in inequitable relationships tended
to stop before going all the way. Couples were also
asked why they’d made love. Those in equitable
affairs were most likely to say that both of them
wanted to have sex. Couples in inequitable relationships
were less likely to claim that sex had been a
mutual decision. Dating and married couples in equitable
relationships also had more satisfying sexual
lives than their peers. Equitable relationships are comfortable
relationships. Researchers have interviewed
dating couples, newlyweds, couples married for various
lengths of time, including couples married 50+
years. Equitable relationships were found to be happier,
most contented, and most comfortable at all ages
and all stages of a relationship.
Equitable relationships are also stable relationships.
Couples who feel equitably treated are most confident
that they will still be together in 1 year, 5 years, and 10
years. In equitable relationships, partners are generally
motivated to be faithful. The more cheated men and
women feel in their marriages, the more likely they are
to risk engaging in fleeting extramarital love affairs.
Thus, people care about how rewarding their relationships
are and how fair and equitable they seem to be.
Implications
Cross-cultural and historical researchers have long
been interested in the impact of culture on perceptions
of social justice. They contend that culture exerts a profound
impact on how concerned men and women are
with fairness and equity and on how fairness is defined,
especially in the realm of gender relationships.
Cultural and historical perspectives suggest several
questions for researchers interested in social justice:
What aspects of justice, love, sex, and intimacy are
universal? Which are social constructions? In the
wake of globalization, is the world becoming one and
homogeneous, or are traditional cultural practices more
tenacious and impervious to deep transformation than
some have supposed?
Theorists are also engaged in a debate as to whether
certain visions of social justice, (especially in romantic
and marital relationships) are better than others. Some
cultural theorists argue that all visions are relative and
that social psychologists must avoid cultural arrogance
and ethnocentrism and strive to respect cultural variety.
Others insist that universal human rights do exist and
that certain practices are abhorrent, whatever their
cultural sources. These include genocide (ethnic cleansing),
torture, and in the area of gender and family relationships,
the sale of brides, the forcing of girls into
prostitution, dowry murders, suttee or widow burning,
genital mutilation, infanticide, and discriminatory laws
against women’s civic, social, and legal equality, just to
name just a few. In this world, in which the yearning for
modernity and globalization contend with yearnings for
cultural traditions, this debate over what is meant by
equity and social justice is likely to continue and to be
a lively one.
Elaine Hatfield
Richard L. Rapson
See also Distributive Justice; Love; Marital Satisfaction;
Social Justice Orientation
Further Readings
Hatfield, E., Berscheid, E., & Walster, G. W. (1976). New
directions in equity research. In L. Berkowitz & E.
Hatfield (Eds.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 9, pp. 1–42). New York: Academic Press.
Hatfield, E., Walster, G. W., & Berscheid, E. (1978). Equity:
Theory and research. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
EROTIC PLASTICITY
Erotic Plasticity———309
Definition
Erotic plasticity refers to the degree to which the sex
drive is shaped by social, cultural, and situational factors.
The sex drive refers to the motivation (desire) to
have sex. High plasticity indicates that the person’s
sexual desires are strongly influenced by social and
cultural factors (including meaningful aspects of the
immediate situation), and it can be reflected in changes
in behavior and in feelings. Thus, someone with high
plasticity might potentially learn to desire and enjoy
different kinds of sexual activities and different kinds
of partners. The intensity of sexual desire might also
be subject to external influence.
The term plasticity is used in the biological sense,
meaning subject to change and able to be molded into
different shapes. The other meaning of plasticity, as in

310———Erotic Plasticity
being phony or artificial, is not relevant to erotic plasticity
and is in no way implied.
Context and Importance
Erotic plasticity lies at the center of one of the most
far-reaching and fundamental debates in the study
of human sexuality, namely, the relative influence of
nature versus culture. Theory and research in sexuality
in recent decades have clustered around two very
different views. One is that biological factors such as
evolution and genetics are centrally important in determining
the sexual feelings and actions of individuals.
The other view emphasizes cultural and social factors,
such as socialization, political influences, and local
norms. For example, theories of homosexuality have
ranged from claiming there is a “gay gene,” which signifies
a biological, innate tendency to become homosexual,
to attempts to explain homosexuality in terms of
personal experiences, such as growing up with an intrusive,
controlling mother and a distant, critical father.
Low plasticity signifies that nature and biology are
the main factors; high plasticity indicates a greater
scope for culture and other social factors. Differences
in plasticity also indicate differences in the type of
causality. Biological factors such as genes influence
sexual behavior by virtue of physical and biochemical
processes, such as how different molecules would create
tendencies to act in particular ways. In contrast,
social and cultural factors depend on meaning, in the
sense of how the person interprets and understands
events. A great many animals engage in sexual behavior
that is essentially and primarily driven by biological
factors, such as hormones and genetic tendencies.
Human beings are the only species for whom sex
depends partly on what it means and who recognize
a distinction between meaningful and meaningless
sex. High plasticity indicates that sexual responses
depend on meaning. Conversely, a sexual response
that is mainly guided by hormones and genes would
be lower in plasticity.
Gender
There is ample evidence that women have higher
erotic plasticity than men. This is not necessarily
either a good or a bad thing, but it may be helpful in
understanding sexual differences between men and
women.
The reason for women’s greater plasticity is not
known. One view is that it derives from lesser drive
strength. That is, to the extent that women’s sexual
desires are milder than men’s, they may be more
amenable to the civilizing and transforming influence
of social and cultural factors.
Evidence
Three broad types of evidence have been used in discussing
erotic plasticity, though more research tools
(including a trait measure to sort individuals as to their
degree of plasticity) may be developed soon.
First, high plasticity suggests that individuals will
change more in their sexual feelings and behaviors
as they move through different circumstances and different
life stages. Thus, women are more likely than
men to adopt new sexual practices throughout their
adult lives (indeed, many men’s sexual tastes seem to
be set at puberty). Women make more sexual changes
in adjusting to marriage than do men. Sexual orientation
is of particular importance: Nearly all studies indicate
that lesbians have had more opposite-sex partners
than have gay males, and heterosexual women are more
likely to experiment with homosexual activity than are
heterosexual men.
Second, high plasticity indicates being more
affected by social and cultural factors, and so one can
look at how much these factors change the individual.
Highly educated women have sex lives that differ
from those of poorly educated women, whereas the
influence of education on male sexuality is considerably
smaller. Degree of religious involvement predicts
very different patterns of sexual behavior for women
but much less for men. Girls and women are more
influenced by their peer group and by their parents
than are men, at least relative to sex. Meanwhile, the
role of genetic factors (low plasticity) is generally found
to be greater among men than women.
Third, to the extent that sexual responses depend on
social and situational influences, general attitudes will
show a weak relation to specific behaviors. For example,
some studies have asked people whether they find
the idea of homosexual sex appealing (a broad attitude)
and whether they have actually engaged in any
such activity in the past year (specific behavior). For
men, those answers are closely related and quite consistent,
such that the men who find the idea appealing
try it out, and those who do not like the idea do not

perform the acts. For women, however, there is much
more inconsistency between the general idea and specific
behavior, possibly because the woman’s response
depends on very specific circumstances (such as the
other person and the setting) rather than on the general
attitude.
Implications
In sex, the balance between nature and nurture may
differ by gender. Women’s sexuality probably depends
on what it means, on learning and culture, and on other
social factors, whereas male sexuality may be more
strictly programmed as a biological reaction and hence
may resist social and cultural influences. Sexual selfknowledge
may be more difficult for women to achieve
(because high plasticity keeps open the possibility of
change). Women may change more easily in response
to circumstances.
See also Sex Drive; Sexual Economics Theory
Further Readings
Roy F. Baumeister
Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic
plasticity: The female sex drive as socially flexible and
responsive. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 347–374.
(Also note commentaries in that same issue)
ERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
Definition
One of the great challenges for humans is figuring out
what is going on in other people’s minds. People don’t
always disclose exactly what they are thinking, they
can behave in very ambiguous ways, and sometimes
they can be downright deceptive. For example, when
a woman smiles at a man, is she sexually interested in
him or just being nice?
Sometimes the errors people make in judging others
are systematic, meaning that they tend to be biased
in one direction or another. For example, judgments
might be systematically biased toward a false positive
error or a false negative error. In judging others, you
would make a false positive error if you believed that
Error Management Theory———311
a person had a particular thought or intention when
the person actually did not. If you judged that the
woman was sexually interested in the man, for instance,
when she actually was not, you would make a false
positive error. On the other hand, you would make a
false negative error if you believed that a person did
not have a particular thought or intention when the
person actually did. If you judged that the woman was
not sexually interested in the man when she actually
was, you would make a false negative error.
Error management theory proposes that the direction
of a bias in social judgment is tied to how costly
different kinds of errors are. For example, consider
how smoke alarms are designed. Failures to detect fires
(false negative errors) are extremely costly, whereas
false alarms (false positives) are usually just inconvenient.
So, when engineers make smoke alarms, they
tend to design them to be biased away from the more
costly false negative error by setting a low threshold for
fire detection. As a consequence, smoke alarms will
tend to be systematically biased toward false positive
errors (false alarms). A low threshold for fire detection
will cause smoke alarms to make more errors overall,
but it will minimize the cost of errors when they
inevitably occur (i.e., the errors will tend to be false
alarms rather than missed fires).
Error management theory proposes that the same
principle of design applies to the evolution of judgment
mechanisms in the human mind. Ancestrally, in
many areas of social judgment, the costs of false
positive and false negative errors differed. When the
costs of false negatives are greater, error management
theory predicts a bias toward false positives (as in the
smoke alarm example); when the costs of false positives
are greater, error management theory predicts a
bias toward false negatives.
Examples and Evidence
One example of a false positive bias is in men’s estimations
of women’s sexual interest. For an ancestral
man, failing to detect sexual interest in a woman
resulted in a missed reproductive opportunity, which
was highly costly to his reproductive success. The
opposite error (believing that a woman was interested
when she was not) was perhaps a bit embarrassing but
probably less costly overall. Thus, error management
theory predicts that natural selection designed a bias in
men toward slightly overestimating a woman’s sexual

312———Error Management Theory
interest to reduce the likelihood of a missed sexual
opportunity; this leads modern men to overpercieve
women’s sexual interest. (The same prediction does
not apply to women’s perceptions because women need
to invest very heavily in each offspring and because
reproductive opportunities tend to be easier for women
to acquire.) Evidence of this bias has been gathered in
many types of studies. In laboratory studies of interactions
between male and female strangers, men viewing
the interaction tend to infer greater flirtatiousness in
the female than do women viewing the interaction. In
surveys of people’s past experiences, women report
more cases in which men overestimated their sexual
interest than in which men underestimated it, whereas
men’s reports of women’s over- and underestimation
errors do not differ. When men and women are shown
romantic movies, men’s subsequent tendency to see
sexual interest in photographs of neutral female faces
is greater than women’s.
An example of a false negative bias is in women’s
judgments of men’s interest in commitment during
courtship. Women must invest heavily in each offspring
produced, and therefore they tend to be very
careful in choosing mates and in consenting to sex.
One feature women prefer in mates is investment: a
man’s ability and willingness to invest time and
resources in caring for a woman and her offspring.
However, women must predict a man’s tendency to
invest from his behaviors, and therefore their judgments
will be susceptible to some degree of error.
Here again, there is an asymmetry in the costs of the
errors in the judgment task. Judging that a man will
commit and invest when he actually will not (a false
positive error) could result in the woman consenting
to sex and being subsequently abandoned. In harsh
ancestral environments, this literally could have been
deadly to the woman’s offspring. The opposite error—
believing that the man is not committed when he actually
is (a false negative)—would typically result only
in a delay of reproduction for the woman, which
would tend to be less costly. Error management theory
therefore predicts that women will tend to be skeptical
of men’s commitment, especially during the early
phases of courtship. This prediction has been tested by
comparing men’s and women’s impressions of male
courtship behaviors. Relative to men, women express
skepticism about a variety of male courtship tactics,
including buying flowers, cooking a gourmet dinner,
and saying, “I love you.”
These two examples concern judgments in
courtship, but the odds that the costs of the two error
types are identical for any particular area of judgment
are essentially zero, and therefore error management
theory applies to a broad array of judgment tasks.
Other biases that may be explained by error management
theory include the following:
The tendency for people to overestimate the dangerousness
of unfamiliar others
The tendency for people to infer that they will be caught
if they attempt to cheat in certain types of social interactions,
even when they know that their identity is concealed
from others
The tendency for people to avoid close contact with noncontagious
sick, injured, or unfamiliar others who actually
pose little risk
The tendency for people to have certain positive illusions
that cause them to strive to attain goals that are in
fact very difficult to attain, but if they are attained lead
to substantial benefits
Implications and Importance
Psychologists often debate whether humans are rational
or irrational. Those arguing that humans are irrational
cite evidence of bias and errors in human judgment.
Error management theory suggests that judgment
strategies biased toward less costly errors are expected
to evolve and are actually superior to unbiased strategies.
Therefore, mere evidence of bias is not necessarily
evidence of irrationality or poor judgment, as is
often claimed.
There are practical implications of understanding
error management biases. The Safeway supermarket
chain made news in the 1990s because of their servicewith-a-smile
policy, which required all employees to
smile and make eye contact with customers. The
female employees in the chain filed complaints about
this policy because they found that men tended to misinterpret
their friendliness as sexual interest, leading
to instances of sexual harassment. Knowledge of error
management biases and the cues that trigger them may
help to create better social policies.
Martie G. Haselton
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Heuristic Processing;
Positive Illusions; Sexual Strategies Theory

Further Readings
Haselton, M. G., & Nettle, D. (2006). The paranoid optimist:
An integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 47–66.
ESCAPE THEORY
Definition
Escape theory refers to the tendency for people to
engage in behaviors to avoid an unpleasant psychological
reaction. Whereas the common use of the term
escape suggests physically removing oneself from
a physical location (such as escaping from prison),
escape theory is used to describe behaviors that enable
a person to flee from negative perceptions of the self.
Escape from the self may help a person temporarily
avoid a negative psychological reaction, but the behaviors
that follow from a motivation to escape from the
self are frequently undesirable.
History and Background
Social psychology has a long history of examining
the consequences of how people view themselves for
their behavior. People construct and interpret meaning
based on how well their identity falls short of, meets,
or exceeds expectations that people set for themselves
or that are supported by social norms. Escape theory
is concerned primarily with the behaviors that follow
when people recognize that some part of their identity
falls short of desired standards. When people realize
that a part of their identity fails to meet desired
standards, they narrow the focus of their attention
to the present and immediate environment to avoid
meaningful thought regarding unflattering aspects of
themselves.
Over the past several decades, social psychologists
have demonstrated that people construct and interpret
meaning at both high and low levels. High levels of
meaning involve comparison of one’s self against
broad personal or social standards, such as how a current
behavior might relate to an event that might occur
in the future. Low levels of meaning, in contrast,
involve a narrow, concrete awareness of the immediate
present. Studying for an exam, for example, can be
explained as fulfilling a long-term goal of achieving
Escape Theory———313
academic and career success (high level of meaning).
At a low level of meaning, studying for an exam could
be explained as simple eye and muscle movements.
Charles Carver and Michael Scheier proposed that
people shift their level of awareness to a low level of
meaning when they are confronted with parts of their
identity that fail to meet socially approved standards.
Other research has shown that people prefer a low
level of awareness after experiencing failure or stress.
Thus, past theory and research have shown that people
seek to escape from the self when one or more aspects
of their identity fall short of expectations.
Six Main Steps in Escape Theory
Escape theory is organized in six main steps. First, the
person has a severe experience in which he or she
realizes that current outcomes (or circumstances) fall
below societal or self-imposed standards. Second, the
person blames these disappointing outcomes on internal
aspects of the self (i.e., parts of his or her personality)
as opposed to situational factors. Third, the
person recognizes that current outcomes portray the
self as inadequate, incompetent, unattractive, or guilty.
Fourth, the person experiences negative emotions as
a result of the realization that current outcomes fall
short of desired expectations. Fifth, the person seeks to
escape from this negative psychological reaction by
avoiding high-level, meaningful thought. Sixth, the
consequences of this avoidance of meaningful thought
results in a lack of restraint, which may give rise to
undesirable behaviors.
The steps in escape theory signify points in a
causal process that are dependent on each other. The
causal process will lead to undesirable behaviors only
if the person proceeds through each of the previous
five steps. If the person explains a recent failure as
caused by situational factors (as opposed to blaming it
on deficient aspects of the self), then the process will
not lead to undesirable behaviors. Escape from the
self should therefore be considered a relatively
uncommon response to distressing or disappointing
outcomes or circumstances.
Applying Escape Theory to
Behavioral Outcomes
Escape theory has been applied to several behavioral
outcomes. Nearly all of these behaviors produce

314———Ethnocentrism
immediate relief but also involve long-term negative
consequences. Suicide attempts can be considered
as attempts to escape from the self. Roy Baumeister
showed that many suicide attempts are the result of a
shift to a low level of meaning (i.e., focus on immediate
environment) to avoid the negative emotions that
result from not achieving a desired goal. Escape theory
has also been applied to sexual masochism, or
the tendency to derive sexual satisfaction from being
physically or emotionally abused. People who engage
in sexually masochistic behaviors often do so out of a
motivation to narrow their attention to immediate,
intense sensations, thereby making the likelihood of
maintaining a normal sense of identity impossible.
Alcohol use may also serve the function of allowing
people to escape from negative thoughts about one’s
self by reducing the ability for people to process complex
information in a high-level, meaningful manner.
Instead, alcohol use typically renders people incapable
of considering how their current outcomes
compare to societal and self-imposed standards for
desirable behavior. Other research has suggested that
cigarette smoking may be understood as goal-directed
behavior aimed at achieving a low level of distraction
from negative thoughts about one’s self.
Todd Heatherton and Baumeister have applied
escape theory to binge eating. First, a person may
realize that he or she is not meeting a self-imposed
weight loss goal. Second, a person may explain his or
her failure to lose weight as the result of being an
incompetent person instead of focusing on how factors
in the environment prevented him or her from losing
weight. Third, the person may become intensely
aware that his or her failure to lose weight reflects
negatively on his or her identity of being a competent
and attractive person. Fourth, the person experiences
negative emotions after realizing that his or her current
body weight does not meet his or her desired
body weight. Fifth, the person shifts his or her level of
awareness to a low level (i.e., focuses on sensations
and objects in the current environment) to escape the
negative psychological reaction that resulted from
realizing that he or she did not meet a desired weight
loss goal. Sixth, the focus on the immediate aspects of
the current environment reduces the tendency for the
person to consider the long-term consequences of his
or her behavior. This lack of restraint increases the
tendency for people to engage in typically undesirable
behaviors, such as binge eating.
C. Nathan DeWall
See also Coping; Self; Self-Deception; Self-Discrepancy
Theory
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1990). Suicide as escape from the self.
Psychological Review, 97, 90–113.
ETHNOCENTRISM
Definition
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to view the world
through the lens of one’s own culture. That is, individuals
tend to judge others’ behaviors, customs, beliefs,
and attitudes by their own cultural standards. The phenomenon
of ethnocentrism is believed to occur largely
because individuals have the greatest awareness and
information about their own culture, which erroneously
leads them to believe that the norms, standards, and
values within their own culture are universally adopted.
Ethnocentrism is a general phenomenon that occurs
for individuals across most cultures and societies,
although the extent to which it occurs may vary.
Background and Research
In 1906, William Graham Sumner, a professor of
political and social science at Yale University, first
coined the term ethnocentrism. Sumner defined it as
the tendency to believe that one’s society or culture is
the center of all others and is the basis for judging
other groups. Moreover, Sumner argued ethnocentrism
is the tendency to believe that one’s own society
or culture is superior to other groups.
Since Sumner’s original definition, early psychological
researchers continued to define ethnocentrism
similarly. In the 1950s, for instance, T. W. Adorno and
his colleagues devised an ethnocentrism subscale that
was a component of the larger authoritarianism construct.
These researchers believed that ethnocentrism
comprises both ingroup favoritism and a denigration
of outgroups. Evidence for Sumner’s conception of
ethnocentrism comes from research that demonstrated
an inverse relation between ingroup attitudes and outgroup
attitudes. This research supported the idea that
individuals that have a high opinion of one’s own
group also correspond to negativity toward outgroups.
In addition, such research showed the generalizability

of negative opinions toward outgroups; that is, individuals
who have negative attitudes toward one group
also tend to have negative attitudes toward other
groups. Thus, this early perspective equated ethnocentrism
with ethnic prejudice, racism, or both.
More recently, researchers have tended to define ethnocentrism
more broadly; for instance, they propose
that individuals use their own cultures to judge other
outgroups, but they do not necessarily have to have
negative evaluations of these outgroups. For example,
Marilyn Brewer and her colleagues found that individuals
can hold simultaneously positive attitudes toward
their own group and outgroups even when they differ
on some value, attitude, or behavior. This finding has
been confirmed in multiple cultural groups including
those in Africa, New Guinea, North America, and Asia.
Additional research on ethnocentrism has revealed that
correlations between ingroup and outgroup attitudes
are not always negative; rather, they vary widely. Lastly,
research demonstrates that under conditions of intergroup
competition, conflict, or threat, individuals may
be more likely to have increased ingroup identification
and outgroup hostility. As a whole, then, ethnocentrism
is not necessarily equated with ethnic prejudice and
racism; instead, it is the tendency to use one’s group or
culture as a reference in judging other groups, with this
judgment resulting in negative, indifferent, or positive
evaluation.
Michelle R. Hebl
Juan M. Madera
See also Authoritarian Personality; Culture; Ingroup–Outgroup
Bias; Prejudice
Further Readings
Brewer, M. B. (2005). Ethnocentrism and prejudice: A search
for universals. In C. S. Crandall & M. Schaller (Eds.), Social
psychology of prejudice: Historical and contemporary issues
(pp. 79–93). Lawrence, KS: Lewinian Press.
ETHOLOGY
Definition
Ethology is the study of the biological bases of behavior.
This subdiscipline of the behavioral sciences uses
methods of objective observation, detailed analysis,
Ethology———315
and experimentation to define the processes underlying
the development, function, causative mechanisms,
and evolution of behavior patterns. Originally, ethology
focused on behavior patterns thought to require
little or no learning for their expression. Gradually,
however, as knowledge of the developmental influences
underlying the expression of various behavior
patterns emerged, a realization that individual experience
plays an important role in the expression of
species-specific behavioral patterns has come to be
accepted.
History and Modern Usage
Charles Darwin promoted the idea that humans and
animals shared certain behavioral traits, an idea that was
important in establishing the approach to comparative
studies of behavior. Oskar Heinroth, studying ducks,
and Charles Whitman, studying domestic pigeons,
noted the similarities of certain behavior patterns used
in courtship and deduced that these patterns were as
typical of a species or race as morphological characteristics
(i.e., the way they look physically). Thus arose
the concept that behavior could be a heritable trait and,
as genetic mechanisms became increasingly understood,
that natural selection could exert its influence on
behavior for survival, as it could on any other adaptation.
Ethologists have long been interested in creating
models of the nervous system that would explain how
species-specific behavior patterns were expressed.
Communicative behavior was of particular interest;
hence, the mechanisms that imparted to others the ability
to correctly interpret and respond to specific patterns
of behavior also was of great interest. Several
concepts arose out of this line of research and conceptual
thinking.
The fixed action pattern was proposed by Konrad
Lorenz to characterize a highly stereotyped behavior
pattern that was a response to specific stimuli
(releasers) from conspecifics. Nikolaas Tinbergen
refined the releaser concept to apply to specific components
of a communicative behavior (including the body
parts involved in its expression), such as the red spot on
a gull’s bill that activated feeding behavior on the part
of a chick. Some communicative gestures were found
to consist of complicated interactions between signaler
and receiver, such as the “dance” of honey bees studied
by Karl von Frisch and others. The explosion of behavioral
studies arising out of these conceptual analyses
and detailed behavioral studies were recognized by the

316———Evolutionary Psychology
awarding of the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine
to Lorenz, Tinbergen, and von Frisch in 1973.
Over the past 50 years or so, ethology has become difficult
to segregate from sister disciplines, including
neuroethology (studying the neural bases of speciesspecific
behavior), behavioral endocrinology (studying
the hormonal basis of species-specific behavior), and
behavioral ecology (including the factors that promote
group organization in a variety of species, including
humans). Integration of the approaches and concepts of
ethology with those of psychology has led to the emergence
of exciting and very productive disciplines of
behavioral biology and behavioral neuroscience, as
well as innovative approaches to studying and understanding
behavioral pathology.
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Sociobiology
Further Readings
John D. Newman
Marler, P. (2005). Ethology and the origins of behavioral
endocrinology. Hormones and Behavior, 47, 493–502.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Evolutionary psychology is the study of behavior,
thought, and feeling as viewed through the lens of evolutionary
biology. Evolutionary psychologists presume
all human behaviors reflect the influence of physical
and psychological predispositions that helped human
ancestors survive and reproduce. On the evolutionary
view, any animal’s brain and body are composed of
mechanisms designed to work together to facilitate
success within the environments that were commonly
encountered by that animal’s ancestors. Thus, a killer
whale, though distantly related to a cow, would not do
well with a cow’s brain, since the killer whale needs a
brain designed to control a body that tracks prey in the
ocean rather than eating grass in a meadow. Likewise,
a bat, though also a mammal, needs a brain designed to
run a tiny body that flies around catching insects at
high speeds in the dark. Evolutionary psychologists
ask: What are the implications of human evolutionary
history (e.g., living in omnivorous and hierarchical primate
groups populated by kin) for the design of the
human mind?
History and Background
Charles Darwin himself deserves the title of first evolutionary
psychologist. In 1873, he argued that human
emotional expressions likely evolved in the same way
as physical features (such as opposable thumbs and
upright posture). Darwin presumed emotional expressions
served the very useful function of communicating
with other members of one’s own species. An
angry facial expression signals a willingness to fight
but leaves the observer an option to back off without
either animal being hurt. Darwin’s view had a profound
influence on the early development of psychology.
In 1890, William James’s classic text Principles
of Psychology used the term evolutionary psychology,
and James argued that many human behaviors reflect
the operation of instincts (inherited predispositions to
respond to certain stimuli in adaptive ways). A prototypical
instinct for James was a sneeze, the predisposition
to respond with a rapid blast of air to clear away
a nasal irritant. In 1908, William McDougall adopted
this perspective in his classic textbook Social Psychology.
McDougall also believed many important social
behaviors were motivated by instincts, but he viewed
instincts as complex programs in which particular
stimuli (e.g., social obstacles) lead to particular emotional
states (e.g., anger) that in turn increase the likelihood
of particular behaviors (e.g., aggression).
McDougall’s view of social behavior as instinctdriven
lost popularity during the mid-20th century, as
behaviorism dominated the field. According to the
behaviorist view championed by John Watson (who
publicly debated McDougall), the mind was mainly a
blank slate, and behaviors were determined almost
entirely by experiences after birth. Twentieth-century
anthropology also contributed to the blank slate viewpoint.
Anthropologists reported vastly different social
norms in other cultures, and many social scientists
made the logical error of presuming that wide crosscultural
variation must mean no constraints on human
nature.
The blank slate viewpoint began to unravel in the
face of numerous empirical findings in the second half
of the 20th century. A more careful look at crosscultural
research revealed evidence of universal preferences
and biases across the human species. For example,
men the world over are attracted to women who
are in the years of peak fertility, whereas women most
commonly prefer men who can provide resources
(which often translates into older males). As another
example, males in more than 90% of other mammalian

species contribute no resources to the offspring, yet all
human cultures have long-term cooperative relationships
between fathers and mothers, in which the males
contribute to offspring. Looked at from an even broader
comparative perspective, these general human behavior
patterns reflect powerful principles that apply widely
across the animal kingdom. For example, investment
by fathers is more likely to be found in altricial species
(those with helpless offspring, such as birds and humans)
than in precocial species (whose young are mobile at
birth, such as goats and many other mammals).
Modern Evolutionary Psychology
Modern evolutionary psychology is a synthesis of
developments in several different fields, including
ethology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology,
anthropology, and social psychology. At the base of
evolutionary psychology is Darwin’s theory of evolution
by natural selection. Darwin’s theory made it clear
how an animal’s physical features can be shaped by the
demands of recurrent problems posed by the environment.
Seals are more closely related to dogs than to
dolphins, but seals and dolphins share several physical
features shaped by common problems of aquatic life
(where fins and streamlined body shape assist in catching
one’s dinner and reduce the chance of becoming
dinner for an aquatic predator). Besides overt physical
features designed by natural selection, animals also
inherit central nervous systems designed to generate
the behaviors needed to run those bodies. The behavioral
inclinations of a bat would not work well in the
body of a dolphin or a giraffe, and vice versa.
Zoologists and comparative psychologists have
uncovered many behavioral and psychological mechanisms
peculiarly suited to the demands of particular
species. For example, dogs use smell for hunting; consequently,
they have many more olfactory receptors
than humans and are thousands of times more sensitive
to various odors. Humans, on the other hand, can
see in color, whereas dogs cannot (color vision may
be useful for detecting ripe fruit, something humans
eat but canines don’t). Bats have echolocation capacities
allowing them to create the mental equivalent of
a sonogram of the night world through which they
must navigate at rapid speeds, searching for foods that
include rapidly flying insects.
In addition to differences in sensory and perceptual
capacities, natural selection has favored many openended
learning and memory biases designed to fit the
Evolutionary Psychology———317
ecological demands confronted by each species. For
example, rats have poor vision and rely on taste and
smell to find food at night. Consequently, they easily
condition taste aversions to novel flavors but not to
visual stimuli. Quail, on the other hand, have excellent
vision and rely on visual cues in food choice, and they
show the opposite learning bias—conditioning nausea
more readily to visual cues than to tastes or smells.
Domain-Specific Mechanisms
Evolutionarily informed research has suggested that
brains are composed of a number of specialized domainspecific
mechanisms. For example, birds use different
memory systems and different rules for remembering
species song, the taste of poisonous food, and locations
of food caches. Many birds learn to sing the song of
their species during a brief critical period early in life
and then reproduce it perfectly during the next breeding
season, without ever having practiced it. On the
other hand, birds can learn the characteristics of poisonous
foods in a single trial during any time of life.
Following yet a different set of rules, locations of food
caches are learned, updated, and erased on a daily
basis. Using the same decision rules for each of these
problems would be highly inefficient, and different
memory systems in birds are anatomically distinct.
Likewise, humans inherit different memory systems for
dealing with different, sometimes conceptually incompatible,
tasks, including learning language, learning to
avoid poisonous foods, and remembering other people’s
faces.
Searching Across Species for
Broad Theoretical Principles
An evolutionary approach to behavior involves an
analysis of particular recurrent problems faced by the
members of a given species and a search across species
for correlations between common behaviors and common
environmental conditions. It can be interesting to
catalog unique adaptations (such as the color bands
on coral snakes or the human ability to throw objects
over long distances), but evolutionary theorists have a
higher goal: to uncover common principles underlying
these diverse adaptations. For example, the concept of
differential parental investment ties together diverse
findings from a wide range of species. Briefly, as animals
invest more in their offspring, they become more
selective about mating decisions. If an adult fish sprays

318———Evolutionary Psychology
1,000 eggs on a rock and then swims away, and can do
so every few weeks, the investment in any one offspring
is necessarily less than if the reproductive adult
guards a nest and protects a smaller number of fry until
they are capable of fending for themselves. As each
offspring becomes more costly to raise, questions about
the fitness of the mate become more important. In most
species, the female has a necessarily higher initial
investment: Eggs are much more nutritionally costly to
produce than are sperm. Thus, females have more to
lose and are usually more selective about choosing
a mate, preferring to mate only with males who are
demonstrably more fit than their competitors (as
manifested in healthier appearance, more colorful displays,
etc.).
Sometimes females choose males who demonstrate
a willingness to make their own investment, as in
birds where males help build a nest and provide
resources before females will mate with them. If one
sex is relatively more careful about choosing mates,
members of the opposite sex must compete to prove
they are better alternatives. Differential parental investment
theory helps explain why male vertebrates are
often more competitive, larger, and/or more colorful—
because females generally make a higher investment
in offspring (in mammals, e.g., this involves internal
gestation and nursing). In some species, such as elephant
seals and orangutans, males are much larger
than females and considerably more aggressive. In
species in which both sexes share in raising offspring,
as in swans and penguins, the sexes tend to be less
differentiated. The theory explains seeming sex-role
reversals, as in phalaropes, birds in which the females
are more colorful and more competitive than the
males. Male phalaropes actually make the higher
parental investment, because they care for the eggs
while females go off in search of additional mates. As
a consequence, males are relatively more selective in
choosing mates, and females are in turn larger and
more competitive.
Sexual selection is another broad evolutionary concept
closely linked to parental investment. It refers to
the process whereby the members of one sex come to
have unique characteristics that assist in mating. For
example, in many hoofed animals, males have horns
and females do not. When features such as horns are
found in males, it suggests they are related to mating
and are useful in competing with other males or attracting
females.
Although human males and females both share in
raising offspring, the physical and behavioral differences
between them suggest a history of sexual selection.
For example, females have deposits of fat on
their breasts and hips not found in other primates,
which may be there because they advertised fertility
to males. Males are taller, have larger upper body
muscles, and are more likely to engage in violent
competitions with other members of their sex. This
suggests our female ancestors were more likely to
mate with males who could physically dominate other
males. Modern mate preferences fit with these ideas,
though the exact nature and magnitude of the human
sex differences forged by sexual selection are still
being debated.
Controversy Surrounding
Evolutionary Psychology
Despite the evidence contradicting the blank slate
view, many social psychologists are still uncomfortable
taking an evolutionary perspective. Although
most psychologists accept the obvious biological
constraints on human behavior (such as that women
bear and nurse children and that the human brain is
uniquely designed for language), some psychologists
still prefer to believe that the slate is blank or nearly
blank in their own research area. Some of the reluctance
to accept an evolutionary viewpoint is based on
misconceptions about how evolutionary models are
tested; other sources of influence are political. For
example, some fear that if scientists admit there are
biological influences on men’s and women’s motivations,
this will justify inequitable treatment in the
workplace. Evolutionary psychologists respond that
scientific censorship is unlikely to lead to either credibility
for the field or enlightened social policy. For
example, if equal treatment of men and women in the
workplace is based on a false premise that the sexes
are identical, any evidence against that premise could
be used to justify inequity. The social value placed on
both sexes deserving fair treatment in modern environments
ought not to depend on accepting or denying
biological differences.
Some psychologists also fall prey to the naturalistic
fallacy, the belief that what is natural is therefore
good. The problems with this assumption are obvious
if one considers that natural selection has produced
viruses, predators, and nepotism. Other psychologists

understand the naturalistic fallacy but fear that the
public (or at least unenlightened policy makers) will
fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy if they hear about
research suggesting evolutionary influences on behavior.
Evolutionary psychologists generally believe that
rather than suppressing scientific facts, understanding
the actual mechanisms controlling behavior is the
best way to change them. An increasing number of
researchers are beginning to realize that humans’ evolutionary
past has shaped not only characteristics that
are socially undesirable (such as male aggression) but
also many positive features of human nature (such as
familial love and the ability to cooperate with others
to benefit the whole group).
Remaining Questions
Evolutionary psychology is an exciting area because
many of the questions it raises have yet to be answered.
Little is known about how genetic predispositions
actually affect the development of psychological mechanisms.
There is good evidence that men around the
world are attracted to women manifesting signs of fertility,
but researchers do not know much about how
those preferences develop, which brain mechanisms
are involved, and how any underlying mechanisms
interact with the environment. Likewise, very little is
known about the dynamic processes that take place as
simple innate mechanisms underlying preferences in
one person play out in the context of the preferences
of other people around.
Until recently, evolutionary models have been
applied to a small number of topics, such as sex differences
in mating behaviors and aggressiveness, and
preferential treatment of kin. Recently, however, psychologists
have begun to realize that this general functionalist
approach has implications for all aspects of
human social behavior, including impression formation,
friendship, intergroup relations, and prejudice.
Thus, there are probably many exciting scientific discoveries
yet to be made applying evolutionary ideas to
the social behaviors of human beings.
Douglas T. Kenrick
See also Affordances; Cheater-Detection Mechanism;
Dominance, Evolutionary; Ethology; Kin Selection;
Sexual Selection; Sexual Strategies Theory; Sociobiological
Theory; Sociobiology; Tend-and-Befriend Response
Further Readings
Exchange Relationships———319
Alcock, J. (2001). The triumph of sociobiology. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Buss, D. M. (Ed.). (2005). Handbook of evolutionary
psychology. New York: Wiley.
Kenrick, D. T., Maner, J. K., & Li, N. P. (2005). Evolutionary
social psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), Handbook of
evolutionary psychology (pp. 803–827). New York: Wiley.
Kenrick, D. T., Trost, M. R., & Sundie, J. M. (2004).
Sex-roles as adaptations: An evolutionary perspective on
gender differences and similarities. In A. H. Eagly,
A. Beall, & R. Sternberg (Eds.), Psychology of gender
(pp. 65–91). New York: Guilford Press.
Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of
human nature. New York: Viking.
Schaller, M., Simpson, J., & Kenrick, D. T. (Eds.). (2006).
Evolution and social psychology. New York: Psychology
Press.
EXCHANGE RELATIONSHIPS
The defining characteristic of an exchange relationship
is that benefits are given with the expectation of
receiving a comparable benefit in return or in repayment
for a comparable benefit received in the past.
When exchange rules are followed appropriately, each
relationship member considers the exchange to be
fair. Relationships between customers and storeowners
often exemplify exchange relationships. For
instance, a customer may pay a storeowner three dollars
for a package of paper towels. Typically, relationships
between employees and employers are also
exchange relationships.
Exchange relationships are ubiquitous, which
means they are found everywhere. Whereas many
involve monetary transactions, as in the examples just
given, many others do not. For instance, one set of
parents with a child who plays soccer may form a
car pool with another set of parents whose child plays
soccer. Each set of parents agrees to provide the other’s
child transportation to practices in exchange for the
other parents doing the same for their child. Another
exchange relationship may exist between couple with
a beach cottage who each year exchanges a week
at that cottage for a week at another couple’s condominium
at a ski resort.
Exchange relationships may be short in duration
(as when a person purchases something from another

320———Excitation-Transfer Theory
at one point in time and never sees the other person
again) or very long in duration (as when couples trade
time in their respective vacation homes every year
for 40 years). Although the motivation to follow
exchange rules is typically selfish, it may be unselfish.
An example of a selfish motivation is a person desiring
dinner because he or she is hungry. That person then
purchases the dinner from a restaurant owner. As an
illustration of an unselfish motivation for following
exchange rules, consider what might happen if one set
of parents in the car pool could not drive 3 weeks in a
row due to their car being repaired. The other set of
parents might cover and even say, “Don’t worry about
it” to the couple with the car in the shop. However, the
first couple might unselfishly insist on compensating
the first set with a gift certificate to a fancy restaurant
to honor the exchange agreement.
Exchange relationships are not exploitative relationships.
They provide a fair way for people to obtain
many goods and services that might not be available
to them in close, communal relationships in which
benefits are given to support the other’s welfare noncontingently.
Occasionally, when interpersonal trust is
low, exchange rules are applied within relationships
which are, normatively and for most individuals, communal
in nature, such as marriages and other family
relationships.
Margaret Clark
See also Communal Relationships; Justice Motive; Reciprocal
Altruism; Reciprocity Norm; Social Exchange Theory; Trust
Further Readings
Clark, M. S. (1984). Record keeping in exchange and
communal relationships. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 47, 549–557.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in
exchange and communal relationships. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 12–24.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between
communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is not.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 684–691.
EXCITATION-TRANSFER THEORY
Ever heard of overreacting? Such as when lovers, after
yelling their heads off arguing, make up and experience
unusually strong sexual pleasures? Or when a
disagreement escalates from silly to serious, prompts
an exchange of insults, and ends with bloody noses?
Or when the girl who went along to a horror movie is
so terrified that she snuggles up on her companion and
finds him irresistibly attractive? It seems that even the
most rational people are not immune to such overreacting.
The famous philosopher and mathematician
Bertrand Russell, for instance, let the world know that
his sexual experience was never more intense than
during extreme fear, when his bedroom was lit up by
exploding grenades during the Nazis’ bombardment
of London. There is ample research evidence that
supports this unlikely enhancement of pleasure by fear.
Samuel Klausner observed, for example, that newcomers
to parachuting tend to experience considerable fear
before jumping but also intense joy upon landing. As
jumping becomes routine and fear diminishes, joy
fades away along with the fear.
The facilitation of pleasure in the aftermath of fear
and similarly unpleasant reactions is by no means the
only transition in which an earlier emotion intensifies
a following one. The intensification occurs, no matter
whether the prior and the subsequent emotions are
pleasant or unpleasant. For instance, prior elation can
enhance ensuing distress as readily as prior grief ensuing
merriment. Likewise, prior anger can enhance
ensuing rage as readily as prior gaiety ensuing exuberance.
Dolf Zillmann proposed a theory of excitation
transfer to explain this puzzling intensification of
emotions that materialize in the aftermath of other
emotional experiences.
Excitation as the Driving
Force in Emotion
Excitation-transfer theory focuses on physiological
manifestations of bodily arousal. All vital emotions
are known to be accompanied by elevated sympathetic
reactivity in the autonomic nervous system. According
to the emergency theory of emotion advanced by
Walter Cannon, the primary function of this reactivity
is to provide energy for a burst of action to allow the
organism to cope effectively with acute behavioral
challenges. As coping via immediate physical action
is rarely productive in contemporary situations of
challenge, much of this energy provision has become
defunct, if not dysfunctional. Such energizing excitatory
reactivity has been retained nonetheless, mostly
because of its mediation by archaic brain structures,
as detailed by Joseph LeDoux and others. This reactivity
still generates agitation that favors action over

inaction. Via feedback, such as heart pounding, palm
sweating, or trembling hands, it fosters cognizance
of the degree of bodily arousal. It ultimately signals
emotional intensity and thus drives the experience and
expression of emotions.
Cognitive and Excitatory Adjustment
to Environmental Change
The time course of cognitive and excitatory reactions
to emotion-arousing changes in the environment differs
greatly. Cognitive adjustment to such changes is
quasi-instantaneous because of the exceedingly fast
neural mediation of cognition. In contrast, the hormonal
mediation of sympathetic excitation via the cardiovascular
system is lethargic, and excitatory adjustment to
situational changes comes about only after considerable
passage of time. The latency of excitatory responding
may be negligible, but the duration of excitatory
reactivity is not. Once instigated, this activity runs its
course even after the instigating emotional challenge
has ceased to exist and, owing to rapid cognitive adjustment,
another emotion has come about.
Emotion Intensification by
Leftover Excitation
Excitation-transfer theory is based on the apparent
discrepancy in adjustment time. It addresses the consequences
of persisting sympathetic excitation from
an earlier instigated emotion for subsequently instigated
emotions that may be different in kind. Specifically,
the theory predicts that whenever particular
circumstances evoke an emotional reaction at a time
when portions of excitation are left over from preceding
emotions, the leftover portions combine inseparably
with newly instigated excitation and thus produce
a total of excitatory activity whose intensity is greater
than that specific to the new instigation alone.
Leftover excitation may thus be considered to have
artificially intensified the newly triggered emotion. In
other words, the response to the new situation
amounts to an overreaction.
An Illustration of Excitation Transfer
Imagine a lady who steps on a snake in the grass of her
backyard. Deep-rooted survival mechanisms, organized
in the brain’s limbic system, will be activated and
make her jump back and scream. A rush of adrenaline
Excitation-Transfer Theory———321
will have been released to elevate sympathetic excitation.
Following these initial reactions, the woman is
bound to construe her emotional behavior as fear and
panic. She might also notice herself shaking and thus
realize that she is greatly excited. However, upon looking
once more at the object of her terror, she recognizes
that the snake is a rubber dummy, planted by her
mischievous son who enters the scene laughing his
head off. This recognition, a result of instant cognitive
adjustment to changing circumstances, proves her initial
emotion of fear groundless and calls for a new
interpretation of her experiential state. Still shaking
from the scare, she is likely to feel acute anger toward
her son. In her infuriation she might even lash out at
him. But after fully comprehending the prank, she
might consider being angry inappropriate and cognitively
adjust once more, this time joining in his laughter
and appraising her experience as amusement.
Throughout this cognitive switching from experiential
state to state, the excitatory reaction to the detected
danger in the grass persisted to varying degrees. It initially
determined the intensity of the fear reaction. The
leftover excitation from this reaction then intensified
the emotion of volatile anger and, thereafter, the experience
of amusement in fits of hysterical laughter. In
short, leftover excitation fostered overreactions in a
string of different emotions.
Supportive Evidence
Emotion-enhancing excitation transfer has been
demonstrated in numerous experiments. Dolf Zillmann
and his collaborators have shown, for instance, that
sympathetic excitation left over from sexual excitement
can intensify such diverse emotions as anger,
aggression, sadness, humor, and altruism. In the reverse
direction, sympathetic excitation left over from either
fear or anger proved capable of enhancing sexual
attraction and sexual behaviors. In the realm of entertainment,
moreover, excitation-transfer theory has been
used to explain the facilitation of enjoyment in the
aftermath of evoked aversions. Based on the observation
that leftover excitation from feelings of tension,
suspense, and terror is capable of intensifying experiences
of joy and elation, strategies could be devised
for the ultimate enjoyment of drama by the optimal
arrangement of foregoing emotion-evoking events.
See also Arousal; Emotion; Misattribution of Arousal
Dolf Zillmann

322———Excuse
Further Readings
Apter, M. J. (1992). The dangerous edge: The psychology of
excitement. New York: Free Press.
Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Klausner, S. Z. (1967). Fear and enthusiasm in sport
parachuting. In J. A. Knight & R. Slovenko (Eds.),
Motivations in play, games, and sports. Springfield,
IL: Charles C Thomas.
LeDoux, J. (1996). The emotional brain: The mysterious
underpinnings of emotional life. New York: Simon &
Schuster.
Zillmann, D. (1996). Sequential dependencies in emotional
experience and behavior. In R. D. Kavanaugh, B.
Zimmerberg, & S. Fein (Eds.), Emotion: Interdisciplinary
perspectives (pp. 243–272). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zillmann, D. (2006). Dramaturgy for emotions from fictional
narration. In J. Bryant & P. Vorderer (Eds.), Psychology of
entertainment (pp. 215–238). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
EXCUSE
Definition
An excuse involves circumstances in which people
perceive that they have made mistakes and, in response
to these uncomfortable situations, will say or do things
to (a) make the mistakes seem not so bad, and/or
(b) lessen their linkages to the mistakes. People are
motivated to make excuses to preserve their images of
being good and in control, and these preserved images
are for both the surrounding people who may have witnessed
the mistakes, as well as the actual people who
made the errors. If the excuse is effective, the givers’
positive images are preserved and they can continue to
perform well and interact with people just as they did
before the slip-ups happened.
History
There probably have been excuses for as long as there
have been people making mistakes. Nevertheless, a
common view among lay people is that excuses are
transparent and useless ploys. Also, the individual
believes that other people use excuses but that he or
she does not. Contrary to these negative views among
the public at large, however, researchers have found
that excuses are serious and generally effective coping
mechanisms when used in moderation.
Alfred Adler first discussed the role of excuses in
safeguard mechanisms, which are coping strategies
for maintaining the positive self-images of people.
Scholarly interest in excuses was kindled in the 1970s
and 1980s when social psychologists began to explore
the attributions that people make for why things happened
to them. During this same time period, work on
excuses increased when researchers’ attentions shifted
to what was called impression management, or the
attempts that people make to maintain their favorable
self-images—both for the external audiences of other
people and the internal audience of oneself.
Evidence
As psychologists began to study excuses, they
observed what people said and did after they had made
mistakes or failed in important activities. There were
two common responses that people produced. First,
people would say things to lessen the seeming badness
of their mistakes. For example, a man who is trying to
lose weight breaks his diet by having a piece of cake.
He then goes into excuse-making mode as he tries
to diminish the badness of this misdeed by saying,
“It was only a small piece of cake.” Second, people
attempt to lessen their linkages to their mistakes. For
example, consider a young girl who picks up her
friend’s doll and takes it home. Later, when caught in
this theft, she says, “Patty (the playmate who owns the
doll) said I could have it (this not being true).”
After observing such real-life examples of excusing,
researchers set up experimental situations in which
the participants would fail at ego-involving tasks. One
experimental approach was to give students a classroom-like
learning experience and afterward deliver
feedback to one set of students that they had done very
poorly (the failure condition). In comparison to another
groups of students, who were told that they had done
very well, these failure-feedback students were more
likely to state that the task was very difficult. Such
excuse making made it seem as if their bad performances
really were not so bad after all because most
other students also did poorly (thereby maintaining a
positive image); moreover, if the task truly was so difficult,
the inherent logic was that the task caused the
poor performance rather than it being the responsibility
of the student (thereby lessening that student’s linkage
to the poor performance). This “everyone would
do poorly on that task” represented a “double play”
type of excuse in that it preserved the positive image
and lessened the student’s responsibility for the failure.

There is yet other research that has examined the
effects of making excuses upon excuse makers’ subsequent
performances. Generally, when compared to
people who were not allowed to make excuses, persons
who have been allowed to make successful excuses for
poor performances will do better the next time they
undertake the same tasks. The reasoning here is that
successful excuses allow people to preserve their selfviews
about being effective people, and thus they can
go into the next performance situations and remain
focused and energized to do well. These successful
excusing people are to be contrasted with people who
either are not allowed to make excuses or whose
excuses fail. These latter people are demoralized when
they face the next similar performance situations and,
accordingly, they are unlikely to do well.
Last, research shows that when a person makes a
mistake or fails, there is considerable tension among
the surrounding people until an excuse is offered.
Therefore, if the person who actually made the mistake
does not offer an excuse, the nearby people will
jump in and make excuses for that person. This shows
how necessary excuses are for the surrounding social
context.
Importance and Implications
Among the public at large, excuses are seen as silly
and lightweight ploys that are used by other people.
Contrary to this negative view, the research evidence
shows that excuses assist people in coping with their
fallibilities and proneness to making mistakes. One
advantage of excuses is that they help people to
maintain a sense of esteem and control in their lives.
Without excuses, people would be faced with the terrifying
possibility that they are absolutely responsible
and accountable for their errors and blunders. Living in
such a no-excuse world, people would fall into unmotivated
states of depression. Similarly, excuses facilitate
social exchanges among people. That is to say, if
people knew that they could not call on excuses in their
future endeavors where they might fail, they would be
unwilling to take chances and try such new activities.
Thus, excuses provide a social lubricant so that people
can attempt new things with the understanding that
others will accept their excuses. Having stated these
advantages of excuses, however, it should be emphasized
that such excusing is only effective when it is
used in moderation and is not employed in the presence
of experts who can refute the person’s excuse.
C. R. Snyder
See also Attributions; Coping; Forgiveness; Impression
Management; Self-Handicapping
Further Readings
Executive Function of Self———323
Higgins, R. L., & Snyder, C. R. (1989). Excuses gone awry:
An analysis of self-defeating excuses. In R. C. Curtis
(Ed.), Self-defeating behaviors: Experimental research and
practical implications (pp. 99–130). New York: Plenum.
Higgins, R. L., & Snyder, C. R., & Berglas, S. (1990).
Self-handicapping: The paradox that isn’t. New York:
Plenum.
Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management: The self
concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations.
Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Snyder, C. R., & Higgins, R. L. (1988). Excuses: Their
effective role in the negotiation of reality. Psychological
Bulletin, 104, 23–35.
Snyder, C. R., Higgins, R. L., & Stucky, R. (2005). Excuses:
Masquerades in search of grace (Rev. ed.). Clinton
Corners, NY: Percheron.
EXECUTIVE FUNCTION OF SELF
Definition
The executive function of self refers to the internal
capacity to choose and to direct one’s own behavior.
Although behavior undoubtedly is shaped by forces
outside of one’s control, including genetics, cultural
norms, and happenstance, some behavior is consciously
intended and therefore shaped in part by the
person. The executive function of self is used whenever
people plan, choose, or control their own actions.
An appropriate analogy is to a chief executive officer
(CEO) of a complex organization or business. In
business, most daily affairs proceed without the direct
oversight or awareness of the CEO, yet the CEO makes
key choices and is ultimately responsible for charting
the course of the organization. In daily life, most individual
behavior also is accomplished without executive
guidance, yet the self occasionally intervenes to
choose which of several possible actions to perform or
to alter its habitual responses.
Scope and Importance
The executive function is a hallmark characteristic of
human selfhood and is relevant for several areas of
psychology. In social psychology, research on delay
of gratification, choice, and self-regulation all concern

324———Executive Function of Self
the executive function of self. Enduring short-term
pain for long-term gain requires the ability to plan for
the future and to forego immediate relief or pleasure.
Making a choice commits a person to one course of
action and places some responsibility for the consequences
on the self. Keeping cool in a crisis involves
regulating fear or anxiety, or at least the appearance
of them. All these behaviors require executive action.
Furthermore, forces that undermine the executive function,
such as distraction, fatigue, and stress, impair all
of these behaviors.
Clinical psychology supplies dramatic evidence of
the consequences of impaired executive functioning.
For instance, major depression reflects a lack of
mood control, and addictive behavior signals a lack of
impulse control. Improving the capacity for executive
control promises to provide powerful treatment for
several psychological disorders. Evidence already
exists to support the benefits of executive control in
normal, healthy individuals. Personality psychologists
have found that people who excel at executive control
enjoy greater successes in life, including better grades,
more satisfying relationships, and greater happiness
than people who struggle with executive control.
In cognitive psychology, the executive function of
self is studied in connection with learning and memory,
planning, and the control of attention. Generally,
people with high executive ability are faster learners,
make better use of plans and strategies, and more ably
control their attention than people with low executive
ability. The executive function is also crucial for performing
novel tasks and for coping with unfamiliar
situations. When habits and prior learning provide
only rough guides to behavior, the executive function
of self intervenes to generate new responses and to
steer behavior in new directions.
Developmental psychologists examine changes in
executive function over time and have found that
the capacity for executive control is closely related to
the growth and maturation of the frontal lobes of the
human brain. Moreover, damage to the frontal lobes
is associated with deficits in executive functioning,
including poor planning, faulty reasoning, and an inability
to coordinate complex social behaviors. Perhaps the
most infamous case of frontal lobe damage is Phineas
Gage, a railroad worker who had a tamping iron blown
through his skull in 1848. Following the accident,
Gage had problems controlling his emotions and abiding
by social and cultural norms, although his memory
and intelligence remained intact. Researchers now
believe Gage suffered severe damage in areas of the
brain involved in the executive function of self.
Enduring Issues
The idea of willed, intentional action seems to contradict
the scientific pursuit of material, especially
biological or chemical, causes of behavior. Some
theorists believe the notion of a willful “little person”
or homunculus in the brain that controls behavior is an
unsatisfying and unscientific explanation that cannot
be empirically tested or verified. Other theorists accept
the idea of a homunculus or internal controller while
acknowledging the shortcomings of this approach.
These theorists work as if a homunculus or internal
controller exists and await a more precise specification
of its biological foundations. Still others study the
executive function of self by examining overt behavior
or the subjective feeling of executive control and
ignore the call to locate its biochemical basis.
Another unresolved issue concerns the measurement
of the executive function of self. The executive
function appears to be involved in a variety of behaviors,
and there is little or no consensus regarding
which single task or test best measures it. As a result,
many researchers rely on multiple tasks to assess the
operation of the executive function, whereas other
researchers focus more narrowly on specific tasks,
such as tasks that involve mainly planning or response
inhibition. Each approach has its drawbacks. The
broad, multitask approach seems ill-suited to specify
the precise capabilities of the executive function, and
the narrow, single-task approach may not capture all
of its varied capabilities.
The problem of measurement contributes to
another issue: whether the executive function of self
should be considered a general purpose capacity, used
in emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes
alike, or whether the executive function should be
considered a more specific capacity, used, for example,
in attention control or planning for the future. On
balance, the evidence suggests that the executive function
of self is a general purpose capacity used in a
wide variety of behaviors. However, this conclusion
may be the direct result of imprecise measurement.
More precise definition and measurement of the executive
function of self may help to specify its core features
and clarify its scope and breadth.
Brandon J. Schmeichel

See also Ego Depletion; Self; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Baddeley, A. D. (1996). Exploring the central executive.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 49A, 5–28.
Baumeister, R. F. (1998). The self. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T.
Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., pp. 680–740). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Norman, D. A., & Shallice, T. (1986). Attention to action:
Willed and automatic control of behaviour. In
R. J. Davidson, G. E. Schwartz, & D. Shapiro (Eds.),
Consciousness and self-regulation: Advances in research
and theory (Vol. 4, pp. 1–18). New York: Plenum.
EXEMPLIFICATION
Definition
Exemplification is defined as a strategic selfpresentational
strategy whereby an individual attempts
to project an image of integrity and moral worthiness.
A person can accomplish exemplification by presenting
him- or herself as honest, disciplined, self-sacrificing,
generous, or principled. When successful, a person
who exemplifies integrity and moral worthiness may
be able to influence other people to follow his or her
example.
History and Modern Usage
Like other self-presentation strategies, the goal of
exemplification is to gain power over others by controlling
the perceptions of the actor’s character. The
power of exemplification comes from the guilt or
shame that observers experience in the face of the
actor’s moral and charitable actions or claims. There
are many exemplifiers in history that achieved great
political power by engaging in principled and selfsacrificing
behavior (e.g., Gandhi and Martin Luther
King). Nevertheless, exemplification is also a strategy
people use in everyday interactions to win favor with
an audience. Parents, for example, can use exemplification
to influence their children by extolling their
own virtuous behavior, or a celebrity can exemplify a
generous and caring image by soliciting donations for
a charity during a telethon. In each case, the target
audience can be motivated to avoid or reduce their
feelings of guilt by performing the target behaviors
requested by the exemplifier. And even if they do not,
the exemplifier may still benefit if he or she leaves a
lasting impression of integrity and moral worthiness
on the audience.
Exemplification can also be a risky strategy if not
executed properly. For example, exemplification is
likely to fail if the audience feels “put down” by the
actor; to create a positive impression, the exemplifier
needs to exhibit or claim moral integrity without
appearing morally superior to the audience. Moreover,
research on exemplification suggests that when an
exemplifier is caught in a transgression, the audience
perceives the actor to be a hypocrite and self-deluded,
leading to especially harsh judgments of the actor’s
character. Other studies suggest that upon discovering
past failures to uphold moral standards, the would-be
exemplifier may experience cognitive dissonance
and become motivated to change the errant behavior.
Thus, the use of exemplification to win favor requires
that we practice what we preach, or at least maintain
the impression that we do, without explicitly stating
that our integrity makes us superior to others.
See also Deception (Lying); Impression Management;
Ingratiation; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Jeff Stone
Gilbert, D. T., & Jones, E. E. (1986). Exemplification: The
self-presentation of moral character. Journal of
Personality, 54(3), 593–616.
Jones, E. E. (1990). Interpersonal perception. New York:
Freeman.
EXPECTANCY EFFECTS
Expectancy Effects———325
Definition
An expectancy effect occurs when an incorrect belief
held by one person, the perceiver, about another person,
the target, leads the perceiver to act in such a
manner as to elicit the expected behavior from the target.
For example, if Mary is told that a new coworker,
John, was unfriendly, she may act in a more reserved
manner around him, refrain from initiating conversations
with him, and not include him in activities. John

326———Expectancy Effects
might then respond to Mary’s standoffish behavior
by similarly not initiating conversations or activities
with her, thus confirming her expectancy that he is
unfriendly. Expectancy effects are thus a subcategory
of self-fulfilling prophecies that occur in an interpersonal
context.
Background
Self-fulfilling prophecies have long been noted and
studied by social scientists. The bank failures of the
Great Depression are frequently offered as a classic
example: An inaccurate rumor would circulate that a
bank was about to fail. This would cause a run on the
bank, with customers hurrying to withdraw their funds
before the bank ran out of money. Banks, of course,
do not keep enough cash on hand to cover all their
deposits, so a run on the bank would eventually force
it into failure, a victim of its clients’ false expectancies.
Research on expectancy effects began with the work
of Robert Rosenthal, who looked at experimenters’
expectations. Rosenthal demonstrated that sometimes
experimenters may obtain their results in part because
their expectations led them to treat their experimental
participants in a biased manner, eliciting the hypothesized
behavior. This work led to the ultimate realization
that researchers need to design their studies so as
to prevent experimenter expectancy effects. Fortunately,
there is an easy solution to this problem: If studies are
run in which experimenters are blind to the experimental
condition of the participants (i.e., if they do not
know which participants are in the experimental vs.
control groups), then it is impossible for them to bias
their participants’ responses. The double-blind experimental
design remains today the gold standard of
research.
Research on expectancy effects then turned to
other interpersonal contexts. The classic Pygmalion
in the Classroom study showed that students whose
teachers were told were academic bloomers (but who
had in fact merely been randomly labeled as such)
showed significant gains in IQ over the school year
compared to students who had not been labeled academic
bloomers.
Current Research
Current research on expectancy effects has moved
beyond mere demonstrations that they occur to identifying
and understanding the theoretical and methodological
variables that moderate expectancy effects.
In other words, for what kinds of people and in what
kinds of situations are expectancy effects more likely
to occur?
Research examining these questions indicates that,
while there are individual differences that moderate
expectancy effects, such as self-esteem, gender, and
cognitive rigidity, situational factors such as the relative
power of the perceiver and target and how long
they have known each other appear to be more important
predictors of expectancy effects. An expectancy
effect is more likely to occur when the perceiver is in
a position of greater power than the target (such as in
a teacher–student relationship) and when the perceiver
and target have not been previously acquainted.
The longer the individuals know each other, the less
likely it is that perceivers will either form or be influenced
by incorrect expectancies.
Relatedly, much of the recent research in this area
has been dedicated to the question of determining how
powerful expectancy effects are in naturally occurring
contexts as opposed to the laboratory. Laboratory experiments
typically yield expectancy effects of larger
magnitude. In the real world, accuracy effects (i.e.,
when the expectations formed by the perceiver reflect
the actual abilities or traits of the target) appear to be
more prevalent than expectancy effects, which occur
less often or tend to be lower in magnitude.
Another major question in this area concerns the
mediation of expectancy effects; in other words, what
are the behaviors by which the perceivers’ expectations
are communicated to the target? While the
specific mediating behaviors involved depend on the
context of the interaction, the vast majority can be
classified as falling into the dimensions of affect or
effort. Affect refers to the socioemotional climate that
is created by the perceiver, and it involves primarily
nonverbal cues associated with warmth and friendliness.
Thus, a teacher who has high expectations for
a student will smile more, use a friendlier tone of
voice, and engage in more eye contact with the student.
Effort refers primarily to the frequency and
intensity of interactions between the perceiver and target.
A teacher with positive expectations of a student,
for example, will attempt to teach more material and
more difficult material to that student, ask more questions,
and spend more time talking with the student.
Importance
Because inaccurate expectations can have such
serious ramifications, this remains a topic of social

psychological research with considerable importance
in both methodological and real-world domains. For
example, knowing that experimenters’ expectations
can unintentionally bias their results has led to major
improvements in how researchers design and conduct
experiments, in psychology as well as other fields
such as medicine.
Of greater social importance is understanding the
role that others’ expectations of a person can play in
determining a person’s outcomes in life, ranging from
events as trivial as whether he or she gets along with a
new coworker to matters of tremendous significance,
such as whether he or she ultimately succeeds or fails
in school. To say that expectations can have selffulfilling
consequences is therefore a message both of
warning and hope. It is a message of warning because
inaccurate negative expectations can doom an otherwise-capable
person from achieving his or her full
potential. It is also a message of hope, because positive
expectations on the part of an important person in
one’s life—parent, teacher, employer—can help lead
one to accomplishments only dreamed of earlier.
Monica J. Harris
See also Individual Differences; Nonverbal Cues and
Communication; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Further Readings
Rosenthal, R. (1994). Interpersonal expectancy effects:
A 30-year perspective. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 3, 176–179.
EXPECTATIONS
Definition
Expectations are personal beliefs about occurrences
that may take place in the future. Expectations develop
from a combination of individuals’ experiences and
knowledge. For example, if one has the knowledge that
a relative’s birthday is next Saturday and experience
indicates that a family get-together was held each of
the past 5 years on that relative’s birthday, then it is
reasonable to have the expectation that a birthday celebration
is likely to occur next Saturday. Expectations
serve a basic function to prepare humans for action.
The choices humans make are based on the expectations
they hold for how their decisions will affect
themselves and the world around them at some future
time. Expectations range in certainty from a small possibility
of occurrence to an almost certain occurrence.
Expectations can be automatic and not given much
thought, for example, expecting there will be sufficient
oxygen available for breathing, or they can be deliberate,
such as expecting one will make a positive impression
on a new acquaintance.
Consequences
Expectations———327
Expectations affect how people think, feel, and behave.
Expectations affect our thought processes involved
in attention, interpretation, explanations, and memory.
People pay more attention to information that is consistent
with expectations or noticeably inconsistent.
Expectations guide how people interpret information;
specifically, people are more likely to interpret uncertain
information consistent with their expectations.
People are more likely to generate explanations for an
event when it is contrary to expectations rather than
consistent with expectations. Finally, people are more
likely to remember information that is either clearly
consistent with expectations or clearly inconsistent.
Expectations affect how people feel, including
attitudes, anxiety, and depression. Attitudes, or one’s
evaluation of an object, are a reflection of people’s
expectations about the object combined with the value
or importance they place on the object. Negative
expectations, such as expecting to fail on a task, can
lead to increased anxiety and depression. In contrast,
positive expectations, such as believing in one’s ability
to perform well on a task, can lead to decreased
anxiety and depression and positive feelings.
Finally, expectations affect how people behave in
many areas, such as choice of tasks, amount of effort
exerted, drinking alcohol, and cooperation. In general,
people behave in ways that are consistent with their
expectations. For example, people choose to engage
and put more effort into tasks for which they expect to
succeed. Having positive expectations about drinking
alcohol, such as increased social ability or sexual performance,
is related to increased alcohol consumption.
Expectations affect whether people will react in
a cooperative or competitive manner with coworkers.
If people expect their coworker dislikes them and/or is
a competitive person, individuals will respond competitively.
In contrast, if people expect their coworker
likes them and/or is a cooperative person, individuals
will respond cooperatively.

328———Experimental Condition
Application
The examination of how people’s expectations affect
their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors has been
applied to many areas of social life, including close
relationships, academic performance, health-related
behaviors, forming first impressions, judgments, decision
making, and the development of worldviews
(how one sees the world).
Bettina J. Casad
See also Confirmation Bias; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Further Readings
Olson, J. M., Roese, N. J., & Zanna, M. P. (1996).
Expectancies. In E. T. Higgins & A. W. Kruglanski
(Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles
(pp. 211–238). New York: Guilford Press.
EXPERIMENTAL CONDITION
Definition
There are many research methods available to the
psychological scientist. Some allow researchers to
describe phenomena (surveys and observational
studies), and another allows researchers to explain
phenomena (an experiment). To explain a phenomenon,
one must be able to determine cause and effect.
The only research method that can do that is an experiment.
Scientific experiments are based on observations
when a variable has been introduced into a
controlled situation. Inferences can be made about the
differences between observations and then used to
develop theories and to generalize to other similar situations.
The controlled situation, in which variables
are manipulated and effects measured, comprise the
design of the experiment.
In setting up the context, the experimenter must
hold as many conditions constant as possible in the
situation, while manipulating a variable(s). The variable
that is manipulated by the experimenter is called
the independent variable (IV); it is free (independent)
to be varied by the experimenter. What is being
measured is called the dependent variable (DV); it
“depends” on the manipulation of the independent
variable. Holding conditions constant means making
sure that no relevant variable in the experiment is
varied besides the IV. The experimental condition is
the one in which the IV is presented. The results from
this condition can then be contrasted with the results
from the control condition, where the IV was not presented.
The idea of controlled contrasts is central to
experimental design.
Types of Experimental Designs
There are many types of experimental designs.
Experimenters may design studies that have one or
several independent variables. Similarly, they may
have one or several dependent variables. Other variations
in experimental design include whether or not
the participants are exposed to all manipulations of
the IV. If they are, then it is called a within-subjects
design. If they only are exposed to one manipulation
of the IV, it is called a between-subjects design. The
design of the experiment also includes the order of
events and how participants are assigned to conditions.
Designing an experiment involves a series of
decisions and justifications about all of these issues.
An Example
A researcher is interested in whether stress causes
a decrease in cognitive performance. First, the experimenter
must decide what the manipulation will be.
The researcher could decide that the IV would be the
presentation of a loud tone. This researcher would
need to justify (usually through a review of previous
literature) that a loud tone is stressful (and he or she
would have to specifically define what “loud” meant).
Next, the researcher would need to determine what the
DV would be, in other words, how would cognitive
performance be measured? Percent correct on a math
test, or time to complete a puzzle task, could each
be a DV. By controlling the presentation of an IV in
the experimental condition, the researcher can see its
effect on cognitive performance by comparing the
findings to those in the control condition. By exerting
both types of control (manipulation of the IV, holding
conditions constant), any differences in the DV (i.e.,
differences in scores/time between participants who
heard different tones) can be attributed to the manipulation
of the IV (the different tones).
M. Kimberly MacLin

See also Control Condition; Experimentation; Research
Methods
Further Readings
MacLin, M. K., & Solso, R. L. (2007). Experimental
psychology: A case approach (8th ed.). Boston: Allyn &
Bacon.
EXPERIMENTAL REALISM
Definition
Experimental realism is the extent to which situations
created in social psychology experiments are real and
impactful to participants.
Background
The concept of experimental realism was developed in
response to criticism that most social psychology
experiments take place in artificial laboratory settings
and thus are invalid for examining how people truly
think and act. In 1968, Elliot Aronson and J. Merrill
Carlsmith addressed this concern by distinguishing
between reality created in experimental situations and
reality encountered outside of the laboratory. They
argued that experimental situations that are sufficiently
engrossing to participants can elicit psychological
states of interest regardless of how similar the
experimental events are to everyday events.
Experimental Realism Versus
Mundane Realism
Aronson and Carlsmith distinguished between experimental
realism and mundane realism. Experimental
realism refers to the extent to which participants
experience the experimental situation as intended.
Mundane realism refers to the extent to which the
experimental situation is similar to situations people
are likely to encounter outside of the laboratory.
Social psychologists are generally more concerned
with experimental realism than with mundane realism
in their research because participants must find the
situation attention-grabbing and convincing in order
for the experiment to elicit targeted sets of beliefs,
motives, and affective states necessary to test the
research hypothesis. A study that accomplishes this
can provide much important insight, independent of
how much mundane realism it possesses.
For instance, in Stanley Milgram’s classic investigation
of obedience, participants were instructed to
administer a series of electric shocks to an unseen confederate
(though no shocks were actually delivered).
As part of a supposed learning study, participants acted
as “teachers” and were instructed by the experimenter
to administer shocks of increasing intensity for every
wrong response offered by the confederate. The events
of this study were highly artificial; it is certainly far
from normal to administer shocks to another human
being under the instruction of an experimental psychologist.
Yet, rather than questioning the reality of the
situation, participants became extremely invested in
it. Because participants took the experimental reality
seriously, they responded naturally, shuddering and
laughing nervously as they obeyed and administered
increasing levels of shock. Due to the high impact of
this study, an otherwise sterile laboratory setting was
transformed into a legitimate testing-ground for examining
human obedience.
The Importance of
Experimental Realism
Experimental realism is of central importance to experimental
social psychology. To capture the essence of
important social psychological phenomena within
laboratory settings, it is often necessary to use deception
to construct events that seem real, nontrivial, and
impactful to participants, within the bounds of ethical
considerations. When this is accomplished, participants
are unlikely to be suspicious of deceptive tactics
in experiments, allowing researchers to investigate the
psychological variables they want to study.
Spee Kosloff
See also Ecological Validity; Milgram’s Obedience to
Authority Studies; Mundane Realism; Research Methods
Further Readings
Experimental Realism———329
Aronson, E., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1968). Experimentation in
social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.),
The handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 1–79). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

330———Experimentation
EXPERIMENTATION
Definition
In its simplest form, experimentation is a method of
determining the presence or absence of a causal relationship
between two variables by systematically
manipulating one variable (called the independent
variable) and assessing its effect on another variable
(called the dependent variable).
Importance and Consequences
The hallmark of experimentation is that it allows
researchers to make statements about causality. There
are several features of experiments that facilitate such
claims:
1. Experiments allow researchers to create a situation
in which changes in the independent variable precede
assessment of the dependent variable—making it
possible to draw conclusions about the directionality
of the relationship. This is important, because to
establish a cause-and-effect relationship between two
events, the event that one supposes to be the cause
must precede the event that one supposes to be the
effect.
2. Experimentation entails randomly assigning
participants to experimental groups. When random
assignment is employed, each participant has an equal
chance of being assigned to any of the conditions in a
study. This technique allows researchers to assume that
the experimental groups of participants are equivalent
at the outset of the study. Thus, researchers can safely
attribute any observed differences in the dependent
variable to the experimental manipulation without worrying
about the possibility that naturally occurring differences
between the groups of participants could
account for these differences.
For example, suppose that a researcher wants to
determine whether playing chess causes an increase in
creativity among fifth graders. Imagine that the
researcher decides to have two groups: one group that
plays chess for an hour after school each day for
6 months and a control group that has free time for an
hour after school each day for 6 months. At the start of
the study, the researcher recruits a group of 80 fifth
graders and allows them to sign up to either play chess
or get free time. Six months later, the researcher
gives all the kids a creativity test. Sure enough, the
researcher finds that the 12 kids who chose playing
chess scored higher on the creativity test than the 68
kids who chose free time. Can the researcher say that
chess caused an increase in creativity? No—because
the kids who chose to play chess might have been
more creative than those who chose free time. Thus,
the group differences in creativity may have been there
from the start and may have had nothing to do with the
researcher’s manipulation. To do this experiment properly,
the researcher should randomly assign the
students to a condition, so that 40 played chess and
40 had free time. By doing so, the researcher could
assume that the two groups were equivalent at the start
of the study, and so any differences in creativity at the
end of the study could be attributed to the independent
variable (in this case, playing chess vs. having free
time) and not to differences in creativity that existed
before the study began.
3. Experimentation allows researchers to isolate
the effect of the independent variable by controlling
all other elements of the environment, thereby ensuring
that all of the participants in a given study undergo
a similar experience, with the exception of the experimental
manipulation. In the chess versus free time
example, imagine that the kids in the chess group
always listened to classical music while they played
chess, whereas the kids in the free time group did not
listen to music. At the end of the study, could the
researcher be sure that the difference in creativity
between the two groups was due to the game that they
played? No—because whether the kids listened to
classical music also may have influenced their creativity.
To do the experiment properly, the two groups
should be identical with the sole exception of the
independent variable (chess vs. free time). In this way,
the experimenter could be sure that it was really the
independent variable that influenced the student’s creativity
and not some other factor.
Some scholars have questioned the utility of
experimentation, noting that the experiments which
researchers design sometimes do not resemble the circumstances
that people encounter in their everyday
lives. However, experimentation is the only research
method that allows one to definitively establish the
existence of a causal relationship between two or more
variables.
Anna P. Ebel-Lam
Tara K. MacDonald

See also Control Condition; Experimental Condition;
Research Methods
Further Readings
Goodwin, C. J. (2003). Research methods in psychology:
Methods and design. New York: Wiley.
Pelham, B. W. (1999). Conducting research in psychology:
Measuring the weight of smoke. Pacific Grove,
CA: Brooks/Cole.
EXPERIMENTER EFFECTS
When scientists conduct experiments, influences and
errors occur that affect the results of the experiments.
Those influences and errors that occur because of
some characteristics of the experimenter or because of
something the experimenter did are called experimenter
effects. They reduce the validity of the experiment,
because the results do not really tell about the
hypothesis; they show that the experimenter somehow
(usually unwittingly) influenced or changed the
results. For that reason, most good researchers look
for ways to prevent or minimize experimenter effects.
There are two major kinds of experimenter effects:
noninteractional and interactional.
Noninteractional Effects
Noninteractional effects are found in research that does
not require experimenters’ interaction with human or
animal research subjects. There are three major subtypes
of such effects:
1. Scientists observe human behavior, animal behavior,
or natural events and record what is observed, but
there are errors in what is recorded. These are called
observer effects. For example, an experimenter who
is responsible for counting the number of mistakes
someone makes might fail to count some mistakes
that would contradict the experimenter’s theory.
2. Scientists look at the results of research, which
may be accurate enough but which the scientist then
interprets incorrectly. For example, researchers might
get the opposite results of what they expected based
on their theory, but after thinking about it, they may
decide that the results support their theory after all.
These are called interpreter effects.
Experimenter Effects———331
3. Scientists intentionally report falsified results of
research. For example, a researcher (such as a student
worried about having a good dissertation) might produce
fake data instead of collecting real observations.
These are called intentional effects.
Interactional Effects
Interactional experimenter effects occur when the
experimenter works (or interacts) with human or animal
subjects. There are several major subtypes of interactional
experimenter effects:
1. Biosocial effects operate when the experimenter’s
age, sex, or race unintentionally influences
the outcome of the research. Subjects may respond differently
to an experimenter, depending on whether
the experimenter is male or female; Asian, African
American, or Caucasian; old, middle-aged, or young.
In addition, the subject’s age, sex, and race may influence
the manner in which an experimenter behaves.
2. Psychosocial effects are the effects associated
with experimenters’ psychological and social characteristics.
Examples of these characteristics include
anxiety, a need for approval, hostility, warmth, or authoritarianism,
all of which may affect the behavior or
responses of the subjects in an experiment.
3. Situational effects are found in the experimental
environment itself. These effects may occur because
of the physical characteristics of the laboratory, the
experimenter’s previous acquaintanceship with the
subject, or whether the subject is the first person participating
in the experiment or one who participates
later in the experiment.
4. Modeling effects occur when experimenters
have tried out the experiment on themselves, and their
responses to the experiment are later unintentionally
communicated to their subjects, causing the subjects
to behave or respond similarly to the behavior or
responses of their particular experimenter.
5. Expectancy effects, the most frequently studied
experimenter effect type, occur when the results of the
experiment are in the direction that the experimenter
expects them to be. This expectancy is communicated
by subtle cues through various channels of nonverbal
communication, such as tone of voice, facial expression,
and body movement.
In an experiment running rats in a maze, if the
experimenters were told that their rats were good

332———Expertise
maze runners (bright), the rats ran the maze well. If
the experimenters were told their rats were poor maze
runners (dull), the rats ran the maze poorly. What the
experimenters expected from their rats determined the
actual behavior of the rats, although the rats had been
assigned their labels of “bright” or “dull” completely
at random. (It is believed that the experimenters may
have communicated their expectancy to the rats by
handling them more gently if they believed they were
bright and handling them more roughly if they
believed they were dull.) A very early study involved
a horse named Clever Hans who belonged to Mr. von
Osten, a mathematics instructor. Clever Hans could
perform mathematical calculations by tapping his foot
in response to questions. After much close observation,
a scientist found that nonverbal, almost imperceptible,
head movements from Mr. von Osten, or even
strangers asking Hans a question, told Hans when to
start tapping and when to stop.
During the 20th century and so far in the 21st, as
the various experimenter effects have been recognized
to be affecting experimental research, researchers in
many disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, anthropology,
and medicine, have devised experimental procedures
and precautions to reduce experimenter effects
in their research.
Robert Rosenthal
See also Expectancy Effects; Influence; Self-Fulfilling
Prophecy
Further Readings
Pfungst, O. (1965). Clever Hans (C. L. Rahn, Trans.).
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. (Original work
published 1911)
Rosenthal, R. (1976). Experimenter effects in behavioral
research (Enlarged ed.). New York: Irvington.
EXPERTISE
Expertise refers to the psychological processes that
underlie the superior achievement of experts, who are
typically defined as those who have acquired special
skills in, or knowledge of, a particular subject through
professional training and practical experience. The
term expert has a long history that can be traced all the
way back to the training of skilled craftsmen in the
guilds of the Middle Ages. At that time most of the
professional skills, such as shoemaking, tailoring, and
weaving, were taught through an apprentice system,
whereby adolescents worked for a master in return for
being allowed to observe and learn the skills of the
trade. When the apprentices had sufficiently learned
the necessary skills enabling them to work independently,
they often left the master and traveled around
the country as journeymen to find work. This allowed
them to further develop their skills until they had
reached a level of understanding and mastery of their
craft to attain expert status. Eventually they would
have accumulated skills to produce master pieces,
which would meet the quality standard set by masters
in the guild, who would give them permission to set
up their own shop and accept their own apprentices.
Over time, the terms master and expert have been
extended and are today used to describe a wide range
of highly experienced professionals, such as medical
doctors, accountants, teachers, and scientists. Its usage
has even been expanded to include any individual who
has attained superior performance by instruction and
extended practice, ranging from birdwatchers to pianists,
golf players to chess players.
When elite ice skaters, chess players, and musicians
demonstrate outstanding skill in public, their
performance often looks extremely natural and surprisingly
effortless. To the casual observer, these exhibitions
appear so extraordinary that it seems unlikely
that most other performers, regardless of the amount
or type of training, will ever achieve similar performance
levels. It is tempting to attribute these amazing
achievements to the performer’s unique innate talent,
deemed necessary for such superior performance
achievement. However, when scientists began measuring
the experts’ presumed superior powers of speed
of thought, memory, and intelligence with psychometric
tests, no general superiority was found; the
demonstrated superiority was limited to particular
types of stimuli and activities. For example, the superiority
of the chess experts’ memory was constrained
to regular chess positions and did not generalize to
other types of materials. Not even IQ could distinguish
the chess masters among chess players nor the
most successful and creative among artists and scientists.
Recent reviews show that (a) measures of general
intelligence do not reliably distinguish those who
will succeed in a domain, (b) the superior performance

of experts is often specific to a domain of activity and
does not transfer outside their narrow area of expertise,
and (c) individual differences between experts
and less proficient individuals nearly always reflect
attributes acquired by the experts during their lengthy
training.
The pioneering research on the thought processes
at the highest levels of performance studied expert and
world-class chess players. To gain insight into differences
in speed and structure of thinking, the chess
players were instructed to think aloud while selecting
the next move for unfamiliar chess positions. The
world-class players did not differ from the less skilled
players in the speed of their thoughts or the size of
their basic memory capacity. The superior ability of
the world-class players to generate better moves was
based on their extensive experience and knowledge of
patterns in chess. In the first formal theory of expertise,
William G. Simon and Herbert A. Chase proposed
that experts with extended experience learn a
larger number of complex patterns and use these new
patterns to store new knowledge about which actions
should be taken in similar situations.
According to this influential theory, expert performance
is viewed as the result of skill acquired with
gradual improvements of performance during many
years of experience in a domain. With further experience
and instruction, aspiring experts acquire more
knowledge about the domain, so it is tempting to
assume that the performance of experts improves as a
direct function of increases in knowledge through
training and extended experience. However, there are
now many demonstrations that extensive domain
knowledge does not necessarily result in superior performance.
For example, the outcomes of psychological
therapy do not improve as a function of the length of
training and professional experience of the therapist.
Similarly, the accuracy of decision making, medical
diagnosis for common diseases, and the quality of
investment decisions do not improve with further professional
experience. More generally, the number of
years of work and experience in a domain is a poor
predictor of attained level of professional performance.
In a pioneering study, Benjamin Bloom and his
colleagues studied the developmental history of scientists,
athletes, and artists who had won international
prizes for their outstanding achievements. These elite
performers did not acquire their performance from
regular activities within their respective domains, in
Expertise———333
which most amateurs participate, but they were identified
early and given special opportunities to study
and train in the best educational environments. Their
families provided substantial financial and emotional
support to allow them to focus fully on the development
of their performance. Bloom’s influential research
demonstrated the necessity for extended training in
the best training environments to reach the highest
levels of performance.
Subsequent research by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf
Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer analyzed the
effects of different types of experience on the improvement
of performance. They found that in activities in
which individuals had attained an acceptable level of
performance, such as recreational golf and many professions,
even decades of continued experience was
not associated with improvements in performance. The
aspiring expert performers, who were able to keep
improving their performance for decades, were found
to seek out particular kinds of experiences involved in
deliberate practice—that is, activities designed, typically
by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively
improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.
In support of the critical role of deliberate practice,
expert musicians differing in the level of attained
solo performance also differed in the amounts of time
they had spent in solitary practice during their skill
development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by
age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the
least accomplished expert musicians, and only 2,000
hours for serious amateur pianists. Many subsequent
studies have found that the accumulated amount of
deliberate practice is closely related to the attained
level of performance of many types of experts, such as
surgeons, radiologists, musicians, dancers, chess players,
and athletes.
The recent advances in our understanding of the
concepts, knowledge, and skills that mediate experts’
superior performance come from studies in which
experts are instructed to think aloud while they complete
tasks that are representative of essential activities
in their domains. Other advances come from
researchers who record where the experts are looking
while they perform the same type of tasks. Finally,
important advances result from attempts to build computer
programs (expert systems) that are capable of
regenerating the performance of human experts.
These studies that monitor the experts’ cognitive and
perceptual processes have found that the differences

334———Extraversion
between experts and less skilled individuals are not
merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the
accumulated knowledge; they also reflect qualitative
differences in strategies, organization of knowledge,
and representation of problems. During the extended
development of their performance abilities, experts
acquire domain-specific memory skills that allow
them to use long-term memory (long-term working
memory) to dramatically expand the amount of information
that can be kept accessible, while the experts
plan and reason about alternative courses of action in
a situation. The superior structure of the experts’ mental
representations allow them to adapt to changing
circumstances as well as anticipate future events, so
the expert performers can respond with impressive
speed without any innate neurological advantage. The
same acquired representations have been found to
allow experts to have the ability to monitor and selfregulate
their own performance so that they can keep
improving their own performance by designing their
own training.
In this way, experts’ superior skills are primarily
acquired, and expertise is developed through mental
and physical adaptations to the demands of the task
domains.
K. Anders Ericsson
See also Achievement Motivation; Automatic Processes;
Learning Theory; Memory
Further Readings
Bloom, B. S. (Ed.). (1985). Developing talent in young
people. New York: Ballantine Books.
Ericsson, K. A. (2002). Attaining excellence through
deliberate practice: Insights from the study of expert
performance. In M. Ferrari (Ed.), The pursuit of
excellence in education (pp. 21–55). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A., Charness, N., Feltovich, P., & Hoffman, R. R.
(Eds.). (2006). Cambridge handbook of expertise and
expert performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Lehmann, A. C. (1996). Expert and
exceptional performance: Evidence on maximal
adaptations on task constraints. Annual Review of
Psychology, 47, 273–305.
Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess.
American Scientist, 61, 394–403.
EXTRAVERSION
Definition
Extraversion is one of the most studied traits in personality
psychology. Some form of the trait has been
included in almost every comprehensive model of personality.
At the broadest level of description, extraversion
reflects the extent to which a person is interested
in and enjoys social interaction. However, this broad
trait also encompasses a number of more specific
facets. For instance, each of the following facets has
been included in at least one major model of extraversion:
impulsivity, assertiveness, activity level, the tendency
to engage in excitement-seeking behaviors, the
experience of positive emotions, and feelings of warmth
toward others. Given the relative diversity of these
characteristics, it should be no surprise that psychologists
disagree about which of these narrower facets is
the defining feature of extraversion (or whether a defining
feature even exists). Modern personality psychologists
strive to resolve this debate and to understand the
psychological and physiological processes that underlie
this trait.
Models of Extraversion
The history of extraversion research is as long as the
history of psychology itself. Precursors of the trait can
be found in the writings of the ancient Greeks, though
many psychologists trace the origin of modern extraversion
research to Carl Jung. Jung believed that
individuals varied in their orientation to the external
world. Extraverts were thought to be characterized by
strong and immediate reactions to the objective features
of the environment. Introverts, on the other hand,
were thought to be more tuned in to the internal, subjective
feelings that objects in the world create. Thus,
extraverts were thought to be adept at dealing with the
changing external environment (and perhaps somewhat
impulsive), whereas introverts were thought to
be less adaptable and more prone to introspection.
Hans Eysenck built on the work of Jung (and others)
and attempted to identify the processes that might
underlie these extraverted thoughts and behaviors.
Initially, Eysenck, like Jung, thought that extraverts
were defined by their impulsivity and their tendency to
react to changing external circumstances. He posited
that individual differences in this characteristic were

due to differential levels of excitation and inhibition.
Specifically, Eysenck believed that extraverts were
characterized by weak and slowly developing excitation,
as well as strong and quickly developing inhibition.
Thus, extraverts conditioned (or learned) slowly
and got bored with repetitive tasks quickly. As a result
of these underlying processes, extraverts were poorly
socialized and craved changing conditions.
This initial model was found to be insufficient, and
Eysenck quickly replaced it with a model based on
individual differences in arousal. According to this
revised model, extraverts were characterized by relatively
low levels of arousal, whereas introverts were
characterized by relatively high levels of arousal.
Because too little or too much arousal impairs performance
and is subjectively unpleasant, extraverts and
introverts should seek out different types of environments.
Extraverts should choose and enjoy highly
arousing situations like parties or risky activities,
whereas introverts should choose and enjoy more
sedate activities likely spending time alone or interacting
with a relatively small number of friends.
Eysenck tested his model by examining extraverts’
and introverts’ performance in conditions that varied
in their level of stimulation.
Soon after Eysenck proposed his arousal model,
Jeffrey Gray developed a revised theory that was
based on more detailed models of psychophysiological
systems in the brain. This revised model shifted
the underlying explanatory mechanism from individual
differences in arousal to individual differences in
sensitivity to reward. Gray believed that extraverts
were highly sensitive to rewards, whereas introverts
(particularly neurotic introverts) were highly sensitive
to punishment. Thus, extraverts should learn better
when given rewards for good performance, whereas
introverts should learn better when punished for poor
performance. Furthermore, extraverts were thought to
be more strongly motivated to approach rewards than
introverts. Recent research has focused on the role of
dopamine in this reward-seeking behavior.
At the same time that Eysenck and Gray were
developing their psychophysiological models of extraversion,
other personality researchers were using factor-analytic
techniques to determine whether a small
number of basic traits could subsume and account for
the many different characteristics that personality
researchers had studied. For instance, researchers from
the lexical hypothesis tradition posited that all important
individual differences in personality would be
encoded in language. Therefore, factor analyses of
personality descriptors should be able to uncover any
basic personality traits that exist. Other researchers set
out to factor-analyze existing questionnaire items to
see whether a small number of traits underlie the large
number of characteristics that psychologists had studied
in the past.
Over the years, these factor-analytic studies have
consistently supported the idea that five broad dimensions
(the Big Five) underlie much of the individual
differences in personality. The first and largest factor
that emerges from these analyses has been given a
variety of labels including “confident self-expression,”
“surgency,” “assertiveness,” and “power.” Yet even with
these different names, most personality psychologists
agree that this first factor usually resembles extraversion.
Thus, extraversion is an important part of modern
five-factor models of personality.
Correlates of Extraversion
Not surprisingly, extraversion has often been linked
with social outcomes, including the amount of time
that a person spends with others, the number of friends
that a person has, and the extent to which a person
enjoys social activities. Extraverts tend to score higher
than introverts on all of these measures. However,
because extraversion is a broad trait, it has also been
linked with a variety of other outcomes. For instance,
because of their greater impulsivity, extraverts are
more likely than introverts to engage in risky behaviors
(including some risky health behaviors). On the other
hand, extraverts tend to be slightly more productive
than introverts at work and are more likely to be
involved in community activities, perhaps because of
their social skills and social interest. Extraverts have
also been shown to be happier than introverts and less
susceptible to certain types of psychological disorders.
Richard E. Lucas
See also Arousal; Personality and Social Behavior;
Personality Judgments, Accuracy of; Risk Taking; Social
Psychophysiology
Further Readings
Extraversion———335
Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1997). Extraversion and its
positive emotional core. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson, &
S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology
(pp. 767–793). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

336———Extrinsic Motivation
EXTRINSIC MOTIVATION
Definition
Extrinsic motivation is the desire to do something
because of the rewards and reinforcements it brings. In
other words, one would probably not do the behavior
if one didn’t get something, later, for doing it. Extrinsic
motivation is often contrasted with intrinsic motivation,
in which behavior occurs because the experience
of doing the behavior is reward enough, independently
of any separable consequences that may follow.
Background and History
Extrinsic motivation is consistent with the tenets of
operant behaviorism, which say that behavior occurs
because it has been reinforced—that is, a person has
received some tangible and separable reward, consequence,
or compensation for doing that behavior in
the past, and expects the same to occur in the present.
Experimental research commencing in the 1970s
showed that inducing extrinsic motivation by rewarding
a person for doing a previously enjoyable activity
can undermine the person’s subsequent intrinsic
motivation to do that activity, a finding that helped to
weaken behaviorism’s influence within psychology.
Although inducing extrinsic motivation via rewards
can have some positive performance effects (e.g.,
evoking greater effort, a greater quantity of output,
and more rote learning), there is a risk because it can
also lead to reduced enjoyment, creativity, mental
flexibility, and conceptual learning.
Four Types of Extrinsic Motivation
In contemporary psychology, extrinsic motivation is an
important feature of E. L. Deci and R. M. Ryan’s selfdetermination
theory. In the past 15 years, this theory
has differentiated the extrinsic motivation concept,
now specifying four different types of extrinsic motivation.
External motivation exists when people act
primarily to acquire anticipated rewards or to avoid
anticipated punishments. Introjected motivation exists
when people act to avoid guilt and self-recrimination.
Identified motivation exists when people act to express
a personally important value or belief. Integrated motivation
exists when people act to express an important
value or belief that is part of an elaborated network of
principles and commitments. For example, people
might recycle primarily because it is mandated by law
(external motivation), because they would feel bad
about themselves if they didn’t (introjected motivation),
because they believe in recycling (identified
motivation), or because recycling is an expression of a
consolidated conservation ethic and worldview (integrated
motivation).
Notably, all four of these motivations are considered
extrinsic because, in each case, behavior is undertaken
not for its own sake but rather as a means to
some other end. Still, the four motivations are said to
vary on their degree of internalization, that is, the
extent to which the end has been incorporated into the
self. External motivations are not at all internalized,
introjected motivations are partially internalized,
identified motivations are mostly internalized, and
integrated motivations are completely internalized.
Importantly, this conceptualization entails that some
extrinsic motivations (i.e., identified and integrated
motivations) can be undertaken with a sense of autonomy
and self-determination despite their non-enjoyable
status. In this way self-determination theory acknowledges
that “not all extrinsic motivations are problematic”
while also addressing the societal benefits that
occur when people internalize non-enjoyable but
essential behaviors (such as voting, tax paying, diaper
changing, etc.). In addition, this formulation allows the
theory to address the social conditions that promote
internalization—in particular, people are more likely
to internalize extrinsic motivations when authorities
are autonomy-supportive, that is, when they take subordinates’
perspectives, provide choice, and provide a
meaningful rationale when choice has to be limited.
Finally, this formulation allows the theory to address
important personality-developmental issues concerning
maturity, role acceptance, and wisdom.
In sum, extrinsic incentives can certainly be powerful
motivators of behavior. However, they should be
used judiciously, because there are numerous ways in
which they can backfire. Ideally, social contexts will
help people to internalize their extrinsic motivations,
so that the necessities of life can be well handled.
Kennon M. Sheldon
See also Intrinsic Motivation; Overjustification Effect;
Self-Determination Theory

Further Readings
Deci, E. L., Eghrari, H., Patrick, B. C., & Leone, D. R.
(1994). Facilitating internalization: The self-determination
theory perspective. Journal of Personality, 62, 119–142.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A metaanalytic
review of experiments examining the effects of
extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological
Bulletin, 125, 627–668.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and
self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY,
ACCURACY OF
Every year in North America at least 75,000 people are
identified from police lineups and subsequently prosecuted.
There are hundreds of documented cases in
which mistaken eyewitness identification has led to
false imprisonment. Although it is impossible to know
how often eyewitnesses make mistakes, it is known
that mistakes are made. For example, of approximately
8,000 sexual assault cases in which DNA was tested
by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the suspect
was exonerated approximately 25% of the time.
In most of those cases, eyewitness identification was
the primary way in which suspects were identified.
Furthermore, of 140 cases in which people have been
falsely imprisoned and subsequently exonerated, more
than 80% involved mistaken eyewitness identification.
Not surprisingly, improving the accuracy of eyewitness
evidence has been a focus of legal psychologists
for many years.
History of Research on Accuracy
of Eyewitness Testimony
For many years, psychologists have been trying
actively to understand how and why eyewitnesses
make mistakes. Hugo Munsterburg published his
groundbreaking volume on the topic, titled On the
Witness Stand, in 1906. This book, based on basic
memory research, detailed how eyewitnesses were
prone to a number of errors and did not have the perfect
memories the legal system often assumed.
Although Munsterburg’s book stimulated a great deal
of discussion after it was published, it was largely
Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of———337
dismissed by the legal system because it did not
describe research that had been done specifically on
eyewitnesses to crimes.
Contemporary Research
Hundreds of more recent studies have explored the
accuracy of eyewitness identifications. The basic distinction
these researchers have made is between system
variables, factors the legal system can control,
and estimator variables, factors the legal system
cannot control. With system variables, one can construct
the situation so that errors may be avoided. For
example, a biased lineup instruction from the police
(e.g., “The guy is in the lineup, all you have to do is
pick him out”) will lead to more eyewitness errors
than will an unbiased instruction (e.g., “The criminal
may or may not be present in the lineup”).
An example of an estimator variable is the race of
the criminal relative to the witness. Research has
shown a consistent decrease in eyewitness accuracy if
the witness and the suspect are of different races.
Because this decrement is greater when the majority
group member identifies a minority, relative to when a
minority attempts to identify a majority group member,
some researchers have suggested familiarity with
the other group may be the cause of the increased error.
Other researchers have suggested that different racial
groups focus on different facial features. However,
a definitive cause has thus far eluded researchers.
Importantly, there is little the legal system can do to
alleviate this problem. Thus, many researchers have
argued it may be best to focus on system variables, as
these are the factors that the legal system will be able
to change.
Guidelines for Investigators
Although research in the field has been around for
35 years, it is only recently that practitioners have
begun to embrace the findings and change their procedures
to avoid errors. In 1999, the U.S. Department
of Justice published a landmark set of recommendations
on the treatment of eyewitness evidence, titled
Eyewitness Evidence: A Guide for Law Enforcement.
Then attorney general of the United States, Janet Reno
called together the relevant stakeholder groups and
asked them to come up with an empirically validated
guide for law enforcement that the whole group could

338———Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of
support. The final group consisted of 33 members: 17
police officers, 4 district attorneys, 6 public defenders,
and 6 eyewitness researchers. The Guide, jointly
developed by the legal community and researchers,
may represent the most comprehensive and potentially
influential work of its type ever developed.
The purpose was to provide step-by-step procedures
for law enforcement in dealing with eyewitnesses.
These procedures were designed to minimize
the risk of contaminating eyewitness evidence and
reduce the likelihood of mistaken identifications. One
set of procedures, based on the empirically validated
“cognitive interview” technique, was designed to
improve how police interviewed witnesses. Specifically,
law enforcement officials were encouraged to
establish rapport with the witnesses; encourage witnesses
to give complete answers; ask only open-ended,
nonleading questions; and caution people against
guessing about what they had witnessed. As for the
lineup process used by police, the Guide recommends
the use of single suspect lineups (i.e., one suspect with
all others being known innocent fillers); ensuring the
use of unbiased lineup instructions; and avoiding postidentification
suggestions and feedback to witnesses.
In addition, researchers in the group wanted the
Guide to recommend the sequential lineup procedure
(where photos are shown one at a time) as preferable
to show-up (one photo) and simultaneous (where the
photos are all shown at the same time) lineups.
Sequential lineups have dramatically reduced error
rates compared to other types of lineups. In addition,
the researchers wanted to recommend double-blind
procedures such that neither the officer conducting the
lineup nor the witness is aware of the identity of the
suspect, a procedure that further reduces false identifications.
However, other members of the group were
reluctant to include these two elements in the Guide as
they might not be feasible for some police departments.
Interestingly, many law enforcement agencies
that have adopted the Guide report little difficulty
implementing these procedures.
Thus, it is clear that the psychological research on
eyewitness identification evidence has had a great
deal to contribute to the legal system. Indeed, this area
is an excellent example of how researchers and practitioners
can work together to ensure a better outcome
for society. However, though the eyewitness literature
has provided a great deal of insight, there remain
many questions that need to be answered.
Steven M. Smith
See also Applied Social Psychology; Expectancy Effects;
Memory
Further Readings
Wells, G. L. (1993). What do we know about eyewitness
identification? American Psychologist, 48, 553–571.
Wells, G. L., Malpass, R. S., Linsay, R. C., Fisher, R. P.,
Turtle, J. W., & Fulero, S. M. (2000). From the lab
to the police station: A successful application of
eyewitness research. American Psychologist,
55, 581–598.

FACIAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTION
Definition
Human beings and some other animals have remarkable
control over their facial muscles. Facial expressions
of emotion are patterned movements of the
muscles in the face that correspond with internal,
affective states.
Importance
Communication is clearly important to effective social
interaction. Whereas humans are able to communicate
with one another verbally, they also are able to communicate
nonverbally through body language and facial
expressions. Facial expression of emotion is an important
aspect of communication, and our bodies and brains
seem wired to engage in such communication.
Two aspects of the nervous system highlight the
biological readiness to engage in communication
through facial expressions. First, human beings appear
to have brain regions specifically dedicated to processing
information about others’ faces. Remarkably, these
brain regions are active and developing even in human
infants. This suggests that humans are born with a
propensity and ability to attend to and process information
about other human faces. Second, each human
brain has two cortical regions containing a map of
one’s own body. The somatosensory cortex is the part
of the brain that interprets which body part or parts are
receiving tactile information at any given time. The
F
339
more sensitive a particular body part is, the more
somatosensory cortex is devoted to it. The motor cortex
is the brain region responsible for directing muscle
commands to various parts of the body. The more
control one has over a particular body part, the more
motor cortex is dedicated to that body part. The face
is disproportionately represented in both of these cortical
regions. That is, there are greater portions of
somatosensory and motor cortex dedicated to the face
than one might expect based on the size of the face relative
to the rest of the human body. All of this suggests
that facial expression of emotions serves an important
role and that our bodies are equipped to readily communicate
through such expression.
Cultural Considerations
Considering the communicative importance of facial
expression of emotion, one might speculate that expressions
of emotion are universal across cultures—that is,
that all human beings make similar facial expressions
when experiencing similar emotions and that observers
from all cultures can interpret what any given person
is feeling based on his or her facial expression. Indeed,
Charles Darwin first championed this idea, arguing
that facial expressions are species specific rather than
culture specific. There is considerable evidence for
this point of view.
Human beings are able to recognize facial expressions
of at least six emotions with remarkable accuracy:
happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and
disgust. Impressively, this has been demonstrated even

340———Facial-Feedback Hypothesis
in cultures with no prior contact with Western societies
(suggesting that the research participants did
not learn these emotional expressions from various
media). Furthermore, when members of preliterate
cultures were asked to make various facial expressions,
Americans were able to recognize which emotion
they were expressing. Accuracy of judgments of
facial expression is good when the target being judged
is a still photograph of an expression. The accuracy of
such judgments improves when people are allowed to
judge the facial expression in action.
The universality of facial expressions of emotion
(and the interpretation of those expressions) suggests
that they are innate rather than learned behaviors. Supporting
this conclusion, people with congenital blindness
produce similar facial expressions to people with
sight. Furthermore, facial expressions of certain primates
appear very similar to those of human beings.
This evidence supports Darwin’s contention that facial
expressions are evolved behaviors that serve an important
communicative function.
Despite these cultural similarities, there also are
differences in facial expression of emotion across cultures.
First, people are approximately 10% more accurate
at interpreting facial expressions of members of
their own cultural group than they are of interpreting
those from members of different cultural groups.
However, it is important to remember that people are
still quite accurate when judging members of other
cultural groups. Second, different cultures and subgroups
within cultures have different rules about the
appropriateness of various expressions of emotion.
For example, Americans tend to display anger much
more readily than do Japanese people. People might
therefore express emotion differentially across cultures.
Third, recent research has identified an interesting
cultural difference in how people interpret the
emotional expressions of others. In this research, participants
viewed a picture of a social scene and were
asked to identify what emotion a particular person in
the photograph was experiencing. Participants from
Western countries used only the target person’s facial
expression in making these judgments. Participants
from Japan were more likely to use the entire context
(i.e., the facial expressions of others in the scene)
when making these judgments. For Americans, a
smile always indicated happiness. For Japanese participants,
a smile sometimes indicated happiness and
other times indicated a smirk.
Expression Versus
Experience of Emotion
Researchers have debated the role of facial expressions
of emotion for quite some time. Some argue that
facial expression is a part of emotional experience,
whereas others argue that facial expression simply
reflects an internal state. Presently, there is no evidence
to determine which of these perspectives is correct.
One thing that is clear, however, is that facial
expressions and emotion are strongly related to one
another. Research has demonstrated that facial expressions
can actually create emotional experience.
Studies have demonstrated this by unobtrusively causing
people to display a smile or a frown (by pronouncing
different phonemes or by holding a pencil in
the mouth) and then looking at the effects on mood.
Smiling induced more pleasant moods, and frowning
induced more negative moods. Facial expressions may
cause emotion by creating physiological changes in
the body. It is also possible that they cause emotion
through a self-perception process in which people
assume they must be happy (or sad) because they are
smiling (or frowning). Of course, in the real world,
people’s emotions are typically caused by factors
besides their facial expressions. That expressions and
experience of emotion are so closely related is an
intriguing finding, however.
Steven M. Graham
See also Cultural Differences; Culture; Emotion; Nonverbal
Cues and Communication; Self-Perception Theory;
Sociobiology
Further Readings
Ekman, P. (1993). Facial expression and emotion. American
Psychologist, 48, 384–392.
FACIAL-FEEDBACK HYPOTHESIS
The facial-feedback hypothesis states that the contractions
of the facial muscles may not only communicate
what a person feels to others but also to the person
him- or herself. In other words, facial expressions are
believed to have a direct influence on the experience of
affect. This hypothesis goes back to Charles Darwin,

who wrote that the expression of an emotion intensifies
it, whereas its repression softens it. A second
origin of the facial-feedback hypothesis is William
James’s theory of emotion, which states that the bodily
changes follow the perception of an exciting fact and
that the feeling of these bodily changes is the emotion.
Although Darwin and James differ in their view of
the role of the eliciting stimulus, they agree that the
behavior that accompanies an emotion exerts a causal
influence on its experience. In particular, the skeletal
muscles were identified as important contributors.
While Darwin has assigned the facial muscles a special
role as means of expression and has meticulously
described their evolutionary significance (e.g., frowning),
James’s account is based on more global units of
behavior (e.g., running away).
To test the causal influence of facial expressions on
the experience of affect, three different procedures have
been employed. In some experiments, participants were
explicitly instructed to adopt an emotionally relevant
facial expression. In another set of studies, the emotional
meaning of the expression was not mentioned.
Instead, the experimenter would point at the muscles
that were supposed to be contracted. In yet a third
method, facial expressions were induced by a procedure
that required the contraction of specific muscles
for a purpose that was void of any emotional meaning.
For example, participants were told to hold a pen with
either their teeth or their protruded lips to either induce
or inhibit a smiling expression by extracting the zygomaticus
muscle (one of the main muscles involved in
making the mouth into a smile) or its antagonist. In a
related study, golf tees were fixed on people’s foreheads,
which they had to move together by contracting
the corrugator (frowning) muscle.
All procedures were successful in causing affective
consequences either in people’s self-reported mood,
in specific emotions, or in the evaluation of emotional
stimuli, like cartoons. However, the three facialinduction
methods afford different theoretical interpretations.
Specifically, the more likely it is that the
induction of the facial expression is linked to the
recognition of its emotional meaning, the more likely
it is that people may infer their affective state on the
basis of their expression. For example, they may draw
the inference that if they smile, they must be amused.
This mechanism is an extension of Bem’s selfperception
theory, which assumes that if internal cues
are weak or ambiguous, people infer their attitudes
Facial-Feedback Hypothesis———341
from their behavior. Similarly, they may infer their
emotional states from what they do. However, the fact
that affective consequences can be obtained from
facial expressions even if their emotional meaning is
disguised suggests that more direct mechanisms may
be operating as well.
While self-perception theory may account for the
cases in which the meaning of the expressions is
apparent, other models are necessary to explain the
direct impact of the facial action. On a physiological
level, it has been argued that facial expressions may
regulate the volume and particularly the temperature of
the blood that flows to the brain and therefore influence
cerebral processes. It was suggested that an emotional
event may cause peripheral muscular, glandular,
or vascular action that changes the emotional experience.
Another explanation that is based on evidence
from the neurosciences comes from a study that identifies
specific cortical activities that are connected to
different facial expressions. Specifically, it was found
that the facial expression of emotions that are linked to
approach (e.g., joy) were associated with greater left
frontal brain activity while avoidance emotions (e.g.,
fear and anger) were linked with greater right frontal
activation.
From a more psychological perspective, the effects
of facial feedback can be understood as the result of a
motivational orientation. As an example, one theory
assumes that behaviors that are involved in approach
facilitate the processing of positive information, whereas
behaviors that are involved in avoidance facilitate the
processing of negative information. Applied to facial
expressions, this implies that a smiling expression will
facilitate the processing of a cartoon and therefore
intensify its affective impact. This also explains why,
in many studies, the mere adoption of an expression
has by itself had no emotional effect.
The importance of facial feedback has been recognized
in domains that go beyond the emotional experiences.
For example, it has been found that positive
or negative sentences are understood more easily if,
outside of their awareness, people were led to adopt a
facial expression that corresponded to the valence of
the sentence. In one study, research participants had to
hold a pen in the smiling pose while watching photos
of either White or Black people. As a consequence,
implicit racial bias was reduced. Also, the importance
of facial feedback has been recognized as a mediator
of empathy and prosocial behavior.

342———False Consciousness
Finally, it should be noted that certain facial expressions
require effort to be maintained, which may influence
the experienced fluency in information processing.
The experience of fluency was found to serve as a
basis for other feelings and judgments, like those of
familiarity and fame. For example, it has been found
that judgments of fame are often based on the feeling
of familiarity that is elicited by a name. More
recently, it was demonstrated that having participants
furrow the brow while reading the names reduced the
fame that was associated with the names. This was
presumably the case because the experienced effort
undermined the feelings of familiarity and, as a consequence,
the judged fame.
Fritz Strack
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Emotion; Self-
Perception Theory
Further Readings
Laird, J. D. (1974). Self-attribution of emotion: The effects of
expressive behavior on the quality of emotional experience.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 475–486.
Strack, F., Martin, L. L., & Stepper, S. (1988). Inhibiting and
facilitating conditions of the human smile: A nonobtrusive
test of the facial feedback hypothesis. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 786–777.
Zajonc, R. (1989). Feeling and facial efference: Implications
of the vascular theory of emotion. Psychological Review,
39, 117–124.
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS
Definition
False consciousness is defined as the holding of false
or inaccurate beliefs that are contrary to one’s objective
social interests and that contribute to the maintenance
of oppression or unjust inequality in society.
According to this usage, the disadvantaged (e.g., poor
people, the working class, women, and oppressed
minorities) possess false consciousness when they
genuinely come to believe that they are inferior,
deserving of their subordinate role in the social hierarchy,
or entirely incapable of taking action against
the causes of their misery. Members of advantaged
groups are said to possess false consciousness when
they genuinely come to believe that they are superior,
deserving of their privileged role in the hierarchy,
or that what is good for them is good for everyone.
Extensive sociological and psychological evidence
reveals that people often do hold seemingly false
beliefs that justify and perpetuate their own (and others’)
misfortune and oppression.
Historical Background
The concept of false consciousness originates with
the early writings of Karl Marx, although it was his
collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who coined the term.
Marx emphasized the illusory character of ideology
and the way in which ideology functions to obscure
and to justify oppression and dominance in capitalist
societies. Through institutional control over religion,
education, culture, the media, and political and economic
institutions, dominant elites in society were
seen as capable of spreading ideas and values that
served their own narrow interests and perpetuated
their hegemony. Thus, according to Marx and Engels,
the political consciousness of most members of the
working class was theorized to be “false,” in the sense
that it reflected the dominant group’s biased interests
rather than their own. At the same time, Marx believed
optimistically that the oppressed would eventually
recognize the falseness of prevailing ideas and take
action against the sources of their oppression.
Social Psychological
Research on False Consciousness
Contemporary scholars, influenced by Marxian ideas
in sociology, have suggested that Marx may have underestimated
the extent to which psychological processes
play a role in leading people to accept, rationalize, and
adapt to unjust circumstances. An extensive body of
research in social psychology has demonstrated that
members of disadvantaged (as well as advantaged)
groups often engage in defensive bolstering of the status
quo (i.e., system justification). In so doing, they
appear to actively imbue the existing social order with
legitimacy and stability. At least six types of false
consciousness beliefs have been identified by scholars
and researchers:
1. Denial and failure to perceive injustice and
disadvantage

2. Fatalism, or the belief that protest is futile and social
change is impossible to achieve
3. Rationalization of unequal distributions of social roles
and divisions of labor in society with the use of stereotypes
and other social judgments
4. The tendency to falsely blame victims for their own
misfortune or to otherwise deflect blame for human
suffering away from the social system itself
5. Identification with and idealization of “the oppressor,”
or the tendency to harbor preferences in favor of
members of dominant groups
6. Active resistance to social change and the desire to
stick with the status quo even when new alternatives
would produce better outcomes
See also Ideology; Just-World Hypothesis; System
Justification
Further Readings
John T. Jost
Ido Liviatan
Cunningham, F. (1987). False consciousness. In F. Cunningham
(Ed.), Democratic theory and socialism (pp. 236–267).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Jost, J. T. (1995). Negative illusions: Conceptual clarification
and psychological evidence concerning false
consciousness. Political Psychology, 16, 397–424.
Runciman, W. G. (1969). False consciousness. In
W. G. Runciman (Ed.), Sociology in its place and other
essays (pp. 212–223). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Wood, A. W. (1988). Ideology, false consciousness, and
social illusion. In B. P. McLaughlin & A. O. Rorty (Eds.),
Perspectives on self-deception (pp. 345–363). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
FALSE CONSENSUS EFFECT
Definition
The false consensus effect occurs when we overestimate
the number of other people (or extent to which
other people) share our opinions, beliefs, and behaviors.
Thus, sometimes individuals tend to believe that
others are more similar to them than is actually the
False Consensus Effect———343
case. For example, if I enjoy eating chocolate ice cream
cones, I will tend to overestimate the percentage of
other people like me who also enjoy eating chocolate
ice cream cones relative to the percentage that do not.
This effect is likely to occur most often when
considering opinions, beliefs, and behaviors that are
important to us. Thus, consider another example: If
you believe a particular favorite television program is
funny, you will tend to overestimate the number of
other people like you who also believe that program is
funny relative to those who do not.
Background and Evidence
The false consensus effect was first described by social
psychologists in 1977. In one of the first research projects
demonstrating the effect, researchers approached
college students as they walked across campus and
asked the students to advertise a restaurant by wearing
a large sign that said, “Eat at Joe’s.” As you might
expect, some of the students agreed to wear the sign,
while others did not. All the college students were
later asked how many other students they estimated
would make the same decision they did (either to wear
the sign or not to wear the sign).
The false consensus effect was demonstrated when
two results occurred: First, the students who agreed to
wear the sign reported they believed that more than
half of the other students on campus (62%) would also
agree to wear the sign. However, the students who did
not agree to wear the sign reported they believed that
more than half of the other students on campus (67%)
also would not agree to wear the sign. Thus, both
groups of students, those who agreed and those who
disagreed to wear the sign, overestimated how many
other students would behave just as they did.
Why It Occurs
One reason why this effect is likely to occur is that
the people with which we regularly come into contact
(such as our friends or classmates) are often like us in
some ways. Thus, sometimes we use our knowledge of
those similarities to make judgments or estimations of
additional ways in which our friends, classmates,
or other people, might be similar to us. Not to mention
the fact that it is often easier for us to remember
instances in which other people agreed with us about
something rather than disagreed with us.

344———False Uniqueness Bias
It is also possible that our believing that other
people are similar to us can serve to boost our selfesteem.
So assuming that others share our opinions,
beliefs, and behaviors helps us feel good about ourselves
and our opinions, beliefs, and behaviors.
Implications
This effect demonstrates a type of bias to which individuals
fall prey in their typical thinking, thus often
referred to as a type of cognitive bias. Unfortunately
we fall prey to a number of such biases. This is problematic
when we consider how often in our daily lives
we make judgments about others, either privately
within our own thoughts or in conversations with others.
Because such judgments are likely to influence
additional thoughts about these people, as well as our
behavior toward them, it could easily be the case that
we have beliefs about others that are incorrect and
then possibly behave toward them in ways that are
inappropriate.
See also Attribution Theory; Availability Heuristic
Further Readings
Tricia J. Yurak
Alicke, M. D., & Largo, E. (1995). The role of the self in the
false consensus effect. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 31, 28–47.
Fabrigar, L. R., & Krosnick, J. A. (1995). Attitude
importance and the false consensus effect. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 468–479.
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false
consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception
and attribution processes. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology 13, 279–301.
FALSE UNIQUENESS BIAS
Definition
False uniqueness bias refers to the tendency for
people to underestimate the proportion of peers who
share their desirable attributes and behaviors and to
overestimate the proportion who share their undesirable
attributes. Typically, this bias has been assessed
by collecting estimates that people make about the
proportion of peers who have positive or negative
traits/behaviors with the actual proportions who report
these traits and behaviors. False distinctiveness is
indexed by comparing the percentage of peers whom
participants estimate act the same as they do with the
actual sample statistic. Several studies have shown
that people underestimate the proportion who also
behave in a socially desirable way—an indication of
false uniqueness. For example, persons who regularly
engage in physical activity tend to underestimate the
actual proportion of other people who exercise. For
undesirable attributes and behaviors (such as smoking
cigarettes), people overestimate the proportion of peers
who behave the same way they do.
Explanation
This bias is thought to be the result of a selfenhancement
or self-protective motivation: By underestimating
the number of other people who behave
desirably, the person can feel distinctively positive. On
the other hand, perceiving one’s undesirable behaviors
or attributes as more common than they actually are
can create a feeling of “safety in numbers,” and help to
justify irresponsible practices.
Such self-serving biased estimates presumably are
the product of constructive social comparison, that
is, projections made up in the head. Although Leon
Festinger’s classic social comparison theory focused
on the effects of the actual relative standing of others
on self-evaluations of abilities and opinions, people
also cognitively construct standards in self-serving
ways. George R. Goethals found, however, that people
were less self-serving and more realistic in their estimates
when the attribute was well defined. Thus,
people are less likely to think that they are smarter than
they are better in a moral sense. This is because it is
easier to distort the norm for such things as being helpful
or fair; intelligence has more reality constraints.
Relation to Other
Social Perceptual Biases
False uniqueness can be distinguished from two other
biases concerning social norms. False consensus refers
to the tendency to attribute one’s own opinion or behavior
to others. In this case, the estimates of behavioral
subscribers are compared to the estimates of the same

ehavior by nonprescribers. For example, marijuana
smokers report more people smoke marijuana than do
nonsmokers. Unlike false uniqueness, false consensus
is not assessed with respect to the actual consensus.
Another difference is that in false consensus, the selfserving
bias always takes the form of an overestimation
of one’s own behavior. But when non–marijuana
smokers exaggerate the use of marijuana (compared to
actual reports), they are exhibiting false uniqueness.
Another related bias is pluralistic ignorance
whereby people erroneously think their private opinions
and behaviors are different from everybody else’s,
even though everyone’s public behavior seems to be
same. For example, people who lived in a small religious
community, which condemned card playing and
alcohol, assumed that everyone concurred because no
one publicly engaged or spoke in favor of these practices
(for fear of embarrassment or social censure).
In actuality, quite a few people in this community
behaved in these ways when their curtains were drawn.
Unlike the other biases which seem to be self-serving,
pluralistic ignorance emphasizes the individual’s distinctiveness
and even alienation from others. It appears
to persist because people are reluctant to let down their
public façade.
Implications
False uniqueness permits the individual to think he or
she has exceptional positive traits and behaves better
than most other people. This perception may support
general feelings of self-worth, but it also might contribute
to overconfidence and lead to negative impressions
of peers.
Jerry Suls
See also False Consensus Effect; Pluralistic Ignorance; Social
Comparison
Further Readings
Goethals, G. R., Messick, D. M., & Allison, S. (1991). The
uniqueness bias: Studies in constructive social
comparison. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social
comparison: Contemporary theory and research
(pp. 149–176). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Miller, D. T., & McFarland, C. (1987). Pluralistic
ignorance: When similarity is interpreted as dissimilarity.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
53, 298–305.
Ross, L., Greene, D., & House, P. (1977). The false
consensus effect: An egocentric bias in social perception
and attributional processes. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 13, 279–301.
Suls, J., & Wan, C. K. (1987). In search of the false
uniqueness phenomenon: Fear and estimates of social
consensus. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
52, 211–217.
Suls, J., Wan, C. K., & Sanders, G. S. (1988). False
consensus and false uniqueness in estimating the
prevalence of health-protective behaviors. Journal of
Applied Social Psychology, 18, 66–79.
FALSIFICATION
Definition
One cannot prove whether a theory or hypothesis is
true. One can only prove that it is false, a process called
falsification. Falsification is a tool that distinguishes
scientific social psychology from folk social psychology,
which does not use the process of falsification.
History and Theory
Falsification———345
From the beginning of the 20th century, various
philosophers and scientists tried to define the best way
to do science, mostly dealing with such questions as
“How can you move from observations to laws?” or
“How can you choose a universal theory from any
number of possible theories?” Here, the philosopher
Karl Popper provided the idea that no real-world theory
can be considered scientific if it does not admit the
possibility of a contrary case. This means that it has
to be possible to make an observation that can falsify
the theory. For example, the statement “all swans are
white” would be falsified by observing a black swan
(or admitting the possibility of a black swan somewhere
in existence).
A scientific theory consists of several statements
that are linked together in a logical manner. If the
statements are proven false, then it becomes unreasonable
to support the theory any longer. Therefore, of
the old (falsified) theory is replaced by a newer (unfalsified)
theory. Some researchers try to avoid the falsification
of their theory by adding further statements,
which account for the anomaly.
For Popper, the falsifiability of a theory is a criterion
to distinguish science from nonscience. Consequently,

346———Fast and Frugal Heuristics
researchers can never finally prove that their scientific
theories are true; they can only confirm or disprove
them. Each time a theory survives an attempt to falsify
it, it becomes a more believable theory. To advance the
science, one has to replace the falsified theories with
new theories. These new theories should account for
the phenomena previously falsified.
Criticisms and Modern
Application in Social Sciences
Several philosophers and various researchers have
criticized the falsification principle. In social sciences,
where tests are very sensitive, many observations may
be argued to be fallible and wrong. Hence, it is easy to
make an argument against the falsification of a theory,
by referring to observational errors.
In contrast to Popper, some philosophers see the
development of additional statements that defend the
old theory as a natural process. Other scholars later
reformulated the falsification principle. Some argued
that the shift from one theory to another could not be
performed due to falsification of the many statements
of a theory, but that a whole change of the paradigm
was needed among the scientists, who share ideas
about the same theory.
Falsification has been widely used in the social psychology.
Current social science is multiparadigmatic.
Generating several hypotheses on the same phenomenon
is seen as additional help for researchers to overcome
the subjective resistance of rejecting their theory.
Igor Grossmann
Brad J. Bushman
See also History of Social Psychology; Logical Positivism;
Research Methods
Further Readings
Ellsworth, P. C. (2004). Clapping with both hands: Numbers,
people, and simultaneous hypotheses. In J. T. Jost,
M. R. Banaji, & D. A. Prentice (Eds.), Perspectivism in
social psychology: The yin and yang of scientific progress
(pp. 261–274). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Lakatos, I., & Musgrove, A. (Eds.). (1970). Criticism and the
growth of knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Popper, K. R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery.
New York: Science Editions.
FAST AND FRUGAL HEURISTICS
Definition
Fast and frugal heuristics, as defined by Gerd
Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research
Group, are simple, task-specific decision strategies that
are part of a decision maker’s repertoire of cognitive
strategies for solving judgment and decision tasks. Fast
and frugal heuristics are simple to execute because
they limit information search and do not involve much
computation. Unlike many decision-making models in
the behavioral sciences, models of fast and frugal heuristics
describe not only the outcome of the decisionmaking
process but also the process itself: Fast and
frugal heuristics comprise simple building blocks that
specify how information is searched for (search rule),
when information search will be stopped (stopping
rule), and how the processed information is integrated
into a decision (decision rule).
The term heuristic is of Greek origin meaning “to
find out” or “to discover.” This notion of heuristics
differs from approaches that define heuristics as rules
of thumb or as irrational shortcuts that result in decision
biases. Fast and frugal heuristics yield decisions
that are ecologically rational rather than logically
consistent.
Examples
A decision maker’s repertoire of cognitive strategies
includes a collection of simple heuristics. As a hammer
is ideal for hammering in nails but useless for
sawing a board, so the heuristics are designed to solve
particular tasks. For example, there are specific heuristics
for choice tasks, estimation tasks, and categorization
tasks. Following are two prominent examples of
fast and frugal heuristics: the recognition heuristic
(RH), which exploits a lack of knowledge, and the
Take the Best heuristic (TTB), which deliberately
ignores information. Both heuristics can be applied to
choice tasks and to situations in which a decision
maker has to infer which of two objects has a higher
value on a quantitative criterion. Examples include
inferring which of two stocks will perform better in
the future, which of two cars is more reliable, or which
of two job applicants is better suited for an open
position.

The Recognition Heuristic
The RH has been studied extensively with the
often-used inference problem of deciding which of
two cities is more populated. In 2002, Daniel G.
Goldstein and Gigerenzer asked students in the United
States and Germany the following question: Which
city has more inhabitants, San Antonio or San Diego?
Given the differences in background knowledge about
American cities, one might expect that American
students would do much better on this task than
German students. In fact, most of the German students
did not even know that San Antonio is an American
city. How did the two groups perform on this task?
Astonishingly, Goldstein and Gigerenzer found the
opposite of what one would expect: Whereas about
two thirds of the American students correctly inferred
that San Diego has more inhabitants than San
Antonio, all of the German students got this question
correct. How could this be? The German students who
had never heard of San Antonio had an advantage.
Their lack of recognition enabled them to use the RH,
which, in general, says, “If one of two objects is recognized
and the other is not, then infer that the recognized
object has the higher value with respect to the
criterion.” The American students could not use the
RH because they had heard of both cities; they knew
too much.
The RH is a powerful tool. It allows for fast decisions
and yields reasonable decisions in many environments
because recognition is often systematic
rather than random. Domains in which the RH works
well include sizes of cities, performances of tennis
players in major tournaments, or productivity of authors.
Conversely, the RH does not work well when, for
instance, cities have to be compared with respect to
their mayor’s age or their altitude above sea level.
The Take the Best Heuristic
If the RH is not applicable because a decision
maker recognizes both objects in a choice task or
because recognition is not correlated with the criterion,
a heuristic that considers cue information can be
applied. The TTB is a cue-based heuristic that does not
require any information integration to make an inference
but bases decisions on single cues. For instance,
when inferring the size of a city, the decision maker
could consider cues such as whether a city has an airport,
an opera house, or a major exposition site. TTB’s
Fast and Frugal Heuristics———347
search rule specifies searching for the cues in the order
of their validity. The validity of a cue is defined as the
probability of making a correct inference under the
condition that the cue discriminates; that is, one object
has a positive and the other object a negative cue value.
According to TTB’s stopping rule, the information
search is stopped as soon as a cue is found that discriminates,
so that if the most-valid cue discriminates,
only one single cue is considered. Otherwise the nextmost-valid
cue will be considered. Finally, according
to TTB’s decision rule, TTB infers that the object that
is favored by the cue that stopped the information
search has the larger criterion value. If no discriminating
cue is found, TTB makes a random guess.
Empirical Evidence
Studies on fast and frugal heuristics include (a) the
use of analytical methods and simulation studies to
explore when and why heuristics perform well and
(b) experimental and observational studies to explore
whether and when people actually use fast and frugal
heuristics. Systematic comparisons with standard
benchmark models such as Bayesian or regression
models have revealed that the performance of fast
and frugal heuristics depends on the structure of the
information environment (e.g., the distribution of cue
validities, the correlation among cues). In many environments,
fast and frugal heuristics can perform
astonishingly well—especially in generalizing, that is,
when making predictions for new cases that have not
been encountered before. Empirical studies indicate
that humans use fast and frugal heuristics especially
when under time pressure, when information search is
costly, or when information has to be retrieved from
memory. Recent studies have investigated how people
adapt to different environments by learning. In 2006,
Jörg Rieskamp and Philipp E. Otto found that people
apparently learn to select the heuristic that performs
best in a particular environment. Moreover, Torsten
Reimer and Konstantinos Katsikopoulos found that
people also apply fast and frugal heuristics when making
inferences in groups.
Torsten Reimer
Jörg Rieskamp
See also Availability Heuristic; Decision Making; Ecological
Rationality; Heuristic Processing; Representativeness
Heuristic

348———Fear Appeals
Further Readings
Gigerenzer, G., Todd, P. M., & the ABC Research Group.
(1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Goldstein, D. G., & Gigerenzer, G. (2002). Models of
ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic.
Psychological Review, 109(1), 75–90.
Reimer, T., & Katsikopoulos, K. (2004). The use of
recognition in group decision-making. Cognitive Science,
28(6), 1009–1029.
Rieskamp, J., & Otto, P. E. (2006). SSL: A theory of how
people learn to select strategies. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 135, 207–236.
FEAR APPEALS
Definition
Fear appeals, or fear-arousing communications, are
communications that emphasize negative consequences
of specific behaviors to motivate behavior
change. Fear-arousing communications usually consist
of two parts, namely, a fear appeal that stresses the
severity of, and personal vulnerability to, a threat and
a recommended protective action capable of reducing
or eliminating the threat.
Context and Importance
Fear appeals are widely used in health promotion.
They come in many guises, from the obligatory health
warnings on cigarette packs to essays about the deleterious
effects of obesity. With an estimated 40% of premature
mortality from the 10 leading causes of death
in the United States due to modifiable lifestyle factors,
the use of fear appeals in health promotion has become
an accepted means of improving the health of populations.
The basic assumption guiding the use of fear
appeals is that the more one succeeds in making individuals
concerned about the negative consequences of
health-impairing actions, the greater will be the likelihood
of behavior change. In line with this principle,
several countries are now considering adding gory pictures
to the written warnings on cigarette packs.
Theories
Over the years, several theories have been proposed to
explain how fear appeals work. According to early
drive-reduction models, exposure to threatening information
arouses fear, which motivates individuals to
reduce it. Greater fear will result in more persuasion,
but only if the recommended action is perceived effective
in avoiding the danger. Because of weak support
for this theory, later models abandoned the assumption
that the intensity of the fear determines the
acceptance of (effective) action recommendations.
According to Leventhal’s parallel response model, the
emotional response to the risk information is considered
largely irrelevant for the actions taken to reduce
the risk. Cognitive appraisal of the risk information
stimulates two parallel responses, namely, danger
control and fear control. Danger control is a problemsolving
process, which involves the choice of actions
capable of averting the danger. In contrast, fear control
entails an individual’s attempt to control the
unpleasant affect evoked by fear arousal. Since fear
control might often use denial strategies to reduce
fear, it can interfere with danger control.
Protection motivation theory is an important
attempt to identify the determinants of danger control.
This theory differentiates between threat appraisal and
coping appraisal. Threat appraisal is an evaluation of
personal vulnerability to, and severity of, a threat and
of the rewards associated with health-impairing behavior.
Coping appraisal involves evaluation of response
efficacy, self-efficacy, and of the costs of healthenhancing
behavior. These two forms of appraisal are
assumed to interact with one another: The motivation
to protect oneself will be strongest when the threat is
appraised as serious, and coping is appraised as effective.
In her extended parallel response model, Witte
suggested that when coping is appraised as ineffective,
individuals will mainly engage in fear control.
The stage model of processing of fear-arousing
communications is the most recent fear-appeal theory.
In line with earlier theories, the stage model differentiates
between threat appraisal and coping appraisal. If
individuals feel vulnerable to a severe health risk, this
threatens their belief that they are healthy, arouses
defense motivation, and stimulates the motivation to
carefully examine the presented information. Defense
motivation results in biased processing of information.
In appraising the threat, defense-motivated individuals
will attempt to minimize it. If this strategy
proves unsuccessful, because the threat seems real,
individuals will accept that they are at risk. In this
case, the processing of the action recommendation
will be biased, but in a positive direction. They will
now be motivated to find the recommended action

effective, because then they can feel safe. Defense
motivation will lead to a positive bias in the processing
of an action recommendation and consequently
heighten the motivation to accept it. Furthermore,
while severity of a threat will improve an individual’s
evaluation of the protective action, individuals are
unlikely to adopt such an action, unless they feel personally
vulnerable.
Evidence
Empirical research on fear appeals has resulted in a
body of evidence that high fear messages are generally
more effective than low fear messages in changing
individuals’ attitudes, intentions, and behavior. More
specifically, it has been found that all main components
of fear-arousing communications have a positive effect
on measures of persuasion: Higher levels of severity of
a threat, perceived vulnerability to a threat, response
efficacy, and self-efficacy of a recommendation all contribute
to changes in attitudes, intentions or behavior.
However, whereas most factors affect individuals’ attitudes,
research shows that the most important factor in
changing individuals’ intentions and actual behavior is
perceived vulnerability: Individuals adopt recommended
actions mainly when they feel vulnerable to a
health risk.
Implications
The emphasis of health education has frequently been
on the severity of negative health consequences and
the effectiveness of the recommended action. However,
although these factors affect attitudes, they fail to have
much impact on behavior. Thus, however severe a
health risk and however effective the recommended
action, unless one persuades individuals that they are
vulnerable, they are unlikely to take protective action.
Health education campaigns should stress an individual’s
vulnerability to a health risk and not merely
vividly depict the severity of the risk. In stressing personal
vulnerability to negative consequences of certain
behaviors, fear-arousing communications can be
an effective way of changing individuals’ healthimpairing
behaviors.
See also Health Psychology; Persuasion
Natascha de Hoog
Wolfgang Stroebe
Further Readings
Boster, F. J., & Mongeau, P. (1984). Fear-arousing persuasive
messages. In R. N. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication
yearbook (Vol. 8, pp. 330–375). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
De Hoog, N., Stroebe, W., & de Wit, J. B. (2005). The impact
of fear appeals on processing and acceptance of action
recommendations. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 31(1), 24–33.
Rogers, R. W., & Prentice-Dunn, S. (1997). Protection
motivation theory. In D. S. Gochman (Ed.), Handbook of
health behavior research: Vol. 1. Personal and social
determinants (pp. 113–132). New York: Plenum.
Witte, K., & Allen, M. (2000). A meta-analysis of fear
appeals: Implications for effective public health
campaigns. Health Education and Behavior,
27(5), 591–616.
FEEDBACK LOOP
Feedback Loop———349
The feedback loop concept has several sources, and
there are several different ways to think about it. One
way is to think about the meaning of cause and effect.
People often think about variable A causing outcome
B to happen, and that being the end of it—a straight
line from cause to effect. The logic behind feedback
processes is that that picture often is too simple.
Sometimes variable A causes outcome B, but outcome
B then turns around and exerts an influence (directly
or indirectly) on variable A, the original cause. This,
in turn, causes variable A to make something else happen
with respect to outcome B. In this circumstance,
there is not a straight line of cause and effect, but a
closed loop. Causality occurs all around the loop.
Another way to approach the concept is to think
about so-called self-regulating systems and how they
work. A self-regulating system tries to keep some condition
fixed, even in the face of various kinds of disturbances
from outside. For example, a heating and
cooling system with a thermostat acts to keep the
temperature of a house confined to a narrow range,
corresponding to the thermostat’s setting. How does it
do that? The thermostat is a device that senses current
air temperature and compares it to a set point. If air
temperature gets noticeably higher than the set point
(deviates from it far enough), the thermostat sends a
message to activate the air conditioner part of the system.
That’s not the end, though. The thermostat keeps
on checking current air temperature, and when the
temperature returns to the set point, it allows the air

350———Feedback Loop
conditioner to turn off. In a system that is sophisticated
enough, deviations in either direction trigger the
appropriate response (if the air temperature falls too
low, the message goes not to the air conditioner but to
the heater).
The component elements of this system are illustrated
in Figure 1. There is some sort of sensing or perception
of current conditions (an input), some sort of
reference value or set point, some way of comparing
the perception to the reference point, and some way of
making things happen (an output). As suggested at the
beginning of this discussion, what happens in the output
can have an effect on current conditions, which
causes the perception of current conditions to change.
This in turn creates a ripple of causal influence to run
through the system again—and again and again, each
time the output changes the current conditions.
Of course, the output isn’t the only thing that can
change current conditions. Unexpected disturbances
of various sorts can also change the existing state of
affairs. For example, weather outside will influence
the temperature of the air in the room; so will filling
the room up with people for a party. Both of these disturbances
influence the current conditions perceived
by the thermostat and thus the behavior of the system.
Engineers use this sort of thinking to design
mechanical and electronic systems, but the same sort
of reasoning can be applied easily to self-regulation in
a living system. As a simple extension of the example
Goal, Standard,
Reference Value
Comparator
Input Function Output Function
Effect on
Environment
Figure 1 Schematic Depiction of a Feedback Loop
just used, if you are outside on a very warm day, your
body heats up. The temperature regulator in your body
detects that you are getting warmer than normal body
temperature and calls for perspiration, which cools
you back down. If a cold breeze chills you, the temperature
regulator calls for your body to shiver, which
generates heat. This process is an example of what is
called homeostatic self-regulation. Alternatively, in
either of these cases, a more elaborate output could
occur, which involves bigger chunks of behavior than
sweating and shivering. That is, if you get too warm,
you might take off your jacket or even go indoors
where the air conditioner is on. If you get too cold,
you might put your jacket on or go someplace where
there’s a toasty fireplace.
Now let’s take this reasoning a couple of steps further.
One step is to make the reference point be a moving
target (e.g., your home’s temperature control
system might be programmed to raise the set point at
night and lower it during the day). Another step is to
make the whole thing be about behavior. Imagine that
people’s goals for what they want to do today (or this
week, or in their lives in general) are reference values
for feedback loops. Put these steps together, and you
get a person who looks at existing conditions, compares
them to the desired goal, and takes steps to make
the existing conditions come into closer conformity to
the goal, even as the goal keeps changing and evolving.
For example, your goal is to buy a present for
a friend, so you have to leave your
house (one goal within the broader
one) and get into your car and drive to
a store (another goal) and find what
you want (another one) and pay for it
and bring it home. The person keeps
making changes to bring the experienced
condition into conformity with
the next step in the path needed to
reach the overall goal. It could be a
concrete goal, such as seeking out and
buying a present, or a more abstract
goal, such as forming and maintaining
a close relationship with someone. In
either case, the same basic processes
are involved. Some believe that these
are the processes that underlie purposive
behavior.
A good deal of complexity is
added by the fact that people are often
interacting with other people, all of
Disturbance

whom have goals. Sometimes acting to make the conditions
you experience closer to what you want entails
having other people also experience a match between
what they see and what they want. Sometimes you discover
that it’s hard to make existing conditions match
what you want, because doing that creates problems
for other people’s goals. A lot of events can be understood
in terms of what would need to happen to make
various people’s perceptions match their goals.
One more twist that can make everything more difficult:
Although it is easiest to understand the feedback
concept from looking at a system that has all the
elements shown in Figure 1, strictly speaking it isn’t
necessary for all those elements to be there. In particular,
it is possible for loops to be created in which no
set point is explicitly represented. Something about
the overall circumstances causes changes in the output
to shift back and forth in such a way that the input
remains relatively stable (or is held within limits).
Typically this involves a response from the environment
that is somehow coordinated with the output, so
that a particular output creates circumstances that
cause further output to be less necessary, and a reduction
in output causes circumstances to shift back so
that further output is necessary again. With respect to
the most recent behavioral example, sometimes a person
has a goal to make something happen, and sometimes
that very thing happens predictably with no goal
being involved.
More concretely, you may set a goal for yourself of
studying about 2 hours per evening. Alternatively, you
may be nervous about your courses if you aren’t
studying in the evening and bored after you’ve studied
for a while, with the result that you tend to study for
about 2 hours each evening. In the latter case, there
would be no goal specifying how much to study. This
second case is sometimes referred to with the phrase
self-organization. It can be very hard to tell which
case exists at any given time.
Another commonly used example of a self-organizing
feedback loop (which also illustrates the fact that the
feedback concept can be applied at various levels of
abstraction) is an ecosystem made up of (for instance)
an island colony of rabbits and a food source. The size
of the food source controls the size of the colony by
determining how many animals can live on it. The population
converges on the value that is the system’s carrying
capacity. If the population gets too large, some
animals starve and the population falls. If the population
falls below that value, there is surplus food and the
population rises. There is no explicit reference value
for population size, though, and this loop does not have
the goal of stabilizing the size of the colony. Stabilizing
the size of the colony is simply a consequence of the
relations among the processes that form the loop. In
cases such as this, it is reasonable to refer to the function
of the loop, but not to the purpose of the loop.
Feedback loops are not about particular kinds of
social psychological phenomena. But they can be seen
as embedded in many kinds of social psychological
phenomena. Easy examples are conformity, dissonance
reduction, and social comparison. Feedback
processes may be the underlying elements in far more
phenomena than most people realize.
See also Goals; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Fight-or-Flight Response———351
Charles S. Carver
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1998). On the self-regulation
of behavior. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960). Plans
and the structure of behavior. New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT RESPONSE
Definition
In 1929, Walter Cannon proposed ways in which the
human body and nervous system, and those of other
species, evolved to cope with immediate threats to
their well-being and safety. These threats elicit strong
emotions and prepare the body (e.g., increase in blood
pressure, release of sugar for use by muscles) for a
vigorous and immediate behavioral response to the
threat—that is, either fighting or fleeing. The emotions
Cannon focused on were fear and anger or rage.
The emotion of anger suppresses fear, and the accompanying
physiological changes prepare the individual
for combat. The behavioral engagement in physical
fighting was largely discussed as male-on-male combat,
either in the context of war, a one-on-one contest,
or during sporting events. Fear often results in similar
physiological changes but, in contrast to anger, prepares
the individual to avoid potential injury, often by
fleeing the threatening situation.

352———Focalism
Analysis
The basic features of Cannon’s argument appear to be
correct, although some of the emotional and physical
effects of threats are subtler and can be longer lasting
than originally proposed. Moreover, his proposal was
largely focused on males and fighting, but nonetheless
other scientists and the general public often extended
the fight-or-flight response to include females. In 2000,
S. E. Taylor and her colleagues proposed that women,
and females of some other species, are more likely to
behaviorally respond to threats by tending to children
and befriending other women rather than by fighting
or fleeing. Of course, women will fight or flee under
some conditions, but they may not have the same
evolved fight-or-flight response as men. Tending to
children is based on the finding that parenting is more
common among females than males in most species,
including humans. Befriending is focused on maintaining
a network of social support to help with tending
when threatened and to provide a more general
source of support to cope with mild day-to-day stressors.
Taylor et al.’s tending-and-befriending proposal
adds an important dimension to Cannon’s 1929 work
and highlights differences in the ways in which women
and men often respond to threatening or stressful situations.
Of course, men often tend to children and can
develop a network of friends that provide support in
threatening situations, but men may not have the same
evolved tend-and-befriend response as women, as
David C. Geary and Mark Flinn noted in 2002.
David C. Geary
See also Coping; Stress and Coping; Tend-and-Befriend
Response
Further Readings
Cannon, W. B. (1929). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear,
and rage: An account of recent researches into the
function of emotional excitement. New York: D. Appleton.
Geary, D. C., & Flinn, M. V. (2002). Sex differences in
behavioral and hormonal response to social threat:
Commentary on Taylor et al. (2000). Psychological
Review, 109, 745–750.
Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L.,
Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral
responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fightor-flight.
Psychological Review, 107, 411–429.
FOCALISM
Definition
Focalism (sometimes called the focusing illusion) is
the tendency for people to give too much weight to
one particular piece of information when making
judgments and predictions. By focusing too much on
one thing (the focal event or hypothesis), people tend
to neglect other important considerations and end up
making inaccurate judgments as a result.
Evidence
Focalism has been shown to bias judgments in two
different domains.
Affective Forecasting
The first domain is that of affective forecasting, or
the prediction of future feelings and emotions. People
tend to overestimate the impact of positive and negative
events on their future happiness, a phenomenon
known as impact bias. One cause of the impact bias is
a tendency to focus too narrowly on the positive or
negative event itself and neglect the extent to which
other, nonfocal events will also affect future thought
and emotion. When predicting how they will feel
several days after their team wins an important game,
for example, college students focus too much on the
prospect of victory itself, and neglect to consider all of
the other events—a quarrel with a friend, that upcoming
organic chemistry test, or a visit from their parents—
that will occupy their attention in the days following
the game.
Focalism in affective forecasts also explains why
both Californians and Midwesterners incorrectly
believe that people living in California are happier in
general. When comparing life in California to life in
the Midwest, people focus too much on one obvious
difference between the two regions—climate—and
fail to consider all of the other, more important ways
in which living in the Midwest is comparable to, or
even better than, living in California. It is true that
Californians are more satisfied with their own region’s
climate than are Midwesterners. But climate is not
all that important in determining how happy people
will be with their lives in general. Having fulfilling

elationships, rewarding work, and a comfortable standard
of living are much more important determinants
of well-being.
Some researchers have proposed that focalism may
also help explain why people tend to underestimate the
happiness of individuals living with disabilities such as
paraplegia. According to this idea, when imagining life
as a paraplegic, people focus too much on the ways in
which paraplegia would change their lives for the worse
and neglect to consider all of the positive aspects of
their lives that would stay the same. Several investigations
have failed to find support for this hypothesis,
however. It seems instead that people underestimate the
happiness of those with paraplegia because they underestimate
the human ability to adapt to new circumstances,
even negative ones.
Social Comparison
The second domain in which focalism operates is
that of social comparison. When comparing their own
traits, abilities, or futures to those of others, people
overweight information about the self and underweight
information about the targets of their comparisons.
People judging whether they are more or less
likely than their peers to experience a variety of life
events, for example, focus too much on their own likelihood
of experiencing these events and fail to consider
the likelihood that their peers will also
experience these events. This leads them to overestimate
their relative chances of experiencing common
events and underestimate their relative chances of
experiencing rare events, producing unrealistic optimism
for certain kinds of events (common positive
and rare negative events) but unrealistic pessimism for
others (common negative and rare positive events).
This same kind of focalism operates in comparative
judgments of skill and ability, in which people judge
as above average their own ability to perform easy
tasks, such as operating a computer mouse, while
judging as below average their own ability to perform
difficult tasks, such as juggling. Finally, focalism contributes
to the tendency for people to overestimate the
extent to which shared benefits and shared adversities
will uniquely affect their own performance in competitive
contexts. When estimating their chances of
winning a poker game that includes wildcards, for
example, people focus too much on how wildcards
could help their own hands and not enough on how
these same cards can also help their opponents’ hands.
As a result, people are likely to bet more in games in
which wildcards are included, even though the inclusion
of wildcards affects all players’ chances equally.
Cultural Differences
Susceptibility to focalism varies across cultures. In comparison
to North Americans and Western Europeans,
Asians are more likely to think holistically, to pay attention
to the big picture. This suggests that people in Asian
cultures will be less likely to suffer from focalism in
their judgments, and research supports this hypothesis.
Asians are less likely to focus on a single focal event
(such as a change in weather) when predicting their happiness
at a later date, and they are less likely to mispredict
their future happiness as a result.
Debiasing
How can focalism be reduced? The method of debiasing
depends on the type of focalism affecting one’s
judgments. For predictions about one’s future happiness
in the wake of a positive or negative event, focalism
can be reduced by making a list of all of the other
events that will be competing for one’s attention in
the future. For social comparisons, focalism can be
reduced by shifting attention away from the self and
toward the comparison target. Instead of being asked
to judge their own skills in comparison to their peers,
for example, people can be asked to judge their peers’
skills in comparison to their own. This technique leads
people to focus more on what they know about their
peers and produces less self-focused judgments as a
result.
See also Confirmation Bias; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Focalism———353
Karlene Hanko
Kruger, J., & Burrus, J. (2004). Egocentrism and focalism in
unrealistic optimism (and pessimism). Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 332–340.
Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T., Meyers, J. M., Gilbert, D. T., &
Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: A source of durability bias
in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 78, 821–836.

354———Foot-in-the-Door Technique
FOOT-IN-THE-DOOR TECHNIQUE
Definition
The foot-in-the-door is an influence technique based
on the following idea: If you want someone to do a
large favor for you, get him or her to do a small favor
first. The power of the foot-in-the-door stems from its
ability to start with a small, innocuous request and
move on to a large, onerous request.
Evidence
In one of the first scientific tests of the foot-in-thedoor,
psychologists Jonathan L. Freedman and Scott C.
Fraser began with a very small request: They had a
researcher go door to door in the California suburb of
Palo Alto and ask homeowners to put a small sign in
their windows that said “Be a safe driver.” Why would
anyone say no to such an innocuous request? After all,
who’s against safe driving? Little did these homeowners
realize, though, that saying yes to this small request
would make them much more receptive to a large
request 2 weeks later.
The large request was made by a different researcher
who approached each house and asked the homeowner’s
permission to put a large, ugly sign on the lawn that
said “Drive Carefully.” Freedman and Fraser knew that
most homeowners wouldn’t want a large, ugly sign on
their lawns because when they made this request to a
different set of homeowners, only 17% said yes. But
when they made this request to the homeowners
who had agreed 2 weeks earlier to put the small “Be a
safe driver” sign in their windows, 76% said yes. The
foot-in-the-door caused an increase in compliance of
over 400%!
How the Foot-in-the-Door Works
Psychologists have put forth a number of theories
about how the foot-in-the-door works. One of the
more popular theories suggests that when a person
complies with the small request, the compliance
changes the person’s self-image. For example, when a
homeowner in Freedman and Fraser’s study agreed to
display the small “Be a safe driver” sign, he or she
might have started seeing herself as someone who
cares a lot about road safety. And a person who cares
a lot about road safety would probably be willing to
put a large “Drive Carefully” sign on his or her lawn,
even if it’s not the most attractive of signs.
Because the foot-in-the-door technique is so powerful,
Dr. Robert Cialdini, one of the foremost
researchers on social influence, rarely signs petitions,
even for positions he supports. Cialdini knows that
today’s petition can turn into tomorrow’s donation—
and we probably won’t even realize why we so readily
gave that donation.
A Real-World Example
One recent example of a large-scale use of the foot-inthe-door
technique was the Internet-based fundraising
effort run by Howard Dean during his campaign for
the Democratic nomination for the 2004 U.S. presidential
election. Prior to Dean’s campaign, politicians
typically raised money by soliciting large donors.
Dean tried something different. Instead of seeking the
relatively rare American willing and able to donate
thousands of dollars to a campaign, Dean sought the
much larger number of Americans willing to donate
$25, $50, or $100.
Dean’s approach had a number of benefits. First, as
Dean and his primary opponents discovered, with lots
of donors, small donations can add up to a large campaign
fund. Second, once people have donated $25,
Dean could contact them again with a request for
another $25 (or, perhaps, $50 or $100). Getting the
first donation is the tough part. Getting the second
donation is much easier. Once someone donated once,
that person was not just an American but also a financial
supporter of the Dean campaign. And when a person
sees him- or herself as a financial supporter of the
Dean campaign, that person will be a lot more likely
to comply with a request for another donation.
Brad J. Sagarin
See also Attitude Change; Door-in-the-Face Technique;
Influence; Persuasion; Reciprocity Norm
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without
pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 4, 195–202.

FORCED COMPLIANCE TECHNIQUE
Definition
The forced compliance technique is an experimental
procedure whereby people are induced to behave in a
way that is inconsistent with their attitudes, beliefs,
values, or other thoughts about an issue. The procedure
was initially developed for studying how inconsistency
between behavior and attitudes can motivate people
to change their position on a topic. According to psychological
theory, when people behave in a way that
is inconsistent with other important cognitions, they
experience a state of discomfort similar to hunger or
thirst. To reduce the discomfort, they are motivated to
restore consistency by changing some of the relevant
cognitions. The intriguing aspect of the forced compliance
paradigm is that because the inconsistent behavior
is often impossible to take back, the path of least
resistance for restoring consistency is to change preexisting
attitudes or beliefs so that they are consistent
with the behavior. Thus, being forced to comply with a
request to commit a discrepant act can cause people to
justify or rationalize the inconsistent behavior.
The Technique
The forced compliance technique basically requires
that people do or say something that is against importantly
held attitudes or beliefs. For example, in the
original version of the forced compliance technique,
participants first worked for an hour on a very boring
task (e.g., turning spools on a board). They were then
asked if they would help the experimenter by telling
the next participant that the task was very interesting
and enjoyable. To control the level of discomfort, participants
were offered either $1 or $20 for telling the
next participant that the boring task was fun. Thus,
participants were induced or forced to comply with a
request to mislead a stranger about the nature of the
experimental task.
After delivering the misleading information to
the waiting student (who was actually a confederate),
participants completed a survey for the psychology
department about their experience in the study. As
predicted, participants who were paid only $1 for
lying about the task rated the task as more enjoyable
than did participants who were paid $20 for telling the
same fabrication. That is, participants were feeling
Forced Compliance Technique———355
discomfort from the inconsistency between the
thoughts “The task was boring” and “I told someone
the task was enjoyable.” However, the discomfort for
the participants in the $20 condition was reduced
because they had an additional thought that was consistent
with their behavior: They were paid a large
sum of money to mislead the waiting person. In contrast,
the discomfort for the participants in the $1 condition
remained high because, though sufficient to
force the participants to comply with the request, the
small $1 payment was insufficient to provide a clear
justification (i.e., a consonant cognition) for their dishonesty.
Participants in the $1 condition had to find
another way to reduce their discomfort, and since it
was impossible to take back the lie, changing their
behavior was not an option. Instead, participants
altered their view of what they had done by changing
their attitude toward the boring task. Thus, participants
in the $1 condition reduced their discomfort by
coming to believe that the task was actually not boring
after all—it was enjoyable!
The original study had a tremendous impact on
the field of psychology, in part because it revealed a
reverse incentive effect—larger rewards were associated
with less positive attitudes toward an object—a
clear challenge to the idea that the more someone is
rewarded for a behavior, the more they like it. It
inspired research labs around the world to further
explore the reverse incentive effect and its implications
for understanding human social behavior.
Follow-up research on the reverse incentive effect
led to several evolutions in the forced compliance technique.
Today, the most widely used version requires
participants to write a counterattitudinal essay in which
they state a position on a topic that is inconsistent with
their own. In the first study to use the essay-writing
approach, students at Yale University wrote an essay in
support of the aggressive actions taken by the New
Haven Police against students on campus. Students at
Yale were strongly opposed to the police response, but
they were induced to write an essay supporting the
police action for $0.50, $1, $5, or $10. Participants
then reported their attitudes toward the police action,
and the data revealed the same reverse incentive effect:
The less they were paid for their essay, the more positive
their attitudes were toward the police actions.
Presumably, the less they were paid, the more discomfort
participants experienced about stating a position
that was inconsistent with their beliefs. However,
since they could not take back what they had written,

356———Forensic Psychology
participants reduced their discomfort by changing their
attitudes toward the issue.
Research on the forced compliance technique
revealed several factors that influence the level of discomfort
and attitude change that follow from inconsistent
behavior. For example, attitude change is greater
when participants believe that they chose, and were not
forced, to engage in an inconsistent act and when participants
perceive that the act has led to negative consequences
that they could have foreseen. Other
research challenged the discomfort interpretation of
the attitude change effects observed in the forced compliance
technique. Some researchers proposed that a
logical conclusion about the behavior, and not a motivation
to restore consistency, was the most credible
explanation for the reverse incentive effects. Others
argued that the observed attitude change effects were
not real changes; they only represented attempts to
present oneself in a positive light to the experimenter.
However, both alternative interpretations were later
dismissed in research showing that arousal was present
when participants stated a position outside of what
they could accept, and that participants changed their
attitudes even when the experimenter had no way to
know what they had said.
Researchers continue to investigate the psychological
processes that contribute to the changes observed
following forced compliance. Recent research has
examined variables that determine whether people are
motivated to change their attitudes to fit their inconsistent
behavior, such as individual differences in selfesteem,
cultural background, and other personality
factors that influence how people perceive an inconsistency.
Other research has looked at how individuals
respond when an important leader or peer behaves in
a way that is inconsistent with important attitudes and
beliefs held by the observer. The forced compliance
technique continues to be an important tool for investigating
how discrepancies between behavior and
belief influence an individual’s perceptions of reality.
See also Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Self-Perception
Theory
Further Readings
Jeff Stone
Harmon-Jones, E., Brehm, J. W., Greenberg, J., Simon, L., &
Nelson, D. E. (1996). Evidence that the production of
aversive consequences is not necessary to create cognitive
dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
70(1), 5–16.
Stone, J., & Cooper, J. (2003). The effect of self-attribute
relevance on how self-esteem moderates dissonance
processes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39,
508–515.
FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY
Forensic psychology is a term used to describe a broad
and growing range of research topics and applications
that address human behavior in the legal system.
Forensic psychologists participate as scientists, trial
consultants, advocates, critics, expert witnesses, and
policy advisers. In so doing, they work not only in
research laboratories and mental health clinics but
also in police stations, courtrooms, prisons, juvenile
detention facilities, and other legal settings.
Although there is a great deal of overlap, there are
two types of forensic psychologists: research scientists
and clinical practitioners. Trained in the principles
and methods of basic psychology, forensic researchers
study a wide range of issues, such as group dynamics
as it applies to how juries deliberate and make decisions;
the processes of perception and memory as they
influence eyewitness identifications and testimony; the
processes of persuasion as they apply to police interrogations
and the confessions they produce; cognitive
development as it applies to the testimony, accuracy,
and suggestibility of children; personality testing as
it applies to the criminal profiling of serial bombers,
rapists, arsonists, and other types of offenders; and the
use of the polygraph and other measures of bodily
arousal for use as lie detector tests.
Clinically oriented forensic psychologists are mental
health professionals trained primarily in assessment,
diagnosis, treatment, and counseling. Working
in criminal, civil, and family law, they are involved
not only in conducting research but in making important
judgments in specific cases, such as whether
offenders were legally responsible or insane while
committing their crime; whether defendants are competent
or incompetent to stand trial; whether prisoners
are dangerous psychopaths or worthy of release on
parole; whether a parent is fit to have custody of a
child; whether young children have been physically or
sexually abused; whether victims of rape have suffered
trauma, making it difficult for them to come forward;
and whether plaintiffs in civil lawsuits have

suffered emotionally as a result of an accident, injury,
discrimination, or harassment.
Three problems illustrate what forensic psychologists
do and how their work is used in the legal
system. The first concerns the limits of eyewitness
memory. As a result of recent advances in DNA technology,
it is now possible to match suspects to samples
of blood, hair, saliva, or semen found at a crime
scene, enabling authorities to both identify criminals
and absolve the innocent. Many prisoners have thus
been exonerated, or found innocent, of the crimes for
which they were convicted. Astonishingly, these cases
reveal that eyewitness memory errors are by far the
most common problem, appearing in three out of four
DNA exonerations.
What factors diminish an eyewitness’s memory,
and can it be improved? Over the years, researchers
have identified a number of problems. For example,
research shows that people find it more difficult to recognize
members of a race other than their own; that the
sight of a weapon reduces a witness’s ability to identify
the perpetrator; that witnesses tend to pick from a
lineup any person who stands out relative to the others.
Making it doubly difficult for juries, research shows
that eyewitnesses often report being highly confident
in their memories, even when mistaken. To improve
eyewitness performance, the U.S. Justice Department
in 1999 published a set of research-based guidelines
for police. Among the recommended methods were
that police should ask questions that are open-ended
rather than leading; that police should present witnesses
with lineups that contain a single suspect and at
least five others who generally fit the witness’s
description; and that witnesses should be instructed
that the perpetrator may or not be presented in the
lineup. Helping to improve eyewitness performance in
these ways, forensic psychologists who study social
influences on human perception and memory play a
valuable role in the legal system.
The DNA exoneration cases also reveal a second,
highly counterintuitive, social psychological phenomenon:
that innocent people sometimes confess to crimes
they did not commit. Seeking to understand why an
innocent person would ever confess, researchers point
to a multistep set of police interrogation techniques.
First, suspects are removed from familiar surroundings
and put into a small, barely furnished interrogation
room. The purpose is to isolate suspects, increasing
their anxiety and incentive to escape. Next, interrogators
confront suspects with unwavering assertions of
guilt, interrupting all denials and perhaps deceiving
them about the evidence. Once suspects feel trapped,
interrogators will then show sympathy and understanding
and morally justify, or even excuse, the offense. In
short, police interrogation is a process of influence that
can get innocent people to incriminate themselves by
increasing the stress of denial, plunging them into
despair, and then minimizing the perceived consequence
of confession. Particularly for people who are
highly vulnerable (such as juveniles and those who are
cognitively impaired), this process may coerce a false
confession.
A third illustration of forensic psychology in action
can be found in trials in which the defendant pleads not
guilty by reason of insanity. In 1981, John Hinckley Jr.
shot and wounded President Reagan. Hinckley was a
disturbed young man, a loner who harbored a delusional
relationship with actress Jodie Foster. But was
he insane? What about Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer
and cannibal who killed and dismembered 17 men
between 1978 and 1991, or Andrea Yates, the mother
who drowned her five children, one by one, in a
bathtub—were they sane or insane? Insanity is a legal
concept. Although definitions vary, defendants are
generally not held responsible for a criminal act if, as
a result of a mental disorder, they do not know the
wrongfulness of their conduct or cannot control their
actions in accordance with the law. In each of these
cases, forensic psychologists tested and interviewed
the defendants and then testified in court about their
mental states. In each case, the expert testimony was
admitted to assist a jury in its decision making
(Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity
and committed to a mental hospital; Dahmer was convicted
and sent to prison; and Yates was initially convicted
and sent to prison, but later her conviction was
overturned, and in a second trial, she was found not
guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a mental
hospital).
See also Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of; Group
Dynamics; Memory; Persuasion
Further Readings
Forensic Psychology———357
Saul Kassin
Bonnie, R. J., Jeffries, J. C., & Low, P. (2000). The trial of
John Hinckley: A case study in the insanity defense
(2nd ed.). Mineola, NY: Foundation Press.
Doyle, J. M. (2005). True witness: Cops, courts, science, and
the struggle against misidentification. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.

358———Forewarning
Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2005, June). True
crimes, false confessions: Why do innocent people
confess to crimes they did not commit? Scientific
American Mind, pp. 24–31.
Wrightsman, L. S., & Fulero, S. M. (2005). Forensic
psychology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
FOREWARNING
Definition
A forewarning is a warning of an impending influence
attempt. Forewarnings include such phrases as, “and
now a word from our sponsors,” that precede ads
designed to persuade listeners. Consistent with the old
adage, “forewarned is forearmed,” psychologists have
discovered that forewarning often leads to resistance,
which is decreased persuasion in the direction of the
influence attempt. However, under certain circumstances,
forewarning can temporarily lead to acquiescence,
which is greater attitude change in the direction
of the influence attempt. Research typically compares
those who are forewarned to those who are not, relative
to the processing they engage in and the resulting
attitudes.
Background and History
The initial investigation on the topic showed that forewarning
leads to greater resistance following an influence
attempt. According to Jane Allyn and Leon
Festinger, forewarnings engage a defensive motivation,
particularly for those who are committed to their
viewpoint. When high school students were forewarned
that a speaker would be arguing against allowing
teenagers to drive, students reported more negative
attitudes after the speech compared to those who were
not forewarned. So when people expect a message
that is dissonant with their attitude, this arouses feelings
of suspicion and hostility, resulting in resistance.
Subsequent research shows that resistance following
forewarning can take the form of increased generation
of arguments against the proposal, called counterarguing,
or increased thoughts in favor of the person’s own
attitude, called bolstering.
Other research has shown that, under certain circumstances,
forewarning can lead to greater acquiescence.
This occurs in the form of temporary shifts in
attitudes that occur prior to receiving the message itself.
According to William McGuire and Susan Millman,
the expectation of an influence attempt leads people to
feel vulnerable and potentially gullible. To avoid this
potential threat to their self-esteem, people are motivated
to shift their attitudes preemptively in the direction
of the influence attempt. So when the persuasion
attempt comes, they avoid facing the reality that the
message persuaded them a lot. This sort of preemptive
shift is not possible in the case of forewarnings that
specify the topic but not the direction of the attempt.
Robert Cialdini and others suggested that forewarnings
that do not indicate the direction of the attempt could
lead people to report more moderate attitudes prior to
the message. Although they are not necessarily aware
of doing so, expressing a more moderate stance helps
people present themselves in a more positive light, as
more flexible and broad-minded. Taken together these
findings suggest that when the focus is on ensuring
that the self is viewed positively, forewarning can lead
to greater acquiescence prior to the actual influence
attempt.
Current Status
In a recent review, Wendy Wood and Jeffrey M. Quinn
were able to distinguish when forewarning is likely to
lead to increased resistance as opposed to increased
acquiescence. In doing so they distinguished between
the impact of forewarning prior to and following the
actual influence attempt.
The impact of forewarning on attitudes prior to
receiving an influence attempt can be either increased
resistance or increased acquiescence, depending on the
type of processing that occurs. Contemporary models
of persuasion, such as the elaboration likelihood model
(ELM) by Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo, hold
that there is a critical distinction between more thoughtful
processing and less thoughtful processing of issuerelevant
information. The results of forewarning for
attitudes prior to the actual message itself are consistent
with this distinction. When the topic is important to an
individual, then forewarning will lead to resistance
based on thought, such as bolstering the current attitude.
On the other hand, if an individual is less concerned
about the topic and more concerned about how
he or she appears to him- or herself, the individual will
acquiesce prior to the message and engage in little
thought about the issue. According to the ELM, less
thoughtful processing results in attitudes that are less
consequential. Consistent with this view, these acquiescence
effects are temporary, disappearing following
either the receipt or cancellation of the influence

attempt. Thus, the impact of forewarning prior to a
message is likely to be greater resistance when thoughtful
processing of information related to the issue
occurs, but it is likely to be acquiescence when less
thoughtful processing occurs and the focus is on ensuring
that the self is viewed positively.
Research to date indicates that forewarning leads to
greater resistance following the influence attempt. In
general, forewarning biases thoughts counter to the
direction of the influence attempt, either through
increased bolstering of the prior attitude or increased
counter-arguing of the persuasive message. This overall
effect of resistance following forewarning suggests
that those who show acquiescence prior to the message
nevertheless engage in more resistance in
response to the message itself than those who do not
receive forewarning. Processing of the message itself
overwhelms the impact of concerns for whether the
self is viewed favorably. Thus, while forewarning can
at times lead to temporary acquiescence prior to the
message, it generally leads to greater resistance once
the message is actually presented.
Application
Research on forewarning suggests that advertisers
should avoid making their persuasive intent clear prior
to the message itself, particularly when thoughtful
processing is likely. On the other hand, commercials
that only introduce the critical product or topic toward
the end may be more persuasive because they circumvent
resistance triggered by forewarning.
See also Attitudes; Elaboration Likelihood Model;
Persuasion; Resisting Persuasion
Further Readings
Jamie Barden
Wood, W., & Quinn, J. M. (2003). Forewarned and forearmed?
Two meta-analytic syntheses of forewarnings of influence
appeals. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 119–138.
FORGIVENESS
Definition
Forgiveness refers to the act of decreasing negative
feelings toward someone who has hurt or offended the
self. Sometimes forgiveness entails replacing negative
feelings with positive feelings. However, many
researchers believe that the reduction of negative emotions
is sufficient.
Scholarly definitions of forgiveness often do not
align with definitions held by the lay public, and these
different definitions have created confusion. Thus,
many researchers who study forgiveness start their
writings by describing what forgiveness is not. To forgive
someone does not mean forgetting or downplaying
an offense. It does not mean behaving in a weak or
timid manner, failing to hold offenders accountable or
pretending that no offense occurred. People can forgive
without trusting their offenders or choosing to
have close relationships with them. Forgiveness is
best understood as an internal process: a change in
emotions, motivations, and attitudes that often leads to
behavioral changes.
Background
Forgiveness———359
Prior to the mid-1990s, psychologists devoted almost
no attention to the topic of forgiveness. Forgiveness
was seen as intimately tied with religion and spirituality,
and many scientists considered these topics to be
off limits for empirical research. However, with the
recent advent of the positive psychology movement,
the study of forgiveness and other virtues has become
a rapidly growing area within social psychology. Within
the past decade, research on forgiveness has increased
dramatically. Social psychologists have studied forgiveness
using the perspectives of social exchange
theory, self-regulation, and close relationship research,
to name just a few.
Injustice, Anger, and Forgiveness
Angry feelings are a natural response to injustice.
When people treat one another unfairly, they create
what scholars call an injustice gap, a gap between the
way that things are and the way that things would be if
everything were fair. If people believe that they have
been treated unfairly, they often ruminate about the
offense, replaying it in their minds and becoming more
angry. However, if the injustice gap can be closed in
some way, anger tends to dissipate. Offenders can
close the injustice gap themselves by apologizing or
making restitution. Victims may also take matters into
their own hands by seeking revenge, pursuing legal
action, or confronting offenders with wrongdoing.
Regardless of whether people take steps to restore justice,
they may eventually decide to forgive the offense.

360———Forgiveness
One might think of forgiveness as bridging the
injustice gap. Obviously, bridging a small gap is easier
than bridging a large gap. And, indeed, many
studies show that forgiveness is easier when the sense
of injustice gap is small, that is, when minor offenses
are quickly followed by apologies, restitution, or both.
Forgiveness is also more likely in close, committed
relationships. When people value a relationship, they
are more willing to make the effort to bridge the gap.
But what if the gap remains large? What about damage
that cannot be repaired, such as the murder of a
loved one? What about heinous offenses by strangers,
particularly those who remain unrepentant or even
smug about their crimes? Without question, the task of
forgiveness is extremely difficult in such cases.
Costs and Benefits of Forgiving
Why would people want to attempt forgiveness,
knowing that it can be so difficult? Many people see
forgiveness as a principled decision. Regardless of its
pragmatic costs or benefits, they see forgiveness as an
important personal value, perhaps even as a moral,
spiritual, or religious imperative. It is crucial to note,
however, that people may choose unforgiveness for
principled reasons as well. They may believe that forgiveness
is wrong in certain situations—if the other
party is unrepentant, for example, or if the offense is
seen as unforgivable. Or, at the level of personal values,
a person might hold a grudge because the goal of
forgiveness is secondary to other goals involving justice,
self-protection, or social dominance.
Although principles are important in guiding
human behavior, pragmatic factors also exert a powerful
influence. Research has demonstrated several
pragmatic benefits of forgiveness. One major benefit
is that forgiveness can help to heal relationships. Even
in close, caring relationships, people inevitably hurt
and offend each other from time to time. Thus, if
people never make the sacrifices required to forgive
one another, they will find it difficult to sustain close
relationships over time. A second benefit of forgiveness
is emotional: When people forgive, they free
themselves from the emotional burdens of bitterness,
resentment, and hatred. This experience of releasing
negative emotions can be powerful and transformative,
especially if it is accompanied by positive emotions,
such as love, gratitude, or a sense of growth. A
third benefit relates to physical health: Reductions in
chronic anger and hostility may also help forgivers to
maintain healthy cardiovascular and immune systems.
There are many good reasons, then, to consider forgiveness
as an option.
What about the costs of forgiving? Some of the
costs that people associate with forgiveness do not
involve forgiveness per se; rather, they are linked
with behaviors that people commonly associate with
forgiveness. For example, people often confuse forgiving
with unassertiveness. In an effort to avoid confrontation,
unassertive people may minimize serious
offenses, accept more than their share of blame, and
behave as though no offense occurred. Unfortunately,
when people fail to assert themselves, not only do
they leave the door open for future exploitation but
they may also indirectly harm the offender, in moral
terms, by not holding him or her accountable for the
offense. Some offenders, particularly those with antisocial
or egotistical tendencies, are quick to blame
others. If paired with unassertive partners who quietly
tolerate mistreatment and readily accept blame,
aggressive partners will find it easy to continue a pattern
of exploitation.
A closely related problem occurs when forgiveness
is confused with reconciliation or trust. Abuse situations
are a prime example. It is crucial for abuse victims
to understand that they can forgive their abusers
without placing themselves in jeopardy by remaining
in close contact. Before attempting to forgive, victims
often need to protect themselves from their abusers in
some way, perhaps by asserting their legal rights,
seeking powerful allies, or creating a safe distance.
The previously mentioned examples were based on
misconceptions of forgiveness. But even if one uses a
textbook definition of forgiveness, one that focuses on
a positive emotional shift, forgiveness can still entail
costs. One cost is that forgiveness requires people to
release angry feelings, and anger carries its own
rewards. Anger can energize people, helping them to
feel righteous, proud, and strong. It can also spur them
to take action to correct injustices. When people let go
of anger, then, they may be losing something that has
served a valuable function for them.
Another cost of forgiving has to do with the social
benefits of being seen as a victim. When people are
seen as victims, they often gain sympathetic attention.
In fact, one of the primary ways that people fuel
grudges is by engaging in vengeful gossip about how
their offenders mistreated them. In such situations,
third-party listeners often contribute their own negative
information about the offender, which may help

the victim to feel supported while contributing to an
increasingly negative, demonized view of the offender.
Many people are reluctant to give up this potential for
social support by stepping out of the victim role.
Perhaps the greatest risk of forgiving has to do
with the softening of attitudes that forgiveness entails.
Anger is a self-protective emotion. When people allow
their attitudes toward another person to become more
positive, it can be natural for them to begin trusting
the other person again, opening themselves up to the
possibility of a continued relationship. Although reconciliation
is not part of most textbook definitions of
forgiveness, there is no denying that it is often a
natural consequence. In many situations, increased
openness is adaptive, opening the door for a healed
relationship. But if the offender is someone who is
ready to exploit others, it could be dangerous to see
this person in a highly optimistic light. When offenders
seem untrustworthy, offended parties may benefit
from learning how to resolve their feelings of hatred
or bitterness while still maintaining a cautious, selfprotective
stance toward the offender.
Individual Differences
Research suggests that people tend to be more forgiving
if they are agreeable and get along easily with others.
In addition, people are more likely to attempt
forgiveness if they identify with a religious or spiritual
belief system in which forgiveness is a core value.
Neurotic individuals, who are prone to focus on negative
events, often have difficulty forgiving. Forgiveness
is also difficult for persons who have a sense of entitlement,
meaning that they see themselves as superior
to others and are highly invested in defending their
rights.
The Process of Forgiving
Assuming that a person does want to try to forgive,
how might the process unfold? Granted, some people
may forgive without being aware of doing so, perhaps
because the offense was minor or because they have
become practiced at forgiving. But in most cases of
serious offense, forgiving requires deliberate effort.
The description that follows focuses on cases in which
people consciously work toward forgiving.
In most forgiveness interventions, the first step is to
honestly assess the harm that was done, along with
one’s feelings about the offense. As described earlier
Forgiveness———361
in this entry, forgiveness does not imply excusing,
minimizing, or forgetting offenses. Such strategies
may work well for minor offenses, such as being cut
off in traffic. However, for more serious offenses, it is
important to pinpoint the injustice and try to understand
one’s emotional responses to it. Many people
need encouragement to acknowledge their angry feelings.
For example, individuals who are unassertive or
low in self-esteem often need to learn that they have a
right to be angry when treated unfairly. In contrast,
those who see themselves as bold or dominant may
find it easy to admit anger but hard to admit fear or
hurt feelings.
Because anger can be an important signal of injustice,
it is often appropriate to take steps to assert or
protect oneself to reduce the odds of being harmed
again. Those who forgive will often experience a softening
of feelings about the offense or the offender. As
such, it is important that people feel safe and strong
before they begin to reduce their negative feelings.
Authentic forgiveness is rooted in self-respect. In contrast,
a lack of self-respect may lead to unassertive
responses or a shame-based desire to lash out at one’s
offender.
Once they have clearly identified the injustice and
are operating from a position of strength and confidence,
offended parties can make a reasoned decision
about whether to try to forgive. In cases of serious
offense, it may take weeks, months, or even years
before a person will even consider the prospect of
forgiving. As people face forgiveness decisions, it is
important to note that forgiveness is an act involving
both the will and the emotions. Although people can
make an intentional decision to forgive, their emotions
may not immediately change. Forgiveness
requires people to regulate strong emotions, which in
turn requires considerable self-control. Strong negative
emotions may also require some time to subside.
Nonetheless, there are some techniques that people
can use to facilitate forgiveness.
Ironically, forgiveness is sometimes facilitated by
confronting one’s offender. Such confrontations tend
to be most successful when delivered in an atmosphere
of mutual safety and respect. If people can specify
what the other person did that hurt or offended them,
they may receive a sincere apology. This outcome is
not guaranteed, of course. But if the offender does
offer a sincere apology or an attempt at amends, the
process of forgiving will be easier. Many offenses are
two-sided. Therefore, as part of their exchange with

362———Free Will, Study of
the offender, people may also find that they need to
apologize for some wrongdoing of their own. If they
start the interaction with their own apology, they may
find that that their willingness to humble themselves
will make the other party more willing to apologize.
Several studies suggest that forgiveness is rooted in
empathy. Forgiveness will be easier if people can consider
the situation from the offender’s perspective. For
example, they might try to generate good reasons why
the offender behaved in this way: Has the offender
been mistreated by others in similar ways? Was there
a misunderstanding that may have led to the offense?
Could the offense have stemmed from the offender’s
fear or shame rather than from cruelty? To the extent
that people can empathize with those who have hurt
them and try to understand the offenders’ motives,
people will find forgiveness easier.
Nonetheless, sometimes people have no idea why
another person mistreated them. Or, worse yet, they may
be very clear that the other person was truly being malicious.
In such cases, forgivers may need to use other
means to empathize. For example, they might reflect on
a time when they behaved cruelly themselves, particularly
if it was a case in which they were forgiven or
shown mercy. Or they might focus on the common
humanity that they share with the offender. Studies have
shown that people find it easier to forgive when they
frame offenses as universals (“Human beings do cruel
things to one another”) rather than focusing on the specific
offense against the self (“My brother did a cruel
thing to me”).
After trying to assert themselves and to empathize
with the offender, people may still find that they are
left with feelings of bitterness or resentment that they
need to release. Some people find imagery useful as
part of this release process. For example, they might
envision themselves severing a rope that is tying them
to their negative emotions. Or they might first envision
their negative feelings as a burden that is weighing
them down and then visualize themselves setting
down the burden and walking away from it. People
often report a sense of emotional release, peace, or
relief associated with such attempts to release negative
emotions.
When people have released their negative emotions,
they often believe that the process of forgiving
is complete. However, angry feelings commonly recur
even after sincere attempts to forgive. An offense
might be repeated, for example, or the initial offense
might have ongoing consequences that continually
remind the forgiver of the damage. Because anger
often recurs, people often find it necessary to repeat
the forgiveness process.
See also Anger; Empathy
Further Readings
Julie Exline
Enright, R. D., & Fitzgibbons, R. P. (2000). Helping clients
forgive: An empirical guide for resolving anger and
restoring hope. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Exline, J. J., Worthington, E. L., Jr., Hill, P., & McCullough,
M. E. (2003). Forgiveness and justice: A research agenda
for social and personality psychology. Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 7, 337–348.
Lamb, S., & Murphy, J. G. (Eds.). (2002). Before forgiving:
Cautionary views of forgiveness in psychotherapy.
New York: Oxford University Press.
McCullough, M. E., Pargament, K. I., & Thoresen, C. E.
(Eds.). (2000). Forgiveness: Theory, research, and
practice. New York: Guilford Press.
Worthington, E. L., Jr. (Ed.). (2005). Handbook of
forgiveness. New York: Routledge.
FREE WILL, STUDY OF
Free will is a controversial idea in social psychology.
Researchers have begun to talk about it and study it,
including ordinary people’s beliefs about it, but there
are many social psychologists who insist that all such
beliefs are mistaken. As a field of scientific research,
social psychology is almost certainly unable to prove
whether free will exists or not. But social psychology
can study how people make choices, when they feel
themselves to be free versus less free, how action is
initiated and controlled, how people react when their
freedom is taken away, and what the consequences are
of believing versus disbelieving in free will.
Definition
Free will is a concept inherited from philosophy and
even theology, so it is not one that scientists have been

able to define as they wish. That definitional problem
has contributed to the controversies about it, because
different people use the term to refer to different things.
The core idea behind free will is that people can
choose to act in different ways. The opposite belief is
determinism, which holds that every action is fully
caused (determined) by prior events.
Think of something you did recently, even perhaps
picking up this entry to read. Is it possible that you
could have done something differently? Or was it an
inevitable result of forces and pressures operating on
you, including both the current situation and past
experiences and lessons? You may have felt as though
you made a decision to read this, but then again that
feeling might be an illusion. Strict determinists think
that it was inevitable that you read this and that you
really could not have done anything else. In contrast,
if you have free will, then you might well have done
something different.
The “will” part of free will presents additional
problems for some philosophers and psychologists. It
implies that there is such a thing as a will, as a part of
the human mind, possibly located somewhere in the
brain. Many experts believe that the will is just a
metaphor or a convenient way of talking about human
mental processes, rather than being something real.
Those experts hence reject the term free will and prefer
to talk about freedom of action. Some of them
think that freedom is real and the will is not real. For
most, however, the issue is whether freedom really
exists, and the “will” part is not the controversial part.
Opposition to Free Will
Social psychologists who reject the idea of free have
several main reasons for doing so. One is a simple act
of faith. Many psychologists believe that, as scientists,
they must believe that there is a cause for everything
and that determinism is the only suitable assumption
for scientific research. Most agree that determinism
cannot be proven true, but they believe that it is necessary
for scientists to assume that it is true. Some
regard free will as an obsolete religious idea. B. F.
Skinner, the famous behaviorist, wrote a book called
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he called upon
people to abandon their silly (as he saw it) belief in
freedom of choice and accept that everything everyone
does is a product of reinforcement history (i.e.,
previous rewards and punishments for similar behaviors)
Free Will, Study of———363
and learning, plus a few innate biological patterns.
Skinner studied the behavior of rats and found that a
few general principles could explain rat behavior. He
thought human behavior followed the same principles,
perhaps in a slightly more complicated way but in no
less determined a fashion.
In psychology, there are several lines of evidence
that call into question people’s belief in free will.
Certainly almost all show that human behavior is
caused by something, including the sorts of rewards
and punishments that Skinner studied. That very fact
of causation can be taken as evidence against free
will. More dramatically, work by Sigmund Freud
claimed to show that people’s behavior is often guided
and shaped by unconscious processes and forces, so
that what they consciously think they are doing might
be mistaken. For example, Freud suggested that a man
who criticizes, condemns, and attacks homosexuals
might consciously believe that homosexuality is bad,
but underneath he may have an unconscious attraction
to homosexuality, and so he defends himself against
his own homosexual feelings (which he cannot
accept) by insisting that homosexuality is evil.
More generally, recent research has shown that
many nonconscious processes affect behavior strongly.
Mostly these do not have a strong resemblance to the
kind of unconscious dynamics that Freud wrote about.
Instead of a dungeon into which socially unacceptable
thoughts are banished, the new theories depict the
unconscious as more like the support staff of an important
executive, performing many helpful activities behind
the scenes. Research has shown that people are affected
by many stimuli that they never realize consciously
(such as subliminal advertising—flashing an image so
fast that one does not consciously see it but unconsciously
registers and responds to it). In one famous
study, research subjects had to solve word puzzles in
which they unscrambled sets of words to make short
sentences. By random assignment, some of the participants
solved sentences that invoked the idea of
being old, such as the words retirement, sunshine, and
Florida. When the participants left the experiment, the
researchers secretly timed how fast they walked to the
elevators. The participants who had been “primed” with
the idea of being old walked more slowly than other
participants. Such causes do not indicate any free will.
The conscious decision about how fast to walk did not
involve any deliberate decision to walk slowly, but their
behavior was affected by these nonconscious processes.

364———Free Will, Study of
The operation of such effects is one important factor
that makes experts question the idea of free will. It
is certain that many times when people believe they
are freely, consciously deciding what to do, in reality
they are affected by things outside their awareness.
Even when people think they control and initiate
behavior, they are sometimes mistaken. Work by
Daniel Wegner, summarized in his book The Illusion
of Conscious Will, has shown that people are often
mistaken about whether they caused something to
happen. He has run many cleverly designed experiments
in which people are or are not responsible for
some event, and yet they consciously have an opinion
about it that can be shown to be wrong. Have you ever
played with an Ouija board? Many people like to
think that the movement of the Ouija board pointer is
guided by ghosts or spirits and that people are not
conscious of moving the pointer themselves, but in
reality they do move it themselves. Ouija boards are
one illusion of free will.
Support for Free Will
Against the skeptics, some researchers believe that
people do actually make choices and have some
degree of freedom. The deterministic view that there
is no free will is unproven and unprovable, as noted.
Moreover, it is contrary to everyday experience (in
which people feel that they are making choices in
which more than one outcome is possible). Also, psychological
data usually do not show 100% inevitable
causation; rather, most psychology studies simply
show a difference in the odds of some response. By
that view, the way psychological causes work is simply
to change the odds a bit rather than to activate a
response that is inevitable. That leaves ample room for
free will, at least in theory.
Other support for free will comes from recent evidence
that willpower is more than a metaphor. Selfcontrol
and choice are central to most discussions of
free will, and they do seem to use up some psychological
resource that could be called willpower.
Other support comes from simply recognizing the
importance of choice and freedom in human life. If
freedom is entirely an illusion, why have there been so
many wars, revolutions, and strivings to gain it? Why
do people struggle so over making decisions? Why
do people react so negatively when their freedom is
taken away?
Common Beliefs
Another research approach is to study the effects of
believing in free will, because some people believe in
it more than others. Delroy Paulhus has developed a
personality trait scale that sorts people according to
whether they believe in free will or not. It is possible
to give that questionnaire to people, score it, and then
bring people into the laboratory to see how they
behave. People who believe in free will may act differently
from people who reject the idea.
Another approach is to manipulate that belief.
Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler have developed
several procedures to increase or decrease belief in
free will, such as by having some participants read an
essay that says science has supposedly proven that
free will is a false idea and that brain processes are a
complete cause and explanation for all behavior. They
have found that these beliefs make a difference. For
example, when people are discouraged from believing
in free will, they become more willing to cheat and
perform other antisocial behaviors. Other work has
shown that losing the belief in free will makes people
more aggressive and less helpful to others. Apparently
the common belief in free will promotes a sense of
personal responsibility and social obligation, and so
people treat each other better to the extent that they
believe in free will.
At a Crossroads
The topic of free will has come to the forefront of
social psychology research because of its profound
implications and its relevance to several, very different
lines of thought and investigation. It seems likely that
the next 10 years will yield important new advances in
how psychologists understand the way people act and
how they talk about the idea of free will.
Roy F. Baumeister
See also Automatic Processes; Consciousness; Dual Process
Theories; Ego Depletion; Reactance
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human
nature, meaning, and social life (Chap. 6). New York:
Oxford University Press.
Wegner, D. M. (2002). The illusion of conscious will.
Cambridge: MIT Press.

FRUSTRATION–AGGRESSION
HYPOTHESIS
For a good many students of human behavior, the
main reason why people become aggressive is that
they have been frustrated. William McDougall, one of
the first psychological theorists to be explicitly
labeled a social psychologist, espoused this idea at
the beginning of the 20th century. He maintained that
an instinct to engage in combat is activated by any
obstruction to the person’s smooth progress toward
his or her goal. Sigmund Freud had a similar view in
his early writings. Before he developed the notion of
a death instinct, he proposed that aggression was the
primordial reaction when the individual’s attempt to
obtain pleasure or avoid pain was blocked. This general
conception, widely known as the frustration–
aggression hypothesis, was spelled out much more
precisely in 1939 by John Dollard, Leonard Doob,
Neal Miller, and several other psychologists, all at
Yale University. This particular analysis will focus on
highlighting many of the theoretical issues involved in
determining the role of frustrations in the generation
of violence.
The Frustration–Aggression
Hypothesis and Its Modifications
The Yale group took care to define frustration clearly,
not as an emotional reaction but as a condition interfering
with the attainment of an anticipated goal.
Aggression, in turn, was regarded as a behavioral
sequence whose goal was the injury of the person to
whom it was directed. The team then went on to contend
not only that every frustration produces an urge
to aggression but also that every aggressive act presupposes
the existence of frustration. Few psychologists
today accept both parts of this broad-ranging
formulation. Moderating the first proposition in the
Yale group’s sweeping analysis, in 1948 Neal Miller
acknowledged that people prevented from reaching an
expected goal might well have a variety of reactions,
not only aggressive ones. Nevertheless, he argued
that the nonaggressive responses to the frustration
will tend to weaken, and the instigation to aggression
strengthen, as the thwarting continues. The second part
of the formulation, stating that all aggression is ultimately
traceable to some prior interference with goal
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis———365
attainment, is largely disregarded these days. It is now
widely recognized that an attack can at times be
carried out in hope of fulfilling some nonaggressive
desire, such as for greater approval by one’s social
group. And so, rather than having been thwarted frequently,
some highly aggressive people might have
learned that their assaults are likely to bring nonaggressive
rewards.
Critiques of the
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
The 1939 monograph quickly captured the attention of
many other social scientists and prompted the publication
of a number of critiques basically insisting that an
interference with goal attainment produces an aggressive
urge only under special circumstances. Many of
these objections have essentially been taken up nowadays
by appraisal theorists, those psychologists who
maintain that what specific emotion is experienced in
a given situation depends virtually entirely on just how
the situation is understood (appraised). In the case of
anger (and presumably affective aggression as well),
some of these writers contend that the goal blockage
has to be perceived as a threat to the ego if it is to generate
an inclination to aggression. Appraisal theorizing
has also frequently proposed other restrictions—for
example, that there will not be a desire to hurt some
target unless an external agent is regarded as responsible
for the thwarting, and/or the interference is perceived
as improper, and/or the obstruction can be
removed (i.e., the situation is controllable).
Investigations of the Relation
Between Frustration and Aggression
The controversy surrounding the frustration–aggression
hypothesis has spurred a truly impressive number of
investigations. Many (but certainly not all) of the laboratory
tests have yielded supporting results. Taking
only a very few examples, in one experiment reported
more than two generations ago, children expecting to
see an enjoyable movie were suddenly frustrated
because the motion picture projector had supposedly
unexpectedly broken down. When these youngsters
played a game with another child soon afterward, they
were more aggressive to their peer than were the nonthwarted
controls, even though this person was clearly
not responsible for their disappointment and the

366———Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
projector breakdown had not been an ego threat. In yet
another study conducted some years later, the collegeage
participants were asked to complete a jig-saw
puzzle in the presence of a supposed other student. In
one condition the participants were unable to assemble
the puzzle in time because of the other individual’s
disturbance, whereas in another condition they couldn’t
do the job because, unknown to them, the puzzle
actually was insoluble. When all the participants were
later able to administer electric shocks to this other
student, supposedly as a judgment of his performance
on an assigned task, those who had been obstructed by
him were most punitive. But even those whose frustration
had been internally caused were more aggressive
to the other (and presumably innocent) individual
than were their nonfrustrated counterparts. Even more
intriguingly, much more recent research indicates that
even young infants display angry reactions (in their
facial expressions) when they are frustrated by the
nonfulfillment of a learned expectation. It is as if there
is an inborn tendency for thwarted persons to become
angry and disposed to aggression.
Generally speaking, the entire body of this research
indicates that anger and emotional (affective) aggression
can occur even when the situational interpretations
stipulated as necessary by appraisal theory are
not made. Violence may well be more likely when the
goal blockage is regarded as socially improper and/or
deliberately intended by some external agent, but this
may be because these appraisals heighten the instigation
to aggression and not because they are necessary.
Extensions and
Apparent Exceptions
All this is not to say, however, that an interference
with goal attainment will invariably lead to anger and
an attack on some available target. Some research initiated
by the Yale group shows how general can be the
basic idea that people become aggressive when they
are unable to satisfy their desires—and also the inconsistencies
that can be seen at times. Employing statistics
from the southern United States at the time when
this region’s economic prosperity was greatly dependent
on its chief crop, cotton, Carl Hovland and
Robert Sears demonstrated that before the 1930s, sudden
drops in the value of cotton were also marked by
a rise in the number of Blacks who were lynched.
Unexpected financial losses, presumably interfering
with the attainment of economic satisfactions, had
evidently generated an increased number of assaults
on an especially disliked group. Partly confirming the
Hovland-Sears findings, Donald Green, Jack Glaser,
and Andrew Rich reported that there was a relatively
small but significant tendency for some measures of
economic hard times in the South to be linked to an
increased number of lynchings of Blacks in that
region in the period the original researchers had studied.
But they also noted that economic fluctuations
were not related to variations in the number of Blacks
lynched in the South after the 1930s. Furthermore,
they also observed that changes in economic conditions
in New York City had no influence at all on the
number of hate crimes against gays, lesbians, and
Blacks from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
All in all, even if frustrations do generate an instigation
to aggression, it is clear that this inclination is
not necessarily always manifest in an open assault on
an available target. Inhibitions prompted by the fear of
punishment or by one’s own internal standards obviously
may block the urge. In the Green, Glaser, and
Rich research, whatever violent impulses the economically
hard-pressed people might have had in New
York City or in the U.S. South after the 1930s, their
aggressive inclinations could well have been restrained
by expectations of social disapproval, threat of legal
punishment, or both. Much of the public conceivably
might also have learned to respond to their privations
in nonaggressive ways, in this case by calling for governmental
help. And then too, it could also be that the
stimulus characteristics of the available target affect
the probability that the affectively generated instigation
to aggression will be translated into an overt
assault. Those persons, such as Blacks or Jews, who
are greatly disliked by the thwarted people, or who are
strongly associated with other victims of aggression,
may be especially likely to be the targets of displaced
aggression.
A Revised Frustration–Aggression
Hypothesis
However, even when one contends that factors such as
these might mask the inclination to aggression, one
must still wonder why there are so many occasions
when failures to obtain an expected satisfaction clearly
do not produce an aggressive reaction. In Leonard
Berkowitz’s revision of the frustration–aggression
hypothesis, he proposed that it is not the thwarting per
se that generates the aggressive urge but the strong displeasure
produced by the goal interference. People
sometimes are not angered by their inability to reach an

expected goal simply because they’re not very unhappy
at this failure. And similarly, from this perspective, several
of the appraisals sometimes said to be necessary
for anger generate hostility primarily because these
interpretations are often exceedingly aversive. Someone’s
deliberate attempt to keep a person from fulfilling
his or her desires is much more unpleasant than an accidental
interference with his or her goal attainment, and
thus, is much more apt to stimulate the person to
aggression. This analysis regards the frustration–
aggression hypothesis only as a special case of a much
more general proposition: Decidedly aversive occurrences
are the fundamental generators of anger and the
instigation to aggression.
See also Aggression; Anger
Further Readings
Leonard Berkowitz
Anderson, C. A., Deuser, W. E., & DeNeve, K. M. (1995).
Hot temperatures, hostile affect, hostile cognition, and
arousal: Tests of a general model of affective aggression.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 434–448.
Berkowitz, L. (1989). Frustration–aggression hypothesis:
Examination and reformulation. Psychological Bulletin,
106, 59–73.
Berkowitz, L., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2004). Toward an understanding
of the determinants of anger. Emotion, 4, 107–130.
Dill, J. C., & Anderson, C. A. (1995). Effects of frustration
justification on hostile aggression. Aggressive Behavior,
21, 359–369.
Ellsworth, P. C., & Scherer, K. R. (2003). Appraisal
processes in emotion. In R. J. Davidson, H. Goldsmith, &
K. R. Scherer (Eds.), Handbook of the affective sciences
(pp. 572–595). New York: Oxford University Press.
Geen, R. G. (1998). Aggression and antisocial behavior.
In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),
The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 317–356). Boston: McGraw-Hill.
FUNDAMENTAL ATTRIBUTION ERROR
Definition
The fundamental attribution error describes perceivers’
tendency to underestimate the impact of situational
factors on human behavior and to overestimate
the impact of dispositional factors. For instance, people
Fundamental Attribution Error———367
often tend to believe that aggressive behavior is caused
by aggressive personality characteristics (dispositional
factor) even though aggressive behavior can also be
provoked by situational circumstances (situational
factor).
History
The term fundamental attribution error was created in
1977 by social psychologist Lee Ross. However,
research on the fundamental attribution error goes
back to the 1950s when social psychologists Fritz
Heider and Gustav Ichheiser started to investigate lay
perceivers’ understanding of the causes of human
behavior. Interest in the fundamental attribution error
experienced a peak in the 1970s and 1980s when a
general notion within social psychology was to discover
shortcomings in human judgment.
Notwithstanding its widely accepted significance for
social psychology, the fundamental attribution error has
also been the subject of controversies regarding its general
nature. On the one hand, critics argued that the fundamental
attribution error does not occur for everyone
under any circumstances, which challenges the adequacy
of the label fundamental. On the other hand, critics
claimed that there is no unambiguous criterion that
could specify the real causes of human behavior, thus
challenging the adequacy of the term error. Irrespective
of these controversies, the fundamental attribution error
is generally regarded as a very important phenomenon
for social psychology, as it often leads to surprised
reactions to research findings demonstrating a strong
impact of situational factors on human behavior.
Evidence
From a general perspective, evidence for the fundamental
attribution error comes from three different
lines of research. First, numerous studies have shown
that people tend to infer stable personality characteristics
from observed behavior even when this behavior
could also be due to situational factors. For example,
students may infer a high level of dispositional anxiety
from a fellow student’s nervous behavior during a
class presentation, even though such nervous behavior
may simply be the result of the anxiety-provoking situation.
This tendency to draw correspondent dispositional
inferences from situationally constrained
behavior is usually called the correspondence bias. In
the present example, the fundamental attribution error
can contribute to the correspondence bias when

368———Fundamental Attribution Error
perceivers do not believe that giving a class presentation
is anxiety provoking. Thus, perceivers will infer
that the presenter must be an anxious person, even
though most people would show the same level of
behavioral anxiety during a class presentation.
A second line of research on the fundamental attribution
error is concerned with surprised reactions that
are often elicited by social psychological findings.
Consistent with social psychology’s notion that human
behavior is strongly influenced by situational factors,
several studies have shown that everyday people often
do not help other individuals in an emergency situation
when other people are present, that everyday people
are willing to administer life-threatening electric
shocks to other individuals upon request by an experimenter,
and that everyday people engage in sadistic,
torturing behavior simply because they are assigned to
a superior social role. These findings have provoked
surprised reactions not only among lay people but also
among professional psychologists. One reason for
these reactions is that perceivers tend to underestimate
how simple changes in the situation can lead everyday
people to engage in immoral behavior.
A third line of research on the fundamental attribution
error is concerned with cultural differences in lay
perceivers’ explanations of human behavior. A large
number of cross-cultural studies have shown that
people in Western societies tend to explain human
behavior in terms of stable personality characteristics,
whereas people in East Asian societies tend to explain
human behavior in terms of situational factors. For
example, a school massacre may be described in terms
of the abnormal personality of the perpetrator in
Western cultures, whereas the same massacre may be
described in terms of the perpetrator’s situation in
East Asian cultures. This difference is assumed to
have its roots in a more general difference between
Western and East Asian worldviews. Whereas Western
societies tend to stress the independence and uniqueness
of each individual (individualism), East Asian
cultures tend to stress the connectedness and the relation
of the individual to the social context (collectivism).
This difference, in turn, leads to a stronger
focus on characteristics of the individual in Western
cultures and to a stronger focus on characteristics of
the individual’s situation in East Asian cultures.
Correspondence Bias
The fundamental attribution error is often associated
with another social psychological phenomenon: the
correspondence bias. The correspondence bias refers
to perceivers’ tendency to infer stable personality
characteristics from other people’s behavior even
when this behavior was caused by situational factors.
Originally, the terms fundamental attribution error
and correspondence bias were used interchangeably
to refer to one and the same phenomenon, namely,
perceivers’ tendency to underestimate the impact of
situational (relative to dispositional) factors on human
behavior. However, recent research has shown that the
correspondence bias can also be due to factors that do
not imply an underestimation of situational factors.
Rather, perceivers sometimes commit the correspondence
bias because they consider situational factors to
have a strong impact on human behavior. Drawing on
these findings, many researchers in the field now distinguish
between the fundamental attribution error
and the correspondence bias, viewing them as two different
(though sometimes related) phenomena.
Specifically, the term fundamental attribution error is
now used to describe people’s tendency to underestimate
the causal impact of situational factors on human
behavior and to overestimate the impact of dispositional
factors. In contrast, the term correspondence
bias is used to describe people’s tendency to infer stable
personality characteristics from observed behavior
even when this behavior could also be due to situational
factors (which may or may not be due to an
underestimation of situational factors).
Explanations
From a general perspective, explanations of the fundamental
attribution error have focused on (a) cognitive
mechanisms, (b) motivational influences, and
(c) general worldviews.
With regard to cognitive mechanisms, it has been
argued that actors usually have a higher perceptual
salience than situations. As such, observed behavior
often forms a perceptual unit with the actor, but not
with the situation in which it occurs. This mechanism
leads to different outcomes for actors who generally
see the situation they are responding to but do not see
themselves engaging in a particular behavior. This
explanation is supported by research showing that
only observers tend to attribute a stronger impact to
dispositional as compared to situational factors,
whereas actors tend to attribute a stronger impact to
situational as compared to dispositional factors.
With regard to motivational influences, it has been
argued that the fundamental attribution error implies

a general tendency to see human behavior as controlled
by the individual rather than by situational factors.
Specifically, lack of personal control over one’s
actions would imply that individuals may not be
responsible for their actions, thus undermining the
social and legal basis of many modern societies. As
such, people are sometimes motivated to downplay
the impact of situational factors on human behavior to
protect the general notion of personal responsibility.
Finally, it has been argued that the fundamental
attribution error has its roots in an individualist worldview
that sees each individual as independent and
unique. This explanation is derived from crosscultural
research, showing that people in collectivist
cultures attribute a stronger weight to situational factors
than do people in individualist cultures.
Bertram Gawronski
See also Actor–Observer Asymmetries; Attributions;
Attribution Theory; Bystander Effect; Correspondence
Bias; Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies; Stanford
Prison Experiment
Further Readings
Fundamental Attribution Error———369
Gawronski, B. (2004). Theory-based bias correction in
dispositional inference: The fundamental attribution error
is dead, long live the correspondence bias. European
Review of Social Psychology, 15, 183–217.
Hamilton, D. L. (1998). Dispositional and attributional
inferences in person perception. In J. M. Darley &
J. Cooper (Eds.), Attribution and social interaction
(pp. 99–114). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Ross, L. D. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his
shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process.
In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). New York: Academic
Press.
Ross, L. D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the
situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York:
McGraw-Hill.

GAIN–LOSS FRAMING
Definition
Gain or loss framing refers to phrasing a statement
that describes a choice or outcome in terms of its
positive (gain) or negative (loss) features. A message’s
framing does not alter its meaning. For example, the
gain-framed message “One fourth of people will survive
the attack” is semantically equivalent to the lossframed
message “Three fourths of people will perish
in the attack.” Framing does not refer to whether a
communicator portrays a choice or outcome as good
or bad. Instead, it refers to whether an option or possibility
is communicated in terms of its positive or
negative consequences.
In one type of gain–loss framing, differentconsequences
framing, one states a statistic of the
likelihood or quantity of either the positive or the
negative outcome. For example, one might describe
the probability that safety-belt wearers would live
(gain frame) or die (loss frame) if they are involved
in a highway accident. With same-consequences
framing, one describes what is gained by taking, or
lost by failing to take, an action. For example, a
weight loss company could frame their advertisements
focusing on either the benefits of slimming
down to a healthy weight (gain frame) or the things
one would miss out on by remaining overweight
(loss frame). For both types of framing, the frame
does not alter the content communicated; with no
additional knowledge, one can express a gain- or
loss-framed message using the opposite frame.
G
371
Context
The way a choice or appeal is framed can affect the
behavioral decisions of the message recipients. A standard
assumption in traditional economic theories is
that if the exact same content is described to people in
a different way (using a different frame), this will not
affect their judgments or decisions. This assumption
is the principle of descriptive invariance. However, a
wealth of evidence demonstrates that the framing of a
message or choice does matter. The contrasting effects
of gain and loss frames suggest that the descriptive
invariance principle does not accurately describe human
judgment.
Framing Effects and Prospect Theory
In the most famous demonstration of gain–loss framing,
research participants were confronted with the Asian
Disease Problem. According to the problem, an Asian
disease is going to cause an outbreak in the United
States and is expected to kill 600 people. There are two
plans—one certain, one risky—that can be taken to try
and contain the disease. Described using a gain frame,
the certain plan would allow 200 lives to be saved,
while the risky plan would provide a one-third chance
of saving all 600 lives and a two-thirds chance of saving
no lives. Under the loss frame, the certain plan
would lead to the certain loss of 400 lives, and the risky
plan would provide a one-third chance of no lives lost
and a two-thirds chance of all 600 lives lost. While each
plan offers the same outcome regardless of the way it is
framed, a clear majority of people select the certain plan
in the gain frame, but the risky plan in the loss frame.

372———Gambler’s Fallacy
Most researchers use prospect theory to explain
such different-consequences framing effects. According
to the theory, people tend to be risk averse (want to
avoid risk) in the domain of gains, but risk seeking in
the domain of losses. Most people would rather take a
sure $100 instead of a riskier 50–50 chance at $200,
reflecting risk aversion for gains. But someone who
receives $200 and then must either take a certain loss
of $100 or a 50–50 chance of losing nothing or everything
will most likely take the risky alternative. By
framing the exact same offer in terms of losses, people
prefer the riskier alternative that offers a chance of not
losing anything.
Same-consequences framing effects are explained
according to a different aspect of prospect theory, loss
aversion. Loss aversion says that losses loom larger
than gains. For example, most people would not be
willing to flip a coin for an even chance of winning
$100 or losing $100, because a potential loss is worse
than a potential gain of the same amount. Capitalizing
on loss aversion, persuasive messages aimed at changing
behavior tend to be more effective when framed in
terms of what one loses by not taking an action (loss
frame) as opposed to what one gains by taking an
action (gain frame). In an applied study, credit card
companies identified customers who had not been
using their credit cards recently and tried to persuade
customers to switch from using cash or checks to using
their credit cards. Compared with customers who were
told how using credit cards offered unique benefits not
shared by cash or checks (gain frame), customers who
were told about all they would lose by not using their
credit cards (loss frame) were subsequently more
likely to resume using their cards. Consistent with the
notion that losses are more attention-capturing or pack
a bigger punch, those who received the loss-framed
message were better able to recall the content of the
persuasive appeal several months later.
Health Applications
Gain–loss framing effects have guided the construction
of health-promotion appeals. One crucial distinction
in designing such messages is whether they seek
to promote preventive measures or to encourage early
detection of a medical condition. In promoting healthful
preventive measures (e.g., applying sunscreen),
gain framing seems to be more effective. In encouraging
early detection (e.g., breast self-examination), loss
framing produces more behavioral compliance. Of
particular importance, the effects of gain–loss framing
continue beyond the time of message exposure, predicting
preventive and early detection behaviors as far
as 4 months into the future. As future research discovers
what, in addition to prospect theory, accounts for
framing effects, practitioners will be better able to
predict whether gain or loss frames would be superior
for any given framing task.
Clayton R. Critcher
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Behavioral Economics;
Decision Making; Loss Aversion; Prospect Theory; Risk
Appraisal; Risk Taking
Further Readings
Highhouse, S., & Yuce, P. (2001). Perspective, perceptions,
and risk-taking behavior. Organizational Behavior and
Human Decision Processes, 65, 159–167.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of
decisions and the psychology of choice. Science,
211, 453–458.
GAMBLER’S FALLACY
If a coin were flipped and it came up heads, would it
be more likely to come up tails the next time? If a
baseball player normally gets a hit 30% of the time but
has no hits after three tries, is he “due” for a hit, in the
sense that he is more likely than usual to get one the
next time? The temptation to say “yes” to such questions
is based on the gambler’s fallacy.
Definition
The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the negative
recency effect and the reactive inhibition principle,
refers to a common mistake in human judgment. It
is the belief that, for random independent events, the
lower the frequency of an outcome in the recent past,
the greater is the likelihood of that outcome in the
future. The belief is false because it is based on the
assumption that chance is self-correcting, so that a
shift in one direction indicates an impending shift in
the opposite direction.

Background
The term was first coined by Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahneman in 1971 and is one of several examples
of the representativeness heuristic identified by
the researchers. The representativeness heuristic refers
to an error in judgment such that the more a proposed
outcome appears representative of a pattern, the more
likely people believe it is to occur. Relative to the
gambler’s fallacy, certain sequences of events appear
more random than others and are thus judged to be
more probable.
Analysis
For example, suppose an unbiased coin were flipped
five times, each time landing on heads. Those falling
prey to the gambler’s fallacy, reasoning that tails is
due, would predict that the next coin toss would more
likely result in tails than heads. The outcome of the
next coin toss, however, is independent of any previous
coin tosses. The probability of the coin landing next on
tails would be equal to that of it landing on heads.
One of the clearest examples of the gambler’s fallacy
can be seen at the roulette wheel in a casino. Some
roulette players record the outcome of each spin of the
wheel, with the implicit belief that they are able to discern
a pattern. If red numbers have been called more
frequently in the recent past, gamblers often place their
next bets on black, and vice versa. Assuming the wheel
is not rigged, however, there is no logical support for
this behavior.
The gambler’s fallacy should not be confused with
its opposite, the hot hand fallacy. This heuristic bias is
the mistaken belief that, for random independent
events, the more frequently an outcome has occurred in
the recent past, the greater is the likelihood of that outcome
in the future. This bias in judgment was named
after basketball fans’ perceptions of players with “hot
hands.” A player is said to have a hot hand if he or she
makes several baskets in a row. On that basis, fans
endorsing the hot hand fallacy believe the player’s
chances of making the next basket to be higher than
usual. Fans readily endorse this belief even though
previous successful shots have nothing to do with a
player’s chance of making the next basket.
Andrew Cox
Nathan C. Weed
See also Hot Hand Effect; Law of Small Numbers;
Representativeness Heuristic
Further Readings
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of
small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76, 105–110.
Yackulic, R., & Kelly, I. (1984). The psychology of the
“gambler’s fallacy” in probabilistic reasoning.
Psychology: A Journal of Human Behavior, 21, 55–58.
GENDER DIFFERENCES
Gender Differences———373
There are differences between men and women, but
most scientific studies show that gender differences
in psychological characteristics are small. Men and
women do not have radically different brains, personality
traits, cognitive skills, or behaviors. There are some
differences on average, but men and women are not the
black versus white opposites that many people believe.
(Even the phrase opposite sex encourages this view.)
There have been numerous media reports about
just how different men and women are. The former
president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, said that
women are not naturally inclined toward science. The
media report that adolescent girls have extremely low
self-esteem. A best-selling book claims that Men Are
From Mars, Women Are From Venus. However, men
and women are not from different planets, or even different
continents here on Earth. The size of most gender
differences is more consistent with men being
from Minnesota and women being from Iowa.
Referring to psychological gender differences as
small means that the effects are between 1/4 and 1/2
of a standard deviation (a statistical term; 1/4 of a
standard deviation is a small difference, 1/2 is moderate,
and more than 3/4 is large). So that means that
gender explains less than 5% of the variation among
people in most psychological characteristics. In comparison,
the gender difference in height, for example,
is almost two standard deviations, so gender explains
50% of the variation among people in height. Yet there
are many women who are taller than many men. That
said, what does research say about the differences that
exist? This entry will review four major areas of difference:
cognitive abilities, personality traits and selfesteem,
attitudes, and behavior.

374———Gender Differences
Cognitive Abilities
Stereotypes suggest that boys are good at math and
girls are good at English. There is a small difference
in verbal ability, with women a little better than men
at this skill. A meta-analysis by Janet S. Hyde and her
colleagues found that boys and girls show no differences
in math ability in elementary school. By late
adolescence and early adulthood, men do better at
math, but the difference is small to moderate, explaining
about 3% to 6% of the variation among people in
math skills.
Spatial ability is one of these slightly larger differences;
this means that men are somewhat better at
rotating figures in their heads and finding their way
around town. If the performance of men and women
on spatial ability tests were graphed, there would be
two curves that overlapped a huge amount, with men’s
curves slightly ahead. This does mean that among
those very talented in this area there are many more
men than women, as a small average difference creates
more of a discrepancy at the high and low ends of
the curve. There is no gender difference at all in overall
intelligence.
In the mid-1990s, several popular books suggested
that girls get less attention in school and lose their academic
confidence during adolescence. Although teachers
may sometimes treat boys and girls differently,
girls consistently earn better grades in high school and
are more likely to go on to college. The Statistical
Abstract of the United States notes that 57% of college
degrees are awarded to women, and entering medical
school and law school classes are now 50% female.
Personality Traits and Self-Esteem
Gender differences in personality traits are also small.
An analysis by Alan Feingold found that women tend
to score higher in anxiety and neuroticism, but they
also score higher in extraversion (linked with positive
emotions). So there is some evidence that women
experience more emotional ups and downs, but these
are small differences, no more than 1/2 a standard
deviation (or about 6% of the variation among people
explained by gender). Even among adolescents, selfreports
of symptoms linked with depression are only
about 1/4 a standard deviation higher among girls
(less than 2% of the variance). Clinical depression has
a larger sex difference, with about twice as many
women as men diagnosed with major depression.
A great deal of attention has also been paid to
gender differences in self-esteem. There is a popular
perception that girls lose their self-esteem during adolescence.
Yet the most comprehensive study of gender
differences in self-esteem, by Kristen Kling and colleagues,
found that men score only 1/7 of a standard
deviation higher than women in self-esteem (less than
1% of the variance). Even among adolescents, the difference
is only 1/4 a standard deviation (less than 2%).
Even this small difference is not caused by girls’ selfesteem
going down; it just doesn’t go up quite as fast
as boys’ self-esteem does during the teen years.
Attitudes
There are also some small gender differences in attitudes.
Women tend to be more liberal than men on
social issues. As one might expect, women are more
progressive in their attitudes about women’s roles.
Women are also more tolerant of gay men (there are
no gender differences in attitudes toward lesbians).
Women are more likely to vote for Democrats than
are men.
Behavior
Men and women do differ in their desire for sex, as
found in separate reviews by Janet Hyde and Roy
Baumeister and colleagues. Men desire more sex with
more partners. Men also masturbate more often and
are more accepting of casual sex; both of these differences
exceed 3/4 a standard deviation and explain
about 20% of the variation among people. Many of
these differences, of course, are much smaller than
they were decades ago. In the 1960s and earlier, men
were more likely than women to engage in premarital
sex; now, however, there is virtually no gender difference
in this practice.
One of the larger psychological sex differences lies
in interests. Generally speaking, men (compared to
women) are more interested in things (like cars, buildings,
and machines), and women are more interested
in people (e.g., how people think, and how their bodies
work). For example, Richard Lippa found that
men were more likely to prefer professions centered
on the “manipulation of objects, tools, machines, and
animals,” and women were more likely to prefer professions
that involved “activities that entail the manipulation
of others to inform, train, develop, cure, or

enlighten” (note, however, that these differences could
be caused by cultural expectations, biological sex differences,
or—most likely—both). This is one reason
why there are more men in fields like engineering
(78% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering go to men)
and more women in fields like psychology (76%
of bachelor’s degrees in psychology go to women).
However, the things versus people distinction makes
some less sex-stereotypical predictions for the future:
If women are more interested in people, women will
eventually be the majority of doctors, lawyers, and
politicians.
Jean M. Twenge
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Cultural Differences;
Erotic Plasticity; Personality and Social Behavior;
Self-Esteem; Stereotype Threat
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Vohs, K. D. (2001).
Is there a gender difference in strength of sex drive?
Theoretical views, conceptual distinctions, and a review
of relevant evidence. Personality and Social Psychology
Review, 5, 242–273.
Kling, K. C., Hyde, J. S., Showers, C. J., & Buswell, B. N.
(1999). Gender differences in self-esteem: A metaanalysis.
Psychological Bulletin, 125, 470–500.
Lippa, R. (1998). Gender-related individual differences and
the structure of vocational interests: The importance of
the people-things dimension. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 74, 996–1009.
GENETIC INFLUENCES ON
SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Why do people act the way they do? There is no simple
answer to this question, because social behaviors,
like all human characteristics, are influenced by multiple
factors. The two most basic influences on social
behavior are genes (the chemical instructions that
people inherit from their parents’ DNA) and the environment
(all other, noninherited factors).
Contrary to a common misconception, genes do
not cause behavioral or personality traits, they only
influence them. Although genes may be linked to certain
traits, it is unlikely that researchers will ever find
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior———375
a single gene that is entirely responsible for most
complicated behaviors. First, each gene is not linked
to one and only one trait; one gene may influence
many different personality characteristics. In addition,
many genes work in concert to influence most behaviors,
meaning the genetic aspects of a particular trait
are the result of small effects over hundreds of individual
genes.
Even if all of the genes influencing behavior were
discovered, behavior still could not be fully explained
nor predicted. This is because people’s environments
are just as important in influencing behavior as their
inherited genes. Factors such as parenting, schooling,
trauma, and the prenatal environment, all play critical
roles in the development of social behavior. Even the
most highly heritable traits, such as height, are influenced
by environmental factors, as demonstrated by
malnourished children that are very short despite having
tall parents. In this example, environmental factors
such as nutritional intake have actually altered the
way in which genetically influenced characteristics
are expressed.
Therefore, although these two influences are often
presented in an either/or fashion, as in the commonly
used phrase “nature versus nurture,” evidence suggests
that behaviors and other characteristics do not
have one clearly identifiable cause. More probable is
that both factors are always at work and that for the
cause of any given trait researchers should not be asking,
“Genes or environment?” but rather, “What is the
contribution of each and how do they work together?”
Concepts and Definitions
Shared/Nonshared Environment
To further understand those factors not due to
heredity, the concept of environment can be further
broken down. If two individuals experience the same
environmental conditions, they are expected to be
similar; at the same time, if two people have different
experiences, it is assumed that they will behave differently.
In behavioral genetics, environmental influences
that cause family members to be similar are
by definition shared, and those influences that cause
family members to be different are nonshared. In the
case of twins, the prenatal environment can typically
be considered shared, since the developmental conditions
experienced are nearly identical. Peer relationships
provide an example of nonshared environment:

376———Genetic Influences on Social Behavior
Even identical twins growing up in the same household
can behave quite dissimilarly, and part of the reason
for this can be different peer groups.
Genotype–Environment Correlation
As already mentioned, it is now widely held
that both nature and nurture simultaneously influence
traits and that, to some extent, the environment can
influence the expression of genes. It is now clear that
the reverse is also true, that genetics influence environment,
or at least social relationships. In essence,
the two forces operate in such a way that children
may create their environment based, at least in part, on
genetically influenced characteristics. This is called
genotype–environment (GE) correlation, which can
be further explained using the terms passive, active, or
evocative.
A passive GE correlation is the result of the parents’
genes influencing the child’s environment,
which is also correlated with the child’s genes. For
example, if a mother and daughter share genes that
contribute to their extraverted temperaments, this similarity
may contribute to open communication between
them. Active and evocative GE correlations reflect situations
in which the child’s genetically influenced
characteristics influence the behavior of others,
including their parents. In active GE correlations, the
child purposefully seeks out a particular environment,
as in the case of children choosing to participate in
extracurricular activities that showcase their natural
talent. Evocative (also called reactive) GE correlations
result when children elicit responses from others. A
child with a difficult temperament, for example, may
evoke harshness from a mother that wouldn’t otherwise
have behaved as negatively.
Background
Genetic Influences on
Parent–Child Relationships
The importance of parenting on the behavior of
children is clear from the extensive literature on the
topic. Until recently, most studies examining parenting
and child and adolescent adjustment assumed that
associations between parenting and child behavior
were the result of purely environmental influences on
the child. The study of genetic influences on parenting,
however, has led many developmental and social psychologists
who considered themselves “environmentalists”
to acknowledge the importance of findings
from behavioral genetics. When genetic and environmental
contributions of parenting have been studied,
significant genetic influences have been demonstrated
for both parent and child behavior. In other words,
research suggests that genetically influenced characteristics
of children and of parents appear to influence
the way that parents treat their children.
Research Constructs
Twin studies of genetic influences on parenting
take two approaches: child-based designs and parentbased
designs. In a child-based design, the children
are twins or siblings, and the focus is on how genetic
influences of the children influence how they are
treated by their parents. Parent-based designs examine
parents who are twins or siblings and thus, the focus
is on the influence of the parents’ genes on how they
parent their children.
Findings
Parental Warmth and Support
Studies have found that genetic influences on parental
warmth and support are best explained by passive
GE correlation, meaning that a mother may interact
with her adolescent in a positive way, at least in part,
because of her own genetically influenced characteristics.
This suggests that mothers may treat their children
with warmth despite the children’s own characteristics
and behaviors. This is further supported by childbased
designs that have found that parents are likely
to be equally positive to all of their children independent
of genetically influenced characteristics of the
children. There is also some indication that evocative
GE correlation may be operating for parental
warmth and support, although these effects are not as
pronounced.
Parental Negativity
Studies have found that evocative GE correlation
best explains parental negativity, meaning children
evoke negativity from their parents due to their own
genetically influenced characteristics. Findings of
genetic influences for child-based studies and little or
no genetic influences for parent-based designs suggest
that parents’ negativity is not influenced by parental
genotypes but is influenced by, and is a response
to, children’s genetically influenced characteristics. For
example, children with difficult temperaments may

evoke negativity even from parents with strong
genetic influences to be warm and supportive.
The finding that the child’s genetically influenced
characteristics evoke negativity from the mother is particularly
relevant for potential prevention and intervention
strategies because parents can be taught to
respond differently to their children. In other words,
the implications of this finding are optimistic considering
that the prospect of changing elicited negative
parental behavior is far less daunting than that of
changing genetically influenced negative parenting.
Parental Control
Parent-based studies on parental control, for the
most part, show very little genetic influence originating
from the parent. This suggests that the level of
control parents exert is primarily a response to genetically
influenced characteristics of their children. In
other words, parental control is primarily evoked by
these characteristics of the child (nonpassive GE correlation).
For example, children with behavior problems
may cause mothers to be more controlling than
they would be with more responsible children.
Genetic Influences on
Sibling Relationships
Although modest genetic influences have been found
for both negative (e.g., rivalry, hostility, and criticism)
and positive (e.g., companionship, empathy, and communication)
dimensions of the sibling relationship,
shared environmental influences are the most important
factors in explaining sibling relationships. The
importance of shared environmental influences is consistent
with the view that sibling relationships are reciprocal
in nature and that, more generally, there exists
a shared family climate. Support for a shared family
climate is also found in studies examining similarities
between mother–child and sibling relationships.
Genetic Influences on
Peer Relationships
Peer groups are unique in that, unlike families, peers
can select each other based on mutual attraction.
Research has demonstrated that adolescents, based on
their own genetically influenced characteristics, initially
seek out friends with whom they share similarities.
Moreover, due to socialization, peers grow to be
more alike over the course of a continuing friendship.
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior———377
To date, there are only a few studies examining genetic
and environmental influences on peer relationships,
and most have focused on the similarities within the
peer group rather than on the quality of the peer relationships.
Studies examining adolescent peer group
characteristics (similarities within the peer group) have
found evidence for substantial genetic influences on
parent’s perceptions of their adolescents’ peer groups.
For adolescents’ own perceptions of their peer groups,
genetic influences were less important and nonshared
environmental factors were more important. For peer
relationship quality, there are several dimensions of
friendship moderately linked to genetic influences,
including positivity (validation, caring, warmth and
support) and, for girls in particular, behavioral and
emotional problems. Certain negative aspects, such as
conflict, betrayal, and criticism, are associated with the
shared environment. Studies of group affiliations have
suggested genetic influences on academic aspirations,
delinquency, and popularity, although the methods
used to draw these conclusions were somewhat problematic.
Future research using refined methods will
help to clarify the influences on peers and friends.
General Methodology
The basic influences on behavior, therefore, are genes,
shared environment, and nonshared environment.
Although for any trait one may be more important
than the others, all three influences are considered in
behavioral genetic studies examining social behaviors.
Exploring family members’ genetic relatedness with
regard to observable similarities helps researchers estimate
the relative ratio of genetic and environmental
influences. To this end, researchers use various methods:
mainly, family, twin, and adoption study designs.
Twin/Sibling Family Designs
Monozygotic (MZ; identical) twins share 100% of
their genes, while dizygotic (DZ; fraternal) twins and
full siblings share 50%, on average. Children also
share exactly 50% of their genes with each parent.
Second-degree relatives such as grandparents, aunts
and uncles, and half-siblings are 25% genetically
similar, and cousins share 12.5% of their genes, on
average. If a trait is largely influenced by genes, the
correlation between MZ twins (e.g., twin 1 correlated
with twin 2) for that trait should be close to 1.0; for DZ
twins, full siblings, and parent—child 0.5; and so on.
Accordingly, unrelated children adopted into the same

378———Goals
family do not correlate for genetic reasons. Shared and
nonshared environmental influences can also be estimated
using twin and family designs. Because shared
environmental influences are all environmental (nongenetic)
factors that make family members similar to
one another, such influences would be indicated by
correlations that are similar across all family members
living in the same household, independent of their
genetic relatedness. While this formula is necessary for
estimating the relative effects of genes and environment,
it becomes problematic in simple family designs
(studies in which there is no variation in the genetic
relatedness of family members in the same household),
whereby the two factors become indistinguishable
since individuals that share many genes (e.g., parents
and siblings) typically share their environments as
well. Finally, nonshared environmental influences
are, by definition, all environmental factors that make
family members different, including measurement
error. The best test of nonshared environmental influences
is MZ twin correlations. Because MZ twins
reared in the same family share all of their genes and
shared environmental influences any correlation less
than 1.0 indicates nonshared environment (and measurement
error).
Adoption Designs
Adoption studies are ideal for identifying shared
environmental influences. The most common design
studies an adopted child reared by genetically unrelated
adoptive parents. Any similarity between the
child and the adoptive parents must be due to shared
environmental factors. Data on the biological parents
makes it possible to further parse genetic and shared
environmental influences by examining similarities
between the adopted child and biological parents and
similarities between the adopted child and adoptive
parents.
Future Directions
While studying the relative ratio of genetic and environmental
influences on behavior and relationships has
enhanced our understanding of the social world,
researchers are working to use these findings as an
avenue to even more specific studies of genetics—
gene finding and molecular genetics. Dramatic technological
advances allow researchers to analyze specific
genes within DNA. Employing statistical analysis
(correlation) to associate specific genes with specific
behaviors, researchers hope to identify genes that are
important in influencing particular behaviors. Using
the results of this process (gene finding), researchers
then hope to trace, at a molecular level, the pathways
from genes to behaviors. Gene finding and molecular
genetics studies are currently under way, and their
successes would provide unprecedented insights into
behavioral processes.
Richard I. Kaplan
Alison M. Kramer
Jenae M. Neiderhiser
See also Hormones and Behavior; Personality and Social
Behavior; Similarity-Attraction Effect; Twin Studies
Further Readings
Iervolino, A. C., Pike, A., Manke, B., Reiss, D.,
Hetherington, E. M., & Plomin, R. (2002). Genetic and
environmental influences in adolescent peer socialization:
Evidence from two genetically sensitive designs. Child
Development, 73(1), 162–174.
Neiderhiser, J. M., Reiss, D., Pederson, N. L., Lichtenstein,
P., Spotts, E. L., Hansson, K., et al. (2004). Genetic and
environmental influences on mothering of adolescents:
A comparison of two samples. Developmental
Psychology, 40, 335–351.
Pike, A., & Atzaba-Poria, N. (2003). Do sibling and friend
relationships share the same temperamental origins?
A twin study. Journal of Child Psychology and
Psychiatry, 44(4), 598–611.
Plomin, R. (1990). Nature and nurture: An introduction to
human behavioral genetics. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Reiss, D., Neiderhiser, J. M., Hetherington, E. M., & Plomin,
R. (2000). The relationship code: Deciphering genetic
and social influences on adolescent development.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
GOALS
Definition
Goals are a form of self-regulation adopted by humans
to achieve specific aims. By focusing people’s attention,
goals facilitate responses that are compatible with
people’s objectives. Although the behavior of lower
animals is controlled by biological mechanisms,
human functioning is more flexible. Humans have the
ability to regulate their responses beyond biologically

ased propensities. Goals represent one form of selfregulation
common in people’s daily lives.
While the specific content of people’s goals vary
considerably, a number of features have been identified
by psychologists as common to all goals.
Mental Idea
Goals are mental ideas, or cognitive representations,
meaning that they are based in the mind. Consequently,
goals can only be inferred, rather than observed.
Furthermore, goals are restricted to animals that use
their mind in the process of regulation. The actions
of plant life, therefore, are not seen as goal-directed
behavior. A blossoming rose bush, for example, is simply
reacting to the conditions in its environment. It
responds by reflex alone. By the same token, physiological
functions in humans, such as digestion or blood
circulation, are not viewed as goal-directed for a similar
reason. These functions are carried out automatically,
without any thought regarding the future.
Future
When engaging in goal-directed behavior, people
take into account future events, behaving in ways
that either facilitate or prevent their occurrence. Goaldirected
behavior, therefore, does not simply entail
an immediate response to a stimulus. Flinching in
response to a loud noise, for example, would not constitute
goal-directed behavior. Of central importance
is the role of a mental image of a future possibility
that influences present behavior.
Commitment
Goal commitment refers to the degree to which a
person is dedicated to following through on his or her
objective. It is only when an individual commits to
some action that a goal is adopted. However, not all
goals are committed to equally. Level of commitment
may vary considerably, and this variability has important
implications for effort, persistence, and absorption
in the goal pursuit process. While goal commitment
requires a conscious decision, once in place, goals may
be activated thorough an automatic process, influencing
behavior outside an individual’s conscious awareness.
Approach or Avoidance
All goals can be categorized as one of two types:
approach-focused or avoidance-focused. Approach
goals center on the pursuit of a positive outcome, such
as scoring above a 90 on a math test. In contrast, avoidance
goals center on the evasion of a negative outcome,
for example, scoring below a 90 on a math test. In both
cases, the content of the goal is the same. However, the
psychological framing differs, which has important
implication for the way goals are experienced.
History and Background
Goals———379
Goals have been present throughout the history of psychological
thought. Aristotle is often regarded as the
first truly psychological thinker, and his writings make
clear reference to the goal-directed nature of behavior.
For Aristotle, behavior is always purposeful, and imagined
future states are viewed as having an important
influence on human action. Aristotle used the work
of a sculptor creating a statue to illustrate this notion of
purpose and directedness. Standing before a block of
marble, the sculptor has an idea of what is wanted at
the end of the sculpting process. It is this imagined end
state that is thought to determine the way that the marble
is chiseled as the sculptor produces the statue.
Friedrich Herbart is commonly viewed as the first
scholar to advocate for a scientific analysis of mental
representations, citing goal-relevant explanations for
human behavior. Several of Herbart’s contemporaries
also made mention of goal-relevant notions, but their
main interest was simply in detailing the nature of
mental activity.
Goals remained on the periphery of the psychological
literature throughout the latter part of the 19th and
(very) beginning of the 20th century. When goalrelevant
expressions did appear, the term end was typically
used, or, on occasion, aim or object. It is in the
work of the Würzburg school that goals came to the
fore in psychological theorizing and received sustained
conceptual and empirical attention.
With the rise of behaviorism in the second decade of
the 20th century, however, mental processes, including
goals, began to be seen as outside the scope of a scientific
psychology. During this time a shift occurred, in
which psychology sought to limit itself to observable
behavior. Internal mental events such as goals were
considered unobservable and, therefore, unscientific.
With time, however, psychologists questioned this
viewpoint. Edward Tolman was among the first to do
so, observing that behavior “reeks with purpose.” As
a behaviorist, Tolman sought to account for the seemingly
goal-seeking nature of behavior, while continuing
to rely on observable behavior. In doing so, he defined

380———Goals
goal-object as the object or situation toward which, or
away from which, the organism moved. Tolman’s contributions
are important in that they helped retain a central
place for the goals in psychology, demonstrating
that behaviorism and goal constructs were not necessarily
incompatible.
A contemporary of Tolman, Kurt Lewin, developed
an elaborate, dynamic analysis of behavior that was
unabashedly goal-based. Lewin attempted to construct
an extensive theoretical account of behavior by
focusing on the goals toward or away from which
behavior was directed. That is, Lewin thought of goals
as the positively or negatively valenced activities or
objects that attract or repel the person, respectively.
By the 1930s, the goal construct had come into its
own in the psychological literature. The word goal
was commonplace and was used as a scientific term to
describe or explain psychological phenomena. Most
subsequent work focused on introducing specific variations
of goal constructs or applying the goal construct
to the study of various motivational issues.
One additional development is particularly noteworthy:
the emergence, in the late 1940s through the
early 1960s, of a cybernetic portrait of goal-directed
behavior. Cybernetic models use machines as a
metaphor for the way goals operate. Thermostats provide
a useful illustration. A thermostat has a target
temperature (a goal) and regulates its behavior according
to this target. The way a thermostat operates is by
continuously comparing its current temperature to a
target temperature, and if a discrepancy is detected,
heat is turned on until the discrepancy is eliminated.
Proponents of cybernetic models posit that people possess
representations of standards (viewed as goals) for
their behavior, and these standards are part of a psychological
mechanism that is used to regulate their
behavior. Much like a thermostat, one’s current behavior
is compared to one’s standard, and if a discrepancy
is detected, corrective action is taken until the discrepancy
is eliminated.
Achievement Goals
Achievement goals refer to people’s intentions within
situations in which the level of competence is
assessed. Achievement goals have received a good
deal of attention within psychology and are generally
distinguished on two levels, each having to do with
the way competence is evaluated. The first level has to
do with how competence is defined, and the second
level has to do with how competence is valenced.
Competence is defined by one’s standard for success.
There are three possible standards: an absolute
standard (i.e., performance compared to the demands
of a task), an intrapersonal standard (i.e., performance
compared to one’s past performance or maximum
possible performance), and an interpersonal,
normative standard (i.e., performance compared to
others). Within the achievement literature, both
absolute and intrapersonal standards are presently collapsed
together within a “mastery goal” category, and
normative standards are placed within a “performance
goal” category.
Competence is valenced by whether it is focused on
a positive possibility that one would like to approach
(success) or a negative possibility that one would like
to avoid (failure). That is, regardless of one’s standard
for success, goals can either be approach-focused or
avoidance-focused.
Combining the definition and valence aspects of
competence, psychologists have identified a total of
four basic achievement goal categories that are presumed
to cover all competence-based strivings. Masteryapproach
goals represent striving to approach absolute
or intrapersonal competence, for example, striving to
improve a tennis serve to the best of one’s ability.
Mastery-avoidance goals represent striving to avoid
absolute or intrapersonal incompetence, for example,
striving not to serve worse than in the past. Performanceapproach
goals represent striving to approach interpersonal
competence, for example, striving to serve
better than others. Performance-avoidance goals represent
striving to avoid interpersonal incompetence, for
example, striving to avoid serving worse than others.
Achievement goals are thought to have an important
impact on the way people engage in achievement
activities. Broadly stated, mastery-approach and
performance-approach goals are predicted to lead to
adaptive behavior and positive outcomes (e.g., masteryapproach
goals optimally facilitate creativity and continuing
interest, while performance-approach goals
optimally facilitate performance attainment). Masteryavoidance
and, especially, performance-avoidance goals,
on the other hand, are predicted to lead to maladaptive
behavior and negative outcomes, such as selecting
easy instead of optimally challenging tasks, quitting
when difficulty or failure is encountered, and poor
performance attainment.

While achievement goals outline the specific aim
and direction of people’s competence pursuits, they
do not explain why people adopt particular types of
achievement goals in the first place. According to the
hierarchical model of approach–avoidance achievement
motivation, personality factors (such as achievement
needs, implicit theories of ability, and general
competence perceptions) account for differences in
achievement goal adoption.
Achievement needs (or motives) may be used as an
illustrative example. Two types of achievement needs
have been identified: the need for achievement (the
tendency to experience pride upon success) and fear
of failure (the tendency to experience shame upon
failure). Both of these personality factors influence
goal adoption in achievement settings. The need for
achievement has been shown to lead to masteryapproach
and performance-approach goals, whereas
fear of failure has been shown to lead to masteryavoidance
and performance-avoidance goals. Fear of
failure has also been shown to lead to performanceapproach
goals, a need–goal combination that represents
an active striving toward success to avoid failure
(i.e., active avoidance).
Worth noting is the fact that need for achievement
and fear of failure do not directly influence performance
in achievement settings. Rather, their influence
is indirect. According to the hierarchical model of
approach–avoidance achievement motivation, needs
influence goal adoption, and it is goal adoption that to
leads to differences in achievement outcomes.
Social Goals
Recent work has applied the approach–avoidance distinction
to goals in the social domain. According to the
hierarchical model of approach–avoidance social motivation,
hope for affiliation and fear of rejection are
personality factors that influence the degree to which
people are motivated to pursue certain goals in their
relationships. Social-approach goals (e.g., trying to
deepen one’s relationships) and social-avoidance goals
(e.g., trying to avoid conflict in one’s relationships)
direct individuals toward potential positive relational
outcomes or away from potential negative relational
outcomes, respectively. Research on approach and
avoidance social goals is just beginning, but the results
to date indicate that social-approach goals lead to positive
relational events and high relationship satisfaction,
whereas social-avoidance goals lead to negative relational
events and a higher level of loneliness.
Personal Goals
Goals———381
Personal goals provide another manifestation of the
goal construct, referring to the consciously embraced,
personally meaningful objectives that individuals
pursue in their daily lives. This type of goal has been
presented in several different ways, most notably as
personal projects, personal strivings, possible selves,
and current concerns. Personal goal is meant as a
generic equivalent of these methods.
Personal goals are commonly measured by having
individuals write short statements indicating what
they are trying to do in their daily lives. The manner
in which individuals present their goals lexically is
thought to correspond to the way that the goal is represented
in memory and, accordingly, the way that the
goal is utilized in daily regulation. That is, the precise
wording that individuals use in listing their personal
goals is neither random nor accidental. Rather, it is
thought to carry precise information as to the structure
and psychological meaning of the goal.
As with any type of goal, a personal goal may be
approach or avoidant in nature. Indeed, nearly any
possibility that an individual may focus on in daily
life may be framed as a positive possibility that he or
she is trying to move toward or maintain, or a negative
possibility that he or she is trying to move away from
or stay away from. For example, a person may articulate
his or her goals as “trying to do well in school”
and “trying to be respectful toward my mother” or,
alternatively, as “trying to avoid doing poorly in school”
and “trying not to be disrespectful toward my mother.”
The pursuit of avoidance goals has typically been
found to result in negative consequences. The focus
on negative possibilities inherent in avoidance goal
regulation leads to a host of processes that are harmful
to the individual’s goal attainment, psychological
adjustment, and physical health. Such processes
are broad in scope and include perceptual processes
(e.g., interpreting information as a threat), attentional
processes (e.g., heightened sensitivity to and vigilance
for negative information), mental control processes
(e.g., difficulty concentrating and sustaining focus),
memory processes (e.g., biased search for and recall
of negative information), emotional processes (e.g.,
anxiety and worry), volitional processes (e.g., feeling

382———Gossip
internally forced or obligated to expend effort), and
behavioral processes (e.g., escaping or selecting oneself
out of goal-relevant situations).
Using negative possibilities as the hub of goal regulation
is also presumed to be inefficient and ineffective,
as it provides the individual with something to
move away from but not something to move toward,
and it does not afford the person a clear sense of
progress. Indeed, even if one succeeds at an avoidance
goal, one simply experiences the absence of a negative
outcome, not the presence of a positive outcome that
is needed to satisfy the individual’s psychological and
physical needs. While avoidance goals are not necessarily
always expected to have detrimental consequences,
in the main they are expected to produce
negative processes that eventuate in negative psychological
outcomes.
See also Achievement Motivation; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Ron Friedman
Andrew J. Elliot
Elliot, A. J. (2005). A conceptual history of the achievement
goal construct. In A. Elliot & C. Dweck (Eds.), Handbook
of competence and motivation (pp. 52–72). New York:
Guilford Press.
Elliot, A. J., & Fryer, J. W. (in press). The goal concept in
psychology. In J. Shah & W. Gardner (Eds.), Handbook of
motivational science. New York: Guilford Press.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (1990). A theory of goal
setting and task performance. Engelwood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
Pervin, L. A. (Ed.). (1989). Goal concepts in personality and
social psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
GOSSIP
Curiosity about gossip seems to center on one question:
What “counts” as gossip? Talking about who in
Hollywood is heading to the altar? Discussing the odd
behavior of a friend at a party? Criticizing a friend’s
choice of attire? Taking bets on how long a common
friend’s latest love affair will last? Confiding in a
friend about another friend’s bizarre eating habits?
Discussing news stories about presidential candidates’
service records? Mulling over whether one’s favorite
baseball player uses steroids? This curiosity is not
about the definition of gossip per se. It is about categorizing
instances of talk about people who are not
present in moral terms, innocent talk or sinful slander,
purposeful or idle, truth or lies. Not gossip or gossip.
The definition of gossip, for most of us, implicitly
includes a moral dimension. And this is precisely
what makes gossip difficult to define, especially for
those who wish to study gossip. Supreme Court Justice
Potter Stewart’s “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” approach
(to defining obscenity) won’t serve social psychologists.
Most social psychologists agree that gossip is
conversation about people who are not present. And
most agree that conversation about people becomes
gossip when evaluations, particularly negative ones,
creep into the discourse. Saying “John got into every
school he applied to” is probably not gossip. But if
it were said with a roll of the eyes, it might be gossip.
If it were followed by “His parents have a lot of
money,” we would now be in a conversation thick with
unflattering evaluations of John. This, to most of us,
is gossip.
Gossip can be defined, behaviorally, as informal
evaluative comments about people who are not present.
One may wish to add to this definition that the
comments are negative or unflattering of the person
being talked about. However, a deeper appreciation
of what gossip is may come from understanding its
purpose. Those who have considered the adaptive
benefits of gossip point to two main purposes: transmission
of information and social bonding. Information
about who is doing what and with whom serves
us as we plot our own moves through the social landscape.
We could get into serious trouble if we didn’t
know who was romantically interested in whom or
who had aspirations of leadership or who was taking
more than their share of community resources, for
example. Gossip is also a source for learning, and even
defining, social norms. This is evidenced by a metaanalysis
of anthropological studies that found that
the main topics of gossip were “personal qualities
and idiosyncrasies, behavioral surprises and inconsistencies,
character flaws, discrepancies between actual
behavior and moral claims, bad manners, socially
unaccepted modes of behavior, shortcomings, improprieties,
omissions, presumptions, blamable mistakes,
misfortunes, and failures.”
Another chief function of gossip, many believe, is
to forge and maintain social bonds. The social bonding
benefit of gossip may even have been the carrot
that drove the evolution of language, according to

Robin Dunbar, evolutionary psychologist. He believes
that language evolved for the purpose of talking about
other members of the social group and that this
allowed our early ancestors to form allies who protected
them from harassment from other group members,
an inevitable part of group living. It also allowed
for the discovery of “freeloaders”—group members
who take more than they give—something that would
have benefited most everyone in the society.
But why should gossip be negative talk about
people? One possibility is that, through negative gossip,
people trade valuable social information. It is as
though they have given each other a little gift. Another
possibility is that because they engaged in an activity
that many find morally questionable—speaking ill of
others—they may have felt like “partners in crime.”
Talking negatively means that one is sharing a confidence,
a private opinion, and hopes that it will stay
secret between the gossipers. Talking positively has
no such implication. Sharing a secret with someone
builds intimacy because it carries with it the implicit
message that the listener is trusted.
Yet another possibility is that sharing negative
opinions about other people is a form of self-disclosure,
and self-disclosure is known to make people feel
closer. Feelings about the actions or character of
another person may be considered very private to
some people, and sharing them may feel like an act of
self-disclosure.
A definition of gossip that satisfies everyone may
never be achieved. Part of the problem is that the definition
of gossip seems to change with perspective.
When we talk about people who are not present, we
take into account our intentions (a moral consideration)
when we decide whether or not what we are
saying “counts” as gossip. But from an outsider’s perspective,
it is impossible to know the motives and
intents of the gossipers, so using moral terms to define
gossip from this perspective is problematic, particularly
for researchers. This entry has suggested a behavioral
definition of gossip to address this problem. But
a definition of gossip that makes black and white
the vast moral gray area in the universe of people talking
about other people is left for you to make.
Sarah Wert
See also Autobiographical Narratives; Bad Is Stronger Than
Good; Cheater-Detection Mechanism; Group Dynamics;
Moral Development; Self-Disclosure
Further Readings
Wert, S. R., & Salovey, P. (2004). Introduction to the special
issue on gossip. Review of General Psychology, 8, 76–77.
GRATITUDE
Definition
Gratitude———383
People experience gratitude when they affirm that
something good has happened to them and when they
recognize that someone else is largely responsible for
this benefit. The source of the benefit is often (but
not always) another human. The benefit prompting a
grateful response may be the absence of some negative
event, as well as the occurrence of a positive favor.
Some of the strongest gratitude responses have been
found to occur when individuals feel that something
bad could have or should have happened to them but
did not. Although early research in this area often
equated the feelings of gratitude and indebtedness
(feeling obligated to repay), recent research has shown
that there are important differences between these
emotions, and they probably should be seen as distinct
states.
Background and Importance
Although gratitude has been a neglected topic in psychology,
it appears to be one of the most important of
the social emotions. Gratitude has been shown to be a
highly valued social trait; people like grateful individuals
and tend to disdain those they feel are ungrateful.
Gratitude has been classified as a moral emotion in
that it is an emotion that promotes positive interactions
among people. Gratitude may be seen as a moral
emotion because it is a moral barometer (it alerts
people to the fact that someone else has benefited them),
a moral motivator (it encourages people to act positively
toward others), and a moral reinforcer (when an
individual expresses gratitude, it encourages the giver
to give again in the future).
It is important to understand that gratitude can be
studied as an emotional state (i.e., how grateful a person
is feeling right now) and as an emotional or personality
trait. Trait gratitude is the disposition toward
gratitude, or how easily a person may experience
grateful emotions. A person who frequently experiences
grateful feelings is someone who could be characterized
as a grateful person, or a person high in trait

384———Gratitude
gratitude. A person low in trait gratitude would be a
person who rarely experiences gratitude. Two questionnaires
are often used to investigate the disposition
toward gratitude: the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6)
and the Gratitude, Resentment, and Appreciation Test
(the GRAT).
Gratitude Research
Research has been able to identify the situations in
which a person is most likely to feel grateful. First, the
person must recognize that a benefit has been given to
him or her, and the more the person values the benefit,
the more he or she tends to feel grateful. Second,
gratitude is more likely to be experienced if the person
receiving the gift feels that it was given to him or her
in good will. In other words, the receiver thinks that
the motives of the giver are good; the gift was given
for the benefit of the receiver. If the person receiving
the benefit feels that it was given for ulterior or irrelevant
motives, gratitude is not likely. Similarly, if the
receivers of the benefit like the giver, they are more
likely to feel grateful toward their benefactor. In addition,
if the gift goes beyond the receivers’ expectations
of the giver, the receivers tend to feel more grateful. It
is for this reason that people are more likely to feel
grateful toward a new acquaintance for driving them
to the airport than one of their parents (because they
have greater expectations of their parents). Finally,
research has also shown that when a receiver of a benefit
thinks that the giver expects some kind of return
favor, the receiver is less likely to feel grateful.
Research that has investigated relationships between
trait gratitude and other variables has provided a picture
of what grateful people are like. Grateful people
tend to be more agreeable, prosocial, hopeful, and
emotionally intelligent; have higher self-esteem; and
are more religious and spiritual. Grateful people also
tend to be less depressed, less hostile, less self-centered,
and less neurotic. Perhaps most importantly,
gratitude has been found to be strongly related to happiness,
such that grateful individuals tend to be happier
as indicated both by their own admission and also by
the reports of others who know them. Researchers
have proposed several theories for this relationship.
For example, some evidence suggests that gratitude
promotes happiness by directing people’s focus to
good things they have, rather than to benefits that they
lack. Gratitude might also enhance happiness by
increasing people’s enjoyment of benefits. Some have
argued that gratitude may help people deal with difficult
events in their lives, and some research supports
this hypothesis. For example, the unpleasantness of
negative memories appears to fade over time more for
grateful people than for ungrateful people. Also, grateful
people appear to handle trauma better than less
grateful individuals. Gratitude is also a common emotion
that people experience following a disturbing
event. Individuals reported an increase in gratitude
following the events of September 11, 2001, and this
response appeared to help them deal with its aftermath.
Some have also suggested that gratitude might promote
happiness by encouraging positive reflections
on one’s past. Research has shown that grateful people
are more likely to recall happy memories.
Several studies have investigated treatments designed
to encourage their participants to experience gratitude.
Encouraging grateful thinking produces an improvement
in mood, and studies encouraging regular grateful
thinking over time showed increases in one’s happiness
and optimism. Experiments have also found that grateful
people report more urges to act favorably toward
those they know, and gratitude also appears to inhibit
the urge to act in harmful ways toward others. Taken
together, research suggests that there are many benefits
to gratitude. Gratitude appears to be an important factor
contributing to one’s happiness.
Philip C. Watkins
See also Altruism; Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive
Emotions; Envy; Equity Theory; Happiness; Helping
Behavior; Moral Emotions; Prosocial Behavior;
Reciprocity Norm
Further Readings
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting
blessings versus burdens: An empirical investigation of
gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377–389.
Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (Eds.). (2004). The
psychology of gratitude. New York: Oxford University
Press.
McCullough, M. E., Emmons, R. A., & Tsang, J. (2002). The
grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical
topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
82, 112–127.

McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., &
Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect?
Psychological Bulletin, 127, 249–266.
Watkins, P. C., Woodward, K., Stone, T., & Kolts, R. D.
(2003). Gratitude and happiness: The development of
a measure of gratitude and its relationship with subjective
well-being. Social Behavior and Personality, 31, 431–452.
GRIM NECESSITIES
Definition
A grim necessity is an activity with short-term negative
consequences but long-term positive payoffs. For
example, reading a boring textbook is unpleasant in
the short term but rewarding in the long term, because
it helps you get a good grade on the exam. Other commonly
listed grim necessities are working at a boring
job to make money and doing exhausting exercise for
long-term fitness.
Usage
Dilemmas of self-control often present a contrast
between immediate payoffs and delayed payoffs.
According to Roger Giner-Sorolla, these dilemmas
can be described either as delayed cost (guilty pleasure)
or delayed benefit (grim necessity). His studies
have shown that people associate different emotions
with different types of consequences. In particular,
when participants were asked for examples of activities
with more negative short-term than long-term
consequences, these grim necessities brought up negative
emotions that tended to be more hedonic. That
is, they dealt with immediate sensations connected
with the activity, for example, “bored” and “frustrated.”
However, the positive emotions they came up
with for these activities tended to be more selfconscious,
or concerned with evaluating one’s own
actions and qualities, for example, “proud” and “confident.”
For grim necessities in particular, the greater
self-control is shown, the less negative hedonic affect
was associated with the activity.
Roger Giner-Sorolla
See also Emotion; Guilty Pleasures; Self-Regulation
GRIT Tension Reduction Strategy———385
Further Readings
Giner-Sorolla, R. (2001). Guilty pleasures and grim
necessities: Affective attitudes in dilemmas of self-control.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
80(2), 206–221.
GRIT TENSION REDUCTION
STRATEGY
Definition
Graduated Reciprocation in Tension reduction (GRIT)
was proposed by Charles Osgood in 1962 and refers to
a method of restoring negotiations between two parties
who are deadlocked. GRIT reestablishes negotiations
by urging one side to initiate a concession. According
to the norm of reciprocity, people are expected to
reciprocate benefits from others. Therefore, when one
side offers a concession, the other side should feel
responsible for making a concession in return, and this
exchange encourages the negotiation process to begin
again.
History and Modern Usage
Osgood’s proposal for GRIT originates in the context
of the Cold War and concern about nuclear weapons.
Specifically, the United States and Russia tried to
surpass each other with advancements in nuclear
weapons to feel more secure. Ultimately, this intensifying
quest for nuclear weapons threatened the stability
of the world. Osgood devised GRIT as a way to
calm this escalated tension. GRIT consists of two
main steps, which are repeated until the two involved
parties reach an agreement. First, the initiating party
must announce an intention to cooperate with the
other side and make a unilateral (one-sided) concession.
The initiating party must also communicate an
expectation that the concession will be reciprocated
(matched) by the opposing party. Second, the opposing
party should reciprocate the concession made by
the initiating side. The two sides should continue reciprocating
concessions until an agreement is reached.
To make GRIT an effective process, there are some
additional conditions that must be met. First, the initiating
side should not make a concession that threatens

386———Group Cohesiveness
its own security or ability to defend against a hostile
act. The concession should also not indicate weakness,
in which case the opposing side may feel motivated
to bargain tough (e.g., not make a concession).
Second, the initiator of GRIT may have to make a second
or third attempt before capturing the attention of
the other side. Third, should the other side abuse a
cooperative act by the initiating party, the initiator
should retaliate and state the purpose of the retribution
(i.e., to show that the abuse will not be tolerated).
Then, the initiating party should instigate another
cooperative act. In addition to drawing on the norm
of reciprocity, the effectiveness of GRIT depends on
building trust between the two sides. Research indicates
a high level of cooperation resulting from GRIT.
This strategy has also effectively been used to reduce
actual conflicts. For example, Anwar Sadat made an
unprecedented trip to Jerusalem in 1977 to establish
trust between his nation (Egypt) and Israel. This initiative
led the way for a peace agreement between
Israel and Egypt in 1978.
See also Conflict Resolution; Reciprocity Norm
Further Readings
Janice R. Kelly
Eric E. Jones
Lindskold, S. (1978). Trust development, the GRIT proposal,
and the effects of conciliatory acts on conflict and
cooperation. Psychological Bulletin, 85, 772–793.
Osgood, C. E. (1962). An alternative to war or surrender.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
GROUP COHESIVENESS
Definition
Group cohesiveness (or cohesion) is a social process
that characterizes groups whose members interact with
each other and refers to the forces that push group
members closer together. A lot of work these days is
accomplished in groups. Most people have had both
good and bad experiences from participating in such
group work. One important element that influences
one’s group work experience is cohesiveness. Cohesiveness
has two dimensions: emotional (or personal)
and task-related. The emotional aspect of cohesiveness,
which was studied more often, is derived from
the connection that members feel to other group
members and to their group as a whole. That is, how
much do members like to spend time with other group
members? Do they look forward to the next group
meeting? Task cohesiveness refers to the degree to
which group members share group goals and work
together to meet these goals. That is, is there a feeling
that the group works smoothly as one unit, or do different
people pull in different directions?
Group (or team) cohesiveness was studied extensively
and has received a great deal of attention in the
social sciences, as evidenced by the hundreds of articles
published in the past 50 years in various domains,
including sports, education, and work (a quick Google
search revealed that there are more than 278,000
hits for “group cohesion” and nearly 120,000 hits for
“group cohesiveness”).
Factors Influencing
Group Cohesiveness
The forces that push group members together can be
positive (group-based rewards) or negative (things lost
upon leaving the group). The main factors that influence
group cohesiveness are members’ similarity,
group size, entry difficulty, group success, and external
competition and threats. Often, these factors work
through enhancing the identification of the individual
with the group he or she belongs to as well as the individual’s
beliefs of how the group can fulfill his or her
personal needs.
Members’ Similarity
The more group members are similar to each other
on various characteristics, the easier it is to reach
cohesiveness. Through social identity theory, it has
been found that people feel closer to those whom they
perceive as similar to themselves in external characteristics
(age, ethnicity) or internal ones (values, attitudes).
In addition, similar background makes it more
likely that members share similar views on various
issues, including group objectives, communication
styles, and the type of desired leadership. In general,
higher agreement among members on group rules and
norms results in greater trust and less dysfunctional
conflict, which, in turn, strengthen both emotional and
task cohesiveness.

Group Size
Because it is easier for fewer people to agree on
goals and to coordinate their work, smaller groups are
more cohesive than larger groups. Task cohesiveness
may suffer, though, if the group lacks enough members
to perform its tasks well enough.
Entry Difficulty
Difficult entry criteria or procedures to a group
tend to present it in more exclusive light. The more
elite the group is perceived to be, the more prestigious
it is to be a member in that group, and consequently,
the more motivated members are to belong and stay in
it. This is why alumni of prestigious universities tend
to keep in touch for many years after they graduate.
Group Success
Group success, like exclusive entry, increases the
value of group membership to its members and influences
members to identify more strongly with the team
and to want to be actively associated with it. Think
how it feels to be part of a winning basketball team!
External Competition and Threats
When members perceive active competition with
another group, they become more aware of members’
similarity within their group and see their group as a
means to overcome the external threat or competition
they are facing. Both these factors increase group
cohesiveness; leaders throughout human history have
been aware of this and have focused the attention of
their followers on conflicts with external enemies when
internal cohesion was threatened. Similar effects can
be brought about by facing an objective external threat
or challenge (such as natural disaster).
Consequences of Group Cohesiveness
Cohesive groups have several characteristics. First,
members interact more with each other. Cohesive
groups develop a supportive communication climate
in which people are more comfortable expressing their
thoughts and feelings. Second, cohesive groups’ members
are friendlier and cooperative with each other
than are members in noncohesive groups. Members of
highly cohesive groups talk positively about their
Group Cohesiveness———387
group and its members. Third, cohesive groups have
greater influence over their members and pressure
them to conform. Fourth, cohesive groups’ members
are more satisfied and believe that both their personal
and group goals are better met compared to lowcohesion
groups.
Given these characteristics, it may be not surprising
that a general finding that emerged from studying
various groups (including sport teams and work
groups) is that cohesiveness contributes to positive
group processes (e.g., sharing information) and to
groups’ task performance. Among the reasons for
the performance-enhancing effects of cohesiveness are
members’ increased motivation to perform better in
the group, partially due to norms that discourage social
loafing on group projects. Another reason for the performance
superiority of cohesive groups is members’
commitment to the group task, which tends to be
higher in cohesive groups; higher task commitment
was indeed found to relate to higher task performance.
Improved communication and trust allow members to
share more and better information with each other,
enabling a wider resource pool for the group to use
when solving problems. Lastly, the high mutual support
among cohesive groups’ members in stressful
times creates a positive and long-lasting interdependency
among team members. On the other hand, in
low-cohesion groups, conflicts tend to occur more and
develop into dysfunctional interpersonal conflicts
more often, discouraging members from sharing information
and helping their teammates.
Notwithstanding the generally positive consequences
of cohesiveness, there are rare situations in which group
cohesiveness may not contribute to higher performance.
One such case is found in organizations when teams’
norms conflict with organizational goals. Researchers
found that when such conflict is high, higher team cohesiveness
actually results in lower task performance.
Another source for potentially negative outcomes is
the pressure to conform that highly cohesive groups
exert on their members. While this adherence to norms
has many benefits for the group as a whole, the same
mechanism may result in negative social and individual
consequences. For example, the fact that abuses against
individual members in small communities and military
units, which tend to be highly cohesive, can go for long
times unexposed, can be attributed in a large part to the
tight norms of these very cohesive groups.
Jacob Eisenberg

388———Group Decision Making
See also Group Identity; Groupthink
Further Readings
Beal, D. J., Cohen, R., Burke, M. J., & McLendon, C. L.
(2003). Cohesion and performance in groups: A metaanalytic
clarification of construct relation. Journal of
Applied Psychology, 88, 989–1004.
Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen eighty-four, a novel. London:
Secker & Warburg.
Piper, W., Marrache, M., Lacroix, R., Richardson, A., &
Jones, B. (1983). Cohesion as a basic bond in groups.
Human Relations, 36, 93–108.
GROUP DECISION MAKING
In everyday life, many decisions are made by groups.
Some of these group decisions are relatively inconsequential;
however, others serve highly critical functions,
such as those made by juries, medical teams,
political committees, and safety advisory boards. Therefore,
much research has been carried out on the determinants
and dynamics of group decision making.
History
The scholarly analysis of group decision making can
be traced as far back as the philosophies of Socrates
and Aristotle. The Socratic dialogue, for example, is
predicated on the assumption that collective discourse
can lead to greater truths than can solitary reflections.
While there are some laudable exceptions, it was not
until the emergence of social psychology in the 1930s
that the study of group decision making took on its
contemporary shape. This approach, initiated by such
luminaries as Kurt Lewin, Muzafer Sherif, and Floyd
Allport, emphasizes the collection of scientific evidence.
Notably, while social psychology is the discipline
most closely associated with the establishment
and current study of group decisions, many important
contributions have come from other fields, including
sociology, business, education, and political science.
An early debate centered on the basic question of
whether or not groups could be considered “real” in the
sense of having scientifically measurable properties
that transcend their individual members. Allport argued
that they did not. He contended that groups could be
wholly understood by studying their member individuals
and that this was the only scientifically valid position.
Others, including Lewin and Sherif, argued to the
contrary. Through the collection of empirical data and
persuasive theorizing, the debate was largely settled by
the 1950s in favor of the groups approach, although
vestiges of the rift remain to this day.
Some early studies on group decision making identified
pseudo-group effects, outcomes that seem to
emerge from groups but are attributable to statistical
principles. For example, when several people combine
their inputs to generate a single decision, they will reliably
outperform individuals working alone. However,
this effect can be attributed to the statistical principle
of aggregation. Increasing the size of a group can also
lead to a better outcome simply because it increases
the probability that one of the individuals will have the
requisite skills or knowledge. While such effects are
real, they can be explained with statistical principles
and are generally rejected as true group effects. However,
this does not mean that such effects are unimportant
or uninteresting. Indeed, mathematical models of
group decision making that incorporate such considerations
continue to be developed. Nonetheless, for most
contemporary researchers, a true group effect necessarily
involves individuals who are interdependent and
engaged in social interaction.
Studying Group Decision Making
The methods used to study group decision making
include experimental designs, which allow for the
systematic manipulation and control of variables, and
correlational designs, in which naturally occurring
variables are carefully measured (but not manipulated)
to see if they are reliably associated. Field studies of
actual groups (e.g., committees, juries, clubs, fraternities,
teams) typically employ correlational designs
but may include experimental variables as well. A case
study is an in-depth descriptive analysis of a single
group, often one that has made a notorious decision.
Each of these basic research designs offers unique
advantages and disadvantages. For example, experimental
designs allow for superior confidence in determining
causality (e.g., Does time pressure cause group
tension?); correlational designs allow researchers to
study variables of interest that cannot be manipulated
(e.g., gender, personality); and case studies, while not
suitable as scientific evidence, can provide fascinating

illustrations of established principles or may serve to
stimulate scientific investigations.
Researchers in this field also rely on various
measurement strategies. Self-report measures involve
directly asking group members questions designed
to tap variables of interest (e.g., How much did you
enjoy the group interaction?). Objective outcome
measures include, for example, the quality of a final
decision, the length of group discussion, or the tally of
votes for a proposed decision. Researchers may also
assess ongoing processes by employing a structured
observational measure. Such measures require trained
observers to code and classify specified bits of behavior
that emerge during a group discussion. For example,
Robert Bales’s influential coding system, called
interaction process analysis (IPA), consists of socialemotional
categories (e.g., displays of solidarity) and
task categories (e.g., asking for suggestions). The IPA
remains popular and has served as the foundation for
numerous theoretical and methodological advancements,
such as the System of Multiple Level Observation
of Groups (SYMLOG).
Group Decision-Making Process
According to much research, most decision-making
groups proceed through three stages: orientation
(defining the situation and procedures), evaluation
(discussion of ideas, opinions), and decision (deciding
what to do). A host of alternative stage models have
been proposed, the most notable of which suggests
four phases: forming (task identification), storming
(dealing with conflict, emotional reactions), norming
(developing cohesion, expressing opinions), and performing
(solving the problem). Despite variations in
terminology and specified number of stages, the various
models share the idea of an initial phase that
defines the problem, a middle phase (or phases) that
involves working on the problem, and a final stage in
which a decision is made.
There is clear evidence for value of the initial
stage. Groups that devote relatively more time and
effort to orientation issues generally produce higherquality
solutions and are generally more satisfied with
the interactions and end result. Unfortunately, research
also indicates that most groups seldom discuss orientation
issues or strategies.
For middle stage processes, it has been demonstrated
that varied contributions, critical appraisals,
Group Decision Making———389
expressions of commitment, and ongoing assessments
of performance all facilitate effective group decisions.
However, studies have shown that groups also frequently
engage in counterproductive processes at this
stage, such as procrastinating, ignoring plausible solutions,
withholding critical comments, trivializing the
discussion, or avoiding responsibility for the decision.
The most notable aspect of the final stage is the
implementation of a decision rule (or social decision
scheme) that dictates how the preferences of individual
group members will be combined to generate a single
collective decision. The most prominent explicit decision
rule across all types of human groups is the majority
rule (or the closely related plurality rule). This is
one of several voting rules, in which each group member
receives one vote and the alternative with the most
votes is adopted by the group. There is good evidence
that the majority rule yields the most efficient
and accurate outcomes across a range of conditions.
Other explicit rules include consensus (discussion, usually
with compromise, until unanimous agreement is
reached), averaging individual inputs (some midpoint
of the expressed preferences is calculated), and delegation
(an individual group member, such as a leader
or expert, or subgroup, is given authority to decide for
the group). The “truth wins” rule is an implicit rule in
which the correct decision emerges and is adopted, as
its correctness is recognized by the group as a whole.
Little research has been conducted on how decisions,
once made, are actually implemented or carried
out. There is evidence that implementation is more
successful if group members are closely involved in
the decision-making process. Reluctance is more
likely if group members are simply ordered to implement
a decision that they had no role in determining.
Recognizing this potential, many organizations now
utilize such strategies as quality circles, autonomous
work groups, self-directed teams, and total participation
groups.
Group Polarization
Group polarization refers to the well-established principle
that, after a group discussion, people tend to take
more extreme positions compared to their prediscussion
inclinations. Thus, for example, a group of moderately
prejudiced individuals will become more
strongly prejudiced after group discussion, whereas a
group of individuals somewhat low in prejudice will

390———Group Decision Making
become even less prejudiced after a discussion. The
implications for group decision making are clear: A
group of individuals leaning somewhat toward a particular
decision (e.g., to initiate a conflict, make an
investment, declare a defendant guilty, not hire a candidate)
is likely to become more solidified and extreme
in that position as a function of group discussion.
After decades of research, two primary determinants
of group polarization have been identified. According
to the persuasive arguments or informational influence
explanation, the group discussion generates a
large pool of arguments or information that supports
the initial proclivities of the group members. This
exposure strengthens each member’s confidence in
the correctness of his or her view, which leads to a
more extreme stance. Thus, this explanation stresses
the desire to be correct as a motivating force. The
social comparison or normative influence explanation
suggests that group members determine what an
appropriate stance is by comparing their own views
with the views of others. They then tend to shift their
views to be more in line with that of the group as a
whole. This explanation emphasizes the desire to be
liked or to be held in high esteem, which acts as a
motivating force.
Which of two major determinants will have a
stronger effect depends, in part, on the type of decision
under discussion. Research suggests that persuasive
arguments have a greater influence on groups
deliberating intellective tasks (problems with relatively
objective, factual solutions) or when the group
is more task- than friendship-based. Social comparison
processes have a greater impact on groups dealing
with ambiguous or judgmental tasks (problems with a
relative emphasis on values, tastes, preferences), or
when the individual’s group identity is more salient
than his or her personal identity.
Groupthink
The term groupthink was brought into prominence by
researcher Irving Janis who examined several infamously
bad group decisions, including those associated
with the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Vietnam
War, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. According to Janis,
groupthink occurs when the members of a group are
so intent on reaching unanimity regarding a decision
that they fail to critically appraise the potential flaws
of their decision or to seriously consider alternative
courses of action. Since Janis’s work, the concept has
been used to explain several other disastrous realworld
group decisions, including the launching of the
Space Shuttle Challenger and the intelligence failures
leading up to 9/11 and the Iraq war.
In theory, the following factors increase the likelihood
of groupthink: a high degree of social cohesion
or comradery among the group members, isolation of
the group from outside scrutiny, and a biased group
leader who strongly favors and promotes a particular
decision outcome. The symptoms of groupthink
include an illusion of invulnerability and morality
(“We can’t possibly fail” and “We are morally justified
in our decision”), constrained flow of information
(don’t rock the boat), self-censorship (opposing opinions
are avoided, minimized, or ridiculed), mindguards
(group members who squelch dissent), and faulty
analyses of goals, processes, and information.
Although the theory of groupthink has been quite
influential and has enjoyed popular appeal, direct
empirical evidence for it is mixed. This is partly due
to the fact that the highly stressful and consequential
situations upon which the theory was developed
are difficult to replicate in laboratories that could
allow for precise scientific study. Many contemporary
researchers have opted to incorporate aspects of the
theory into more general models of group decision
making.
Minority Influence
Minority influence refers to those instances when a
group’s decision is substantially influenced by the
views of an individual or a small subset of individuals
that are not in line with the views of most group members.
A good fictional illustration of this phenomenon
can be seen in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men.
In this film, 11 jurors quickly agree on the guilt of
a defendant but are slowly influenced by the contrary
views of a lone juror. About a decade after the film
was released, Serge Moscovici, a prominent European
social psychologist, formulated a theory of minority
influence and conducted a series of classic studies that
empirically demonstrated its power. Subsequent studies
have continued to demonstrate that a minority position
can indeed change the viewpoint of the majority.
Research has shown that minority influence is most
likely to occur when the person or persons holding the
converse opinion are steadfast in their views, but do

not appear overly dogmatic or rigid, and are willing to
compromise. Minority views also are more likely to
have an influence on the majority if they offer a compelling
argument against the majority’s position, the
minority position is held by more than one group
member, and there is not an obvious selfish explanation
for the minority position (e.g., the minority would
benefit financially).
Even under the best of circumstances, a minority
viewpoint may not be accepted. And even if accepted
privately, publicly expressed acceptance may be hindered
by the fear of disapproval by the larger group or
powerful leaders. Nevertheless, there is good evidence
that even if a minority position is not fully or even partially
adopted immediately, the process may stimulate
more in-depth and creative thinking about the issues
under consideration and can lead to more long-term
shifts in opinions.
Information Processing in Groups
To help explain certain decision-making processes,
some researchers conceptualize decision-making
groups as collective information processors. One
prominent model in this vein considers situations in
which different members of a group are responsible
for different domains of knowledge. Their combined
cognitive effort of collecting, analyzing, and communicating
information is termed a transactive (or
collective) memory system (TMS). In short, a TMS is
a cooperative division of mental labor. Research suggests
that such systems have limited benefits with
newly established or short-term groups but do benefit
long-term groups. It seems that as a group stays
together over time, the members become more proficient
at coordinating their cognitive efforts, more trusting
in their mutual reliance, and typically improve in
their decision-making performance.
Relatedly, the information sampling model was
developed, in part, to examine the commonly held
assumption that group members tend to pool their
unique bits of knowledge and this leads to higherquality
decisions. Indeed, studies confirm that the
extent to which unshared information (information
held by only one or a few members of the group) is
discussed is a good predictor of ultimate decision
quality. However, consistent with the model’s predictions,
studies have also found that groups tend to
spend an inordinate amount of time discussing shared
information (information that each member of the
group possessed) and very little time discussing
unshared information. This information sampling bias
leads to faulty decision-making outcomes (sometimes
referred to as the common knowledge effect). There
is some evidence that the sampling bias can be mitigated
if the decision task is intellective rather than
judgmental and if the group is motivated to generate
the correct solution.
Jay W. Jackson
See also Decision Making; Group Dynamics; Group
Polarization; Groupthink; Minority Social Influence;
Research Methods; Transactive Memory
Further Readings
Baron, R. S. (2005). So right it’s wrong: Groupthink and the
ubiquitous nature of polarized group decision making. In
M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 37, pp. 219–253). San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Forsyth, D. R. (2006). Group dynamics (4th ed.). Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
Hastie, R., & Kameda, T. (2005). The robust beauty of
majority rules in group decisions. Psychological Review,
112, 494–508.
Kerr, N. L., & Tindale, S. R. (2004). Group performance and
decision-making. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 623–655.
Nemeth, C. (1986). Differential contributions of majority and
minority influence. Psychological Review, 93, 23–32.
GROUP DYNAMICS
Group Dynamics———391
Definition
Group dynamics are the influential actions, processes,
and changes that take place in groups. Individuals often
seek personal objectives independently of others, but
across a wide range of settings and situations, they join
with others in groups. The processes that take place
within these groups—such as pressures to conform,
the development of norms and roles, differentiation
of leaders from followers, collective goal-strivings, and
conflict—substantially influence members’ emotions,
actions, and thoughts. Kurt Lewin, widely recognized
as the founding theorist of the field, used the term

392———Group Dynamics
group dynamics to describe these group processes, as
well as the scientific discipline devoted to their description
and analysis.
History and Background
People have wondered at the nature of groups and their
dynamics for centuries, but only in the past 100 years
did researchers from psychology, sociology, and
related disciplines begin seeking answers to questions
about the nature of groups and their processes: Why
do humans affiliate with others in groups? How do
groups and their leaders hold sway over members? To
what extent is human behavior determined by instinct
rather than reflection and choice? What factors give
rise to a sense of cohesion, esprit de corps, and a
marked distrust for those outside the group?
The results of these studies suggest that groups
are the setting for a variety of individual and interpersonal
processes. Some of these processes—such as
collaborative problem solving, social identity development,
coordination of effort and activities in the
pursuit of shared goals, and a sense of belonging and
cohesion—promote the adjustment and welfare of
members, whereas others—the loss of motivation in
groups (social loafing), conformity, pressures to obey,
and conflict—can be detrimental for members. Some
of these processes also occur within the group (intragroup
processes), whereas others occur when one
group encounters one or more other groups (intergroup
processes). Because groups are found in all cultures,
including hunting–gathering, horticultural, pastoral,
industrial, and postindustrial societies, group processes
also influence societal and cultural processes.
Interpersonal Processes in Groups
The processes that take place within small groups
vary from the subtle and ubiquitous (found everywhere)
to the blatant and exceedingly rare. Initially, as
groups form, social forces draw people to the group
and keep them linked together in relationships. These
formative processes work to create a group from formerly
independent, unrelated individuals. In some
cases groups are deliberately formed for some purpose
or goal, but in other cases the same attraction
processes that create friendships and more intimate
relationships create groups.
Once the group forms, normative processes promote
the development of group traditions and norms
that determine the kinds of actions that are permitted
or condemned, who talks to whom, who has higher
status than others, who can be counted on to perform
particular tasks, and whom others look to for guidance
and help. These regularities combine to form the
roles, norms, and intermember relations that organize
and stabilize the group. When the group becomes
cohesive, membership stabilizes, the members report
increased satisfaction, and the group’s internal
dynamics intensity. Members of groups and collectives
also tend to categorize themselves as group
members and, as a result, identify strongly with the
group and their fellow group members. These social
identity processes result in changes in self-conception,
as individualistic qualities are suppressed and groupbased,
communal qualities prevail.
As interactions become patterned and members
become more group-centered, their response to social
influence processes is magnified. Group members are,
by definition, interdependent: Members can influence
others in the group, but others can influence them as
well. As a result, individuals often change when they
join a group, as their attitudes and actions align to
match those of their fellow group members. Solomon
Asch, in his studies of majority influence, found that
these influence processes exert a powerful influence
on people in groups; approximately one third of his
subjects went along with the majority’s incorrect
judgments. Stanley Milgram’s research also demonstrated
a group’s influence over its members. Volunteers
who thought they were taking part in a study of
learning were ordered to give painful shocks to another
participant. (No shocks were actually administered.)
Milgram discovered that the majority of people he
tested were not able to resist the orders of the authority
who demanded that they comply.
Groups are not only influence systems but also
performance systems. Group members strive to coordinate
their efforts for the attainment of group and
individual goals, and these performance processes
determine whether the group will succeed or fail to
reach its goals. Robert Freed Bales, by observing the
interactions of people meeting in face-to-face groups,
identified two common core behavioral processes.
One set of behaviors pertained to the social relationships
among members. The other set, however, concerned
the task to be accomplished by the group.
These two constellations of behaviors are also core
elements of leadership processes, for group leaders
strive to improve the quality of relations among members
in the group as well as ensure that the group
completes its tasks efficiently and effectively.

Conflict processes are also omnipresent, both within
the group and between groups. During periods of intragroup
conflict, group members often express dissatisfaction
with the group, respond emotionally, criticize
one another, and form coalitions. If unresolved, the
conflict may eventually result in the dissolution of the
group. During periods of intergroup conflict, the group
may exchange hostilities with other groups. Competition
for scarce resources is a frequent cause of both
intragroup and intergroup conflict, but the competition–
hostility link is much stronger when groups compete
against groups rather than when individuals compete
against individuals (the discontinuity effect).
The Field of Group Dynamics
Lewin used the term group dynamics to describe the
way groups and individuals act and react to changing
circumstances, but he also used the phrase to describe
the scientific discipline devoted to the study of these
dynamics. Group dynamics is not a prescriptive analysis
of how groups should be organized—emphasizing,
for example, rules of order, democratic leadership, or
high member satisfaction. Nor does it stress the development
of social skills through group learning or the
uses of groups for therapeutic purposes. Rather, group
dynamics is an attempt to subject the many aspects of
groups to scientific analysis through the construction
of theories and the rigorous testing of these theories
through empirical research.
Donelson R. Forsyth
See also Groups, Characteristics of; Leadership; Social
Identity Theory
Further Readings
Forsyth, D. R. (2006). Group dynamics (4th ed.). Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
McGrath, J. E. (1997). Small group research, that once and
future field: An interpretation of the past with an eye to
the future. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and
Practice, 1, 7–27.
GROUP IDENTITY
Definition
Group identity refers to a person’s sense of belonging
to a particular group. At its core, the concept describes
social influence within a group. This influence may be
based on some social category or on interpersonal
interaction among group members. On one hand, if
we consider the case of athletic teams, a student at a
university that participates in popular forms of competition
such as football or basketball may identity
with his or her team during contests with rival schools
(“We really rocked in the Banana Bowl Classic. We
took on all comers and whipped them!”). Classic
rivalries such as Michigan versus Ohio State in football
or Duke versus North Carolina in basketball are
excellent examples of instances that produce strong
identification based on a social category.
On the other hand, students can identify with a
group created to conduct experiments in an animal
learning laboratory course. By working together closely,
students may come to identify with their lab group
(“We finally finished our lab report and I bet it ranks
among the best in the class!”). Although group identification
is not always based on competition, identification
is based on social comparison. These examples
serve as clear illustrations of the “us versus them”
experience that sometimes accompanies the identification
process in intergroup situations.
Research History
Group Identity———393
Historically, social psychologists have studied social
influence processes relative to whether individual or
group outcomes are maximized. Dorwin Cartwright
and Alvin Zander suggested that relations among individuals
in a group make them interdependent on one
another. Harold Kelley and John Thibaut found that
relations among members of a group were more often
than not a function of the basis and outcome of interpersonal
exchanges. In this light, social comparison,
norms of exchange, and communication can forge common
bonds among group members. Friendship groups
are one example of how social influence processes
produce identification.
In contrast to this dynamic view, John Turner offered
that self-categorization theory provided a powerful
explanation of when and why members identify with
groups. From this perspective, people join groups that
represent unique and sometimes powerful social categories.
Members are attracted to and influenced by the
behaviors of such groups. Consider, for example, the
political situation of Israel and the Palestinians. Being
Jewish or Arabic in this part of the world comes with
a set of cultural, religious, and attitudinal expectations
that create consistency within each group and

394———Group Identity
diversity between the two. A second example is the
distinction between being a member of the Republican
versus the Democratic political party.
Generally, both social influence and social categories
serve to create group identity. A U.S. citizen of
Mexican descent may or may not support citizenship
for illegal Mexican immigrants. Discussions whereby
attitudes and the consequences for immigration are
revealed could serve to clarify the identity process and
lead to a definitive position on the issue. Thus, some
combination of both research traditions probably
account for group identification depending on the
circumstances.
Context and Consequences
of Group Identity
Jennifer Crocker and others have demonstrated that
group identity is part of how people feel about themselves.
Group identity permits one to be connected to
a broader slice of society. These connections may produce
feelings ranging from pride to prejudice. In wars
between ethnic or religious groups, individuals are
prepared to die for the sake of their group identity.
These powerful emotional reactions have prompted
some groups to attempt to manage group identity. An
unfortunate example is the use of suicide bombers by
terrorist organizations.
In situations involving intergroup competition,
members may distance themselves from a group when
it is performing less well than others. Alternatively,
when a group receives threats from factions external
to the group, members may react by increasing identification
to protect the value of the group. Henri
Tajfel and Turner have reported that members manage
threats to a group’s value by changing some aspect of
how a group is compared to other groups. Michael
Hogg suggests that the specific strategies a group uses
are a function of how a group is organized (e.g.,
boundaries, composition, authority). A growing body
of research indicates that social context is an important
factor in the process of group identification.
Penelope Oakes contends that perceptions of similarity
to other people in a given social context provide
a basis for construing oneself as being part of a group.
Caroline Bartel describes the nature of people’s conversations
soon after the attacks of September 11,
2001. In her view, people focused on exchanging information,
speculating on who was responsible and discussing
how the city would handle this crisis. In this
setting, the social identity of “New Yorker” became a
salient and context-appropriate group to which people
felt an increasing sense of belongingness in the days
after the World Trade Center attacks.
Focusing on a particular type of group identity,
organizational membership, Bartel investigated how
experiences in community outreach affected the identity
process of employee volunteers. She found that
intergroup comparisons with clients (emphasizing
differences) and intragroup comparisons with other
members of the organization (emphasizing similarities)
changed how members construed the defining
qualities of their organization. Supervisors reported
higher interpersonal cooperation and work effort for
members whose organizational identification became
stronger. These results suggest that identification
processes operate in everyday work contexts.
A group identity is one of the reasons that people
donate to charitable causes, support friends and family,
and exhibit helping behaviors toward those with whom
they identify. Alternatively, Marilyn Brewer points out
that group identity, precisely by creating an “us versus
them” mentality, can produce conflict, discrimination,
and prejudice. One need only spend a few minutes
watching the national news to see versions of group
identification. U.S. citizens boycotted Aruba because
of the disappearance of Natalie Holloway. In Iraq, terrorists
have killed, kidnapped, and beheaded those
sympathetic to U.S. efforts to establish a democracy.
Finally, international soccer games often result in a sea
of violence after a match. Clearly, group identity will
continue to serve as an important guide to relations
within a group, relations between groups, and even
relations between countries.
Richard Saavedra
See also Intergroup Relations; Social Categorization; Social
Comparison
Further Readings
Bartel, C. A. (2001). Social comparisons in boundaryspanning
work: Effects of community outreach on
members’ organizational identity and identification.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 46, 379–413.
Postmes, T., Spears, R., Lee, A. T., & Novak, R. J. (2005).
Individuality and social influence in groups: Inductive and
deductive routes to group identity. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 89, 747–763.

GROUP PERFORMANCE AND
PRODUCTIVITY
Task performance or the outcome of some behavioral
or intellectual goal is a key function of many groups.
Task-performing groups include various decisionmaking
groups, sports teams, and work teams. One
would expect groups to benefit from their multiple
and potentially complementary skills. It is true that
the more able or skilled the group or team members
are, the better the group is. Yet researchers have shown
that there are a number of factors that inhibit productivity
in groups. However, groups can also reach high
levels of productivity under the right conditions and
with the right group member composition.
There is an endless range of tasks that groups could
potentially perform. Some of these require a simple
addition of effort, whereas others require that each
group member fulfill a particular role. On some tasks,
the focus may be on quantity or speed of output, and
on others, the concern may be with quality of work.
Some tasks are mainly cognitive in that they require
some degree of ideation, whereas others may be
mostly behavioral (e.g., sports or music performance).
According to Ivan Steiner, the effectiveness of groups
may depend on the nature of the task they are required
to perform. Group task performance may often be less
than optimal because of two types of process losses
that occur in groups: coordination and motivation.
When group members work together, they have to
coordinate with one another, and this requirement
may make it difficult for each member to contribute
his or her best effort. Group members may also be less
motivated in groups than they would be if they were
working by themselves.
Productivity in
Task-Performing Groups
When someone works in a large group and each individual’s
performance is combined with that of others,
a person may be less motivated to work hard on behalf
of the group. This type of motivation loss is known as
social loafing or free riding. Social loafing has been
found to increase with the size of the group, the extent
to which a person’s performance is anonymous, and
the degree to which the task is seen as challenging.
According to Kipling Williams and Steven Karau,
Group Performance and Productivity———395
a person’s motivation level in groups depends on the
extent to which he or she believes the group goal can
be attained and how much the person values this goal.
That is, as long as group members perceive that there
is an incentive to work hard, they will not loaf. This
incentive to work hard can be increased by evaluating
the work of group members individually. Generally
there is a strong relationship between an individual’s
level of effort in the group and the personal consequences
for this level of effort.
When group members are accountable to one
another or in competition with one another and have
challenging goals, they may in fact have increased
motivation in groups. Individuals may also compensate
for the lack of effort on the part of other group
members if they particularly value the group goal.
Similarly, a low-ability group member may increase
his or her effort if the group member thinks that a
small increase in his or her effort will be important to
the success of the group.
When group members work together, they have to
mesh their various talents and perspectives in addition
to coordinating their group activities. Groups have to
decide who does what, when, and how. This is seen
clearly in sports teams and highly trained military
units that require careful coordination for success.
A lack of effort or mistake in coordination by one or
more group members can mean failure for the group.
Research has documented several of these types of
coordination problems. Garold Stasser has shown that
groups do not fully share their unique knowledge but
tend to focus on what they have in common. This
may be because the discussion of shared information
makes group members feel more comfortable and validated.
In group decisions, individuals often are more
concerned about being agreeable than being right. In
the case of problem solving, someone with a correct
answer often has a hard time persuading the group of
its veracity unless it can be easily demonstrated and/or
support is gained from at least one other group member.
In group task performance situations, groups are
also faced with the problem of coordinating the input
of individual group members into the group task. For
these reasons, it is not difficult to see why so few
studies have been able to show group synergy cases in
which the performance of interacting groups exceeds
the combined performance of individual members.
Today many people do most of their work on computers,
including a lot of information exchange with
coworkers. How effective is such electronic group

396———Group Performance and Productivity
interaction? For tasks that are fairly individualistic,
such as generating solutions to simple problems or
idea generation, the absence of coordination issues
makes the electronic medium beneficial. However, for
more complex tasks requiring decision making or
negotiation, computer interaction does not work as
well. The computer format makes it difficult to deal
with all of the interactional subtleties required in these
situations because there are no nonverbal communication
channels available to augment the group’s verbal
interaction.
Group Brainstorming:
Productivity in Idea Groups
Group brainstorming represents one type of group
activity that nicely demonstrates the role of various
group factors. Brainstorming involves the generation
of novel ideas by expressing thoughts as they occur,
without concern for immediate evaluation. The goal is
to generate a large number of ideas that can subsequently
be used as a basis for selecting the most useful
ideas. Although effective brainstorming instructions
enhance the number of ideas generated, the group
product is typically significantly less than the total
number of ideas generated by the same number of
individuals brainstorming alone. This is called a production
loss and seems to be the result of a number of
procedural and motivational factors. Group members
may be apprehensive about sharing novel ideas in
groups for fear that others may evaluate them negatively.
They may not exert a full effort because it may
be lost in the overall group performance. In fact, there
may be a tendency for performance to go in the direction
of the low-performing group members. A major
factor appears to be the interference or production
blocking that results when individuals compete with
each other for opportunities to share ideas during the
group exchange process. Only one person can effectively
share ideas at one time, and people may forget
ideas while waiting their turn.
All of these factors suggest that group brainstorming
is a pretty futile exercise. However, there is some
reason for hope since exposure to ideas from others
should stimulate additional ideas. Ideas from others
may remind a person of areas of knowledge that he or
she had not considered or may allow a person to combine
his or her knowledge with the knowledge of other
group members. This should be particularly beneficial
if group members have diverse backgrounds or expertise.
Cognitive stimulation effects have been observed,
especially in a period of reflection after group interaction
since such a session allows for a full consideration
of the relevance of shared ideas to one’s own
knowledge base. Group brainstorming on computers
may also benefit the process, especially with large
groups. Computer brainstorming avoids the interference
effects of face-to-face brainstorming and allows
a convenient process for subsequent individual reflection.
Similar benefits can be gained by exchanging
ideas using slips of paper.
The brainstorming literature thus suggests that
groups have considerable creative potential. However,
groups need to overcome some natural tendencies, and
the interaction needs to be structured to optimize the
effective processing of exchanged information. Several
other factors are also helpful. Groups should have
leaders or facilitators that can effectively guide them
to interact in a most effective way. Groups should feel
psychologically safe to express any and all ideas, so
some prior group experience that reinforces feelings of
psychological safety may be useful. This is particularly
important when group members experience emotional
conflicts based on their diverse perspectives.
Exposure to conflicting perspectives can increase creative
thinking in groups. This is especially true when
all group members are committed to the group’s goal.
Groups need to be aware of their differential expertise
and be motivated to share it. A collection of individuals
actually has a greater capacity for memory than any
one individual alone. Groups who take advantage of
this capacity, and know which members are good at
what, will outperform those groups who do not utilize
these knowledge stores. Group composition is also a
critical factor. Individuals who are positively inclined
to groups or are very comfortable in groups tend to be
less inhibited in sharing their ideas. When groups are
demographically diverse, as in the case of ethnic diversity,
group members may be a bit uncomfortable and
may not benefit fully from the diverse perspectives
available to the group. Prior experiences that allow for
increased familiarity and some kind of cohesive bonding
may eliminate such inhibitory effects of diversity.
See also Brainstorming; Groupthink; Social Loafing
Paul B. Paulus
Kelly Trindel

Further Readings
Baron, R. S., & Kerr, N. L. (2003). Group process, group
decision, group action (2nd ed.). Buckingham, UK: Open
University Press.
Paulus, P. B., & Nijstad, B. A. (Eds.). (2003). Group
creativity: Innovation through collaboration. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
GROUP POLARIZATION
Definition
Group polarization occurs when discussion leads a
group to adopt attitudes or actions that are more
extreme than the initial attitudes or actions of the individual
group members. Note that group polarization
can happen in the direction of either riskiness (risky
shift) or conservativeness. One example is the way in
which unruly mobs (e.g., lynch mobs) often commit
horrendous acts of violence that no individual member
would have been brash enough to attempt (the kidnapping
and hanging of humans by the neck until the
point of death). Another example is the way in which
relief agencies often attempt and accomplish wonderful
acts of benevolence that no individual group
members would have been ambitious enough to deem
possible and then attempt, for example, providing
food, clothing, and long-term housing to survivors of
natural disasters.
Explanation
One explanatory reason for group polarization is the
sharing of persuasive arguments. For example, when
the majority of a group’s members are initially likeminded
and present arguments (a) that support the
attitude or action, and (b) that other group members
have not yet considered, then the group members’ initial
attitudes will become stronger. Thus, the attitudes
of the group, as a whole, will be stronger compared to
the individually assessed attitudes of the members.
Note also that during the sharing of persuasive arguments,
group members may have a tendency to reiterate,
at least in part, the arguments presented by other
group members. This repetition of ideas also can
strengthen the group’s and individuals’ attitudes. It is
important to note that when the majority of the group
Group Polarization———397
initially is not in agreement and, instead, is split on an
issue, depolarization can occur as a result of group
members trading persuasive arguments. Depolarization
refers to a shift away from the extremes and toward
the middle.
Another explanatory reason for group polarization
is the influence of social comparison. For example,
one group member may assess other group members’
attitudes and then adopt a similar or more extreme
attitude. People have a tendency to like those who are
similar to themselves. It follows, then, that if people
want to be liked by group members, one way to
accomplish this is to have beliefs or attitudes that are
consistent with those of the group.
A number of things factor into whether making
persuasive arguments or social comparisons will have
a more polarizing effect on the group: the nature of the
task (judgmental vs. intellective), the goal of the
group, what the group considers more important (group
cohesion vs. making correct decisions), what the individual
group members consider more important
(group cohesion vs. making correct decisions), and
the nature of the response required of the individuals
(public vs. private). Persuasive arguments tend to be
most effective in situations in which the nature of the
task is intellective, the group values accuracy more
than cohesion, the individuals value accuracy more
than cohesion, and private responses will be given.
Social comparisons tend to be most effective in the
situations in which the nature of the task is judgmental,
the group values cohesion more than accuracy, the
individuals value cohesion more than accuracy, and
public responses will be given.
Culture, Gender, and Age
The direction of the attitude shift is influenced by
cultural variables. Individualistic cultures (North
American countries such as America and Canada)
have a tendency to value independence and risk more
than dependence and caution. Collectivistic cultures
(Asian countries such as Taiwan or South American
countries such as Argentina and Brazil) tend to value
dependence and caution more than independence and
risk. Research by Lawrence K. Hong in 1978 demonstrated
that groups comprising individualistic culture
members are more likely to experience risky shift,
and groups comprising collectivistic culture members
are more likely to experience cautious shifts. The

398———Groups, Characteristics of
direction of attitude shift is also influenced by gender
and age. Research by Margo Gardner and Laurence
Steinberg suggests that men are more likely to experience
risky decision making compared to women, and
younger persons (children, teenagers, and young
adults) are more likely to experience risky decision
making compared to older persons (persons aged 24
and older). It is important to note that the gender difference
appears to decrease as age increases.
Evidence
Traditionally, one of three types of methodologies has
been used to illustrate group polarization effects:
hypothetical choice scenarios, self-report behaviors,
and behavioral observation. Hypothetical choice scenarios
require group members to select one of two
imaginary options (riskier vs. safer) or to choose a percentage
or level of risk in an imaginary scenario. For
example, given a scenario about a sick woman who has
an opportunity to have an operation that could either
kill her or completely cure her, group members are
asked whether or not they would endorse having the
operation. Alternately, given the same scenario, group
members are asked the lowest probability of success
they would consider before endorsing the operation.
The self-report behaviors method requires people to
report how often they engage in risky behaviors. The
behavioral observation method requires external
observers to observe and assess how often, or to what
extent, people engage in risky behaviors.
Implications
Group polarization addresses ways in which a group
of individuals interacts and influences the evolution of
more extreme attitudes and actions. This concept is
relevant to the topics of attitude strength, attitude
extremity, and attitude change.
Dee Lisa Cothran
See also Attitude Change; Collectivistic Cultures; Group
Cohesiveness; Group Decision Making; Influence;
Research Methods; Risky Shift; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Brauer, M., Judd, C. M., & Gliner, M. D. (1995). The effects
of repeated expressions on attitude polarization during
group discussions. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 68, 1014–1029.
Byrnes, J. P., Miller, D. C., & Schafer, W. D. (1999). Gender
differences in risk taking: A meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 125, 367–383.
Gardner, M., & Steinberg, L. (2005). Peer influence on risk
taking, risk preference, and risky decision making in
adolescence and adulthood: An experimental study.
Developmental Psychology, 41, 625–635.
Stoner, J. A. F. (1961). A comparison of individual and group
decisions involving risk. Unpublished master’s thesis,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Cited
in Marquis, D. G. (1962). Individual responsibility and
group decisions involving risk. Industrial Management
Review, 3, 8–23.
GROUPS, CHARACTERISTICS OF
Definition
There is no consensus among social psychologists on
the defining characteristics of a group. Nearly all definitions,
however, emphasize that a group is not a mere
aggregation of individuals. Rather, two or more individuals
become a group to the extent that they are
bonded together in some way, which generally means
that they interact and influence one another and share
perceptions of themselves as a group. By these criteria,
one’s immediate family is a group, and so are a sport
team, an airline flight crew, and a support group. But a
social category such as members of the same race or
gender is not a group—nor is an audience attending a
concert, the line of people at a ticket window, or all the
students at a university. Recognizing that such distinctions
are not as clear-cut as they appear, some social
psychologists have argued that various social aggregates
are best viewed as falling along a continuum of
groupness based on certain characteristics.
Background and History
The idea that groups have properties distinct from
those of their individual members was controversial in
the early history of social psychology. Focusing on
Gustave LeBon’s concept of the group mind, psychologists
in the 1920s debated the epistemological status
of groups. One side of the debate argued that groups
are real entities with emergent characteristics; the
concept of the group mind, for example, suggests that
groups have a mind of their own, a unifying mental
force that transcends the consciousness of the individuals
that constitute the group. The other side of the

debate denied the reality of groups, contending that
only individuals are observed, not groups; psychological
processes occur only in individuals, and actions or
processes attributed to groups are nothing more than
the sum of actions of the individual group members.
Eventually the concept of group mind was rejected,
primarily because there was never any solid scientific
evidence to support it. As research on groups flourished
in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, researchers
accepted the reality of groups and identified several
verifiable group properties. Much of this research was
influenced by Gestalt psychology, a school of thought
that emphasizes that an individual’s experience consists
of integrated whole patterns that are not reducible
to the sum of elements of the whole. One line of
inquiry proposed, for example, that a bunch of people
constitutes a group to the extent that they form a
Gestalt; that is, they are perceived as being a coherent
entity rather than independent, unrelated individuals.
Furthermore, individuals’ intuitive perceptions of the
quality of groupness depend on the extent to which a
collection of people possesses certain group characteristics,
including small size, similarity, a high level
of interaction, and shared goals.
Group Size
In general, the larger the collection of people, the less
likely they are to possess other characteristics that
define a group and the less likely they are to be perceived
as a group. Research indicates that most groups
are small, usually two or three people and seldom
more than five or six. In fact, much of the research on
groups focuses on groups of this size or slightly larger,
such as families, friendship cliques, work crews, and
committees, in which people engage in regular faceto-face
interaction. As group size increases, the nature
of the group changes. It becomes less intimate and
satisfying to members, and it becomes more complex,
its activities more difficult to coordinate.
Group Member Variability
Each member brings to the group personal attributes
such as his or her sex, age, race, and education as well
as opinions, interests, and abilities. Research shows
that members of the same naturally occurring group
tend to be similar to one another on such qualities but
different from members of other groups. Ingroup
homogeneity is thought to exist for a variety of reasons:
Similar people are attracted to similar activities
that bring them together; they are recruited from the
same social network, which also tends to be similar;
and similarity increases satisfaction and commitment
to the group. Diversity within groups can negatively
affect relations among group members, creating miscommunication,
division, and conflict, but by providing
a variety of skills and knowledge, diversity also
can make a group more flexible and innovative and
better able to accomplish group tasks.
Group Structure
Perhaps the most essential defining characteristic of
a group is the pattern of relationships among group
members, referred to as group structure. Patterned
relations may exist along several dimensions—for
example, attraction, communication, and power—so
that social psychologists seldom think of groups as a
unitary structure.
Group Cohesion
The dimension of group structure most often studied
is a group’s cohesion or cohesiveness. Cohesion
derives from the pattern of attraction of members
toward one another and toward the group as a whole;
in a cohesive group, members like one another, are
tightly knit, identify with the group, and want to
remain in it. Compared with groups low in cohesion,
highly cohesive groups, such as adolescent peer groups,
sport teams, and military squads, are more satisfying to
their members but also have greater influence over
members and produce greater pressures to conform. In
general, highly cohesive groups are more productive
and outperform less unified groups with one notable
exception: Cohesive groups are less productive when
group norms support a low level of productivity.
Attraction Structure
Groups, Characteristics of———399
General attraction to the group is indicative of
group cohesion or unity, but variations within the group
in how much members like or dislike one another is
indicative of a form of structural differentiation. By
asking group members who they like best and least or
with whom they would choose to work, social psychologists
have identified patterns of interpersonal
attraction within groups, including the formation of
subgroups or cliques. As groups increase in size and
diversity, cliques are increasingly likely to form.
Members of cliques tend to reciprocate choices (if A

400———Groups, Characteristics of
likes B, B likes A) and also tend to be more similar to
one another than to other members of the group.
Role Structure
Within every group, members develop expectations
concerning how people in particular positions ought
to behave. These shared expectations, called roles,may
be defined formally, as in most work groups, or may
evolve over time and be tacitly understood. Airline flight
crews, for example, often consist of three positions—
captain, first officer, and flight engineer—each of which
is expected to perform specific tasks related to flying
a plane. In many groups, various group roles such as
initiator, coordinator, and harmonizer emerge to meet
two basic demands: to accomplish the group’s task and
to maintain harmonious relationships among group
members.
Status Structure
Roles are often associated with status, which refers
to a person’s power (ability to influence others) and
authority (the right to exert power) within a group.
Virtually all groups develop a status structure in which
some members have higher status than others. In an
airline flight crew, there is a clear status hierarchy,
with the captain, who makes major command decisions
and leads the crew, on top, and the flight engineer
on the bottom. Two general factors seem to affect
the development of status in most groups: the characteristics
and abilities members bring to a group, and
members’ contributions to the group goal. In a jury,
for example, a doctor may be assigned a higher status
than a laborer, and persons who smooth over disagreements
and move the group toward a decision are
likely to have more status than others.
Communication Network
Groups also differ in their patterns of interaction
and communication. The flow of communication in
many groups follows the status structure, with most
communication either directed downward, from superiors
to subordinates, or among members of equal status.
Early studies of communication networks focused
on the extent to which communication within a group
flowed through a single person or position. In the
most centralized networks, all lines of communication
are directed to and from a single group member,
whereas in a decentralized network, each member has
an equal number of communication lines to others in
the group. Research suggests that centralized networks
are most efficient in solving simple tasks, but
decentralized networks work best for more complex
and multifaceted tasks.
Group Culture
Besides the patterned relations among members,
groups also develop a culture of their own: a set of
shared ideas and customs that guide group members’
actions and interpretations of the group experience.
Elements of group culture include norms, or ideas
about how group members ought to behave, as well as
values, beliefs, customs, and symbols that express the
group’s identity. Although some elements of group culture
are adapted directly from the larger culture, other
elements evolve within the group, so that every group
creates its own unique culture. Members of all airline
flight crews, for example, have a common knowledge
of how to perform their jobs and also may share certain
values and beliefs about their work. But, in addition, as
crew members interact with one another, they develop
unique customs such as special names or jargon, traditions,
and stories about group activities. Becoming
a new member of an existing group is largely a matter
of learning the group’s culture.
Importance of Groups
Groups provide vital links between the individual and
society. On one hand, groups satisfy basic individual
needs: Through groups, children are raised, shelter
and protection are provided, people gain important
information about themselves, and people satisfy an
inherent desire to have human contact and to bond
with others. At the same time, groups support and
sustain larger organizations and society by teaching
values and societal norms, by exerting pressure on
individuals to conform, and by providing a means to
solving problems.
See also Group Cohesiveness; Group Dynamics
Further Readings
Royce A. Singleton, Jr.
Forsyth, D. R. (2006). Group dynamics (4th ed.). Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.

Levine, J. M., & Moreland, R. L. (1998). Small groups.
In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The
handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 415–469). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lickel, B., Hamilton, D. L., & Sherman, S. J. (2001).
Elements of a lay theory of groups: Types of groups,
relational styles, and the perception of group entitativity.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5, 129–140.
GROUPTHINK
Definition
Groupthink refers to decision-making groups’ extreme
concurrence seeking (conformity) that is hypothesized
to result in highly defective judgments and outcomes.
According to Irving Janis, the inventor of the
groupthink concept, decision-making groups are most
likely to experience groupthink when they operate
under the following conditions: maintain high cohesion,
insulate themselves from experts, perform limited
search and appraisal of information, operate
under directive leadership, and experience conditions
of high stress with low self-esteem and little hope of
finding a better solution to a pressing problem than
that favored by the leader or influential members.
When present, these antecedent conditions are
hypothesized to foster the extreme consensus-seeking
characteristic of groupthink. This in turn is predicted
to lead to two categories of undesirable decision-making
processes. The first category, traditionally labeled
symptoms of groupthink, includes illusion of invulnerability,
collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups,
self-censorship, mindguards, and belief in the
inherent morality of the group. The second category,
typically identified as symptoms of defective decision
making, involves the incomplete survey of alternatives
and objectives, poor information search, failure to
appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective
information processing. Not surprisingly, extremely
defective decision-making performance by the group
is predicted.
History and Social Significance
Irving Janis proposed the term groupthink to describe
group decision fiascos that occurred in such cases as
the appeasement of Nazi Germany by Great Britain at
the beginning of World War II; the failure of the U.S.
Groupthink———401
military to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor, which served to bring the United States into
World War II; then President of the United States
Harry Truman’s decision to escalate the war in North
Korea, which resulted in Communist China’s entry
into the war and a subsequent military stalemate; then
President of the United States John Kennedy’s decision
to send Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro
by invading Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, resulting in the
death of 68 exiles and the capture of an additional
1,209; and then President of the United States Lyndon
Johnson’s decision to escalate the war in Vietnam,
counter to the warnings of intelligence experts. Janis
developed his list of antecedents and consequences of
groupthink by comparing the social processes that
occurred in these decisions with the successful group
decisions in the cases of the development of the
Marshall Plan for distributing U.S. aid in Europe after
World War II and the use of threats and rewards by the
Kennedy administration to remove Soviet missiles
from Cuba in what has become known as the Cuban
Missile Crisis.
The concept of groupthink became a hit with the
general public. Just 3 years after the term was introduced,
it appeared in the Webster’s New Collegiate
Dictionary, which defined groupthink as “conformity
to group values and ethics.” Thus, in the popular
imagination, groupthink has come to mean any conformity
within a group setting. (Of course, Janis’s
original formulation involves much more than just
conformity or going along with the group.) The concept
of groupthink was also a hit within the academic
literature, frequently appearing in textbooks in social
psychology and organizational management.
There was just one problem with this popularity:
Empirical research on the concept has produced
overwhelmingly equivocal support for the groupthink
model. Researchers have attempted to apply the
groupthink framework to new case examples, such as
Nazi Germany’s decision to invade the Soviet Union
in 1941, Ford Motor Company’s decision to market
the Edsel, Chemie Grünenthal’s decision to market
the drug thalidomide, the tragedy at Kent State
University during the Vietnam War, the Space Shuttle
Challenger disaster, the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster,
and the City of Santa Cruz’s decision not to prepare
for an earthquake. It is rare in these case studies
to find the constellation of antecedents and consequences
proposed by Janis. Researchers have also
attempted to produce groupthink in the laboratory
using the experimental method. These experiments,

402———Guilt
which manipulated such variables as group cohesion,
directive leadership, and stress, created ad hoc groups
that were required to make group decisions. With
one notable exception (discussed in the next section),
these experiments have not been able to produce the
defective decision making associated with groupthink.
Current Evidence for a Social
Identity Maintenance Model
Given the equivocal results of empirical groupthink
research, some have called for the abandonment of
the groupthink concept. Marlene Turner and Anthony
Pratkanis took a different approach of attempting to
redefine key groupthink concepts in order to first produce
them experimentally in the lab and then use those
concepts to clarify conflicting results in case examples.
In this model of groupthink, termed the social identity
maintenance (SIM) model, groupthink occurs when
members attempt to maintain a shared positive image
of the group (e.g., “the Kennedy White House,”
“NASA,” or “progressive City of Santa Cruz”), and that
positive image is subsequently questioned by a collective
threat (e.g., no good solution to the Bay of Pigs,
pressures to launch a space shuttle, financial pressures
of retrofitting for an earthquake). In such cases, the
group tends to focus on how it can maintain the shared
positive image of the group and not the specific task of
making a good decision in the situation.
Turner and Pratkanis experimentally tested the
SIM model of groupthink by asking groups of three
persons to solve a difficult problem involving the
falling productivity of a group of assembly station
workers. Half of the groups were given a unique social
identity (e.g., a group label such as Eagles or Cougars)
and then asked to list the similarities among the group
members. The other groups were not given labels and
asked to discuss their dissimilarities. In addition, half
of the groups were informed that their group would be
videotaped and, more critically, were told that their
videotapes would be used for training purposes in
both classes held on campus and training sessions
held in local corporations. Thus, failure at the task
would in fact involve direct negative consequences for
the group that would threaten a positive image of the
group. The results showed that the groups who were
given a social identity and who were operating under
threat performed poorly at decision making, consistent
with the expectations of a SIM of groupthink.
The SIM model of groupthink has also been tested
using real-world case examples. For example, in a
case analysis of how the city council of Santa Cruz,
California, made decisions regarding earthquake
safety prior to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake disaster
that devastated the city, Turner and Pratkanis
found that the city council had a strong social identity
as a progressive, humane governing body and that that
image was threatened by a state-mandated earthquake
preparedness plan. An examination of the proceedings
of the city council on earthquake preparedness showed
all of the classic antecedents and consequences of
groupthink (as originally proposed by Janis) as well as
defective decision making.
Anthony R. Pratkanis
Marlene E. Turner
See also Decision Making; Group Decision Making; Group
Dynamics; Group Polarization
Further Readings
Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Janis, I. L. (1982). Groupthink: Psychological studies of
policy decisions and fiascoes (2nd ed.). Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Pratkanis, A. R., & Turner, M. E. (1999). Groupthink and
preparedness for the Loma Prieta earthquake: A social
identity maintenance analysis of causes and preventions.
In E. A. Mannix & M. A. Neale (Series Eds.) &
R. Wageman (Vol. Ed.), Research on managing groups
and teams: Vol. 2. Groups in context (pp. 115–136).
Stamford, CT: JAI Press.
Turner, M. E., & Pratkanis, A. R. (1998). A social identity
maintenance theory of groupthink. Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73, 210–235.
Turner, M. E., Pratkanis, A. R., & Samuels, T. (2003).
Identity metamorphosis and groupthink prevention:
Examining Intel’s departure from the DRAM industry.
In A. Haslam, D. van Knippenberg, M. Platow, &
N. Ellemers (Eds.), Social identity at work: Developing
theory for organizational practice (pp. 117–136).
Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
GUILT
Guilt is a widely misunderstood emotion, having long
suffered from an undeserved, bad reputation. The popular
press abounds with articles offering advice on
how to live a guilt-free life, many therapists identify

guilt reduction as one of their short-term treatment
goals, and no one wants to be regarded as a guiltinducing
mother. But much of the stigma of guilt can
be attributed to people’s tendency to confuse guilt
with shame. As it turns out, recent research suggests
that, on balance, guilt is the more adaptive emotion,
benefiting relationships in a variety of ways, without
the many hidden costs of shame.
Guilt has been variously classified as one of the
moral, self-conscious, social, and problematic emotions,
underscoring the complexity of this affective experience
and the many different roles guilt plays in people’s
lives. Systematic theoretical considerations of guilt
date back at least to Sigmund Freud, who viewed guilt
as a reaction to violations of superego standards.
According to Freud, guilt results when unacceptable
ego-directed behaviors or id-based impulses conflict
with the moral demands of the superego. Freud saw
guilt as part of the normal human experience. But
he also viewed unresolved or repressed feelings of
guilt as a key component of many psychological
symptoms. For decades, guilt remained largely in the
province of psychoanalytic theory. Very little scientific
research was conducted on guilt until the mid-1960s,
and few psychological researchers distinguished
between shame and guilt until the affect revolution of
the late 1980s.
What Is the Difference
Between Guilt and Shame?
People often use the terms guilt and shame interchangeably,
as moral emotions that inhibit socially
undesirable behavior or as problematic emotions that
play a key role in a range of psychological symptoms.
But much recent research indicates that these are distinct
affective experiences. Both guilt and shame are
emotions of self-blame that can arise in response to a
broad range of failures, transgressions, and social
blunders. The crux of the difference between these
two emotions centers on the focus of one’s negative
evaluation. When people feel guilt, they feel badly
about a specific behavior—about something they’ve
done. When people feel shame, they feel badly about
themselves. This differential emphasis on self (“I did
that horrible thing”) versus behavior (“I did that horrible
thing”) makes a big difference in the experience
of the emotion and in the emotion’s implications for
psychological adjustment and interpersonal behavior.
Whereas feelings of shame (about the self) involve
a sense of shrinking, a sense of worthlessness, and
a desire to escape the shame-inducing situation, feelings
of guilt (about a specific behavior) involve a
sense of tension, remorse, and regret over the bad
thing done. People in the midst of a guilt experience
often report a nagging focus or preoccupation with the
transgression, thinking of it over and over, wishing
they had behaved differently. Rather than motivating
a desire to hide, guilt typically motivates reparative
behavior: confessing, apologizing, or somehow undoing
the harm that was done. Thus, feelings of guilt are
more apt to keep people constructively involved in the
guilt-inducing situation.
An advantage of guilt is that the scope of blame is
less extensive and far-reaching than in shame. In guilt,
one’s primary concern is with a particular behavior,
somewhat apart from the self. Because guilt doesn’t
threaten one’s core identity, it is less likely than shame
to trigger defensive denial or retaliation. In effect,
guilt poses people with a much more manageable
problem than shame. It’s much easier to change a bad
behavior than it is to change a bad self.
Guilt Appears to Be the More
Adaptive Moral Emotion
Guilt———403
Five sets of research finding indicate that guilt is the
more moral, adaptive emotion, relative to shame. First,
shame and guilt lead to contrasting motivations or
action tendencies. Shame is typically associated with a
desire to deny, hide, or escape; guilt is typically associated
with a desire to repair. In this way, guilt is apt to
orient people in a constructive, proactive, future-oriented
direction, whereas shame is apt to move people
toward separation, distancing, and defense.
Second, there appears to be a special link between
guilt and empathy. Interpersonal empathy involves the
ability to take another person’s perspective, to really
know (and feel) what another person is feeling. In
turn, empathy motivates prosocial, helping behavior;
it inhibits aggression; and it is an essential component
of warm, rewarding relationships. Numerous studies
of children, adolescents, and adults show that guiltprone
individuals are generally empathic individuals.
(In contrast, shame-proneness is associated with an
impaired capacity for other-oriented empathy and a
propensity for self-oriented personal distress responses.)
Similar results emerge when considering feelings of
shame and guilt in the moment. Individual differences
aside, when people describe personal guilt experiences,
they convey greater empathy and concern
for the victims of their transgressions, compared to

404———Guilt
descriptions of shame experiences. By focusing on
a bad behavior (as opposed to a bad self), people
experiencing guilt are relatively free of the egocentric,
self-involved process of shame. Instead, their focus
on a specific behavior highlights the consequences of
that behavior for distressed others, facilitating an
empathic response.
Third, perhaps owing to the link between feelings
of guilt and empathy, guilt-prone people are inclined
to manage and express their anger in a constructive
fashion. Although guilt-prone individuals are about
as likely as the average person to become angry in
the course of everyday life, once angered they are
inclined to work toward addressing the problem in an
open, nonhostile manner, using their anger to make
changes for the better. For example, when angered,
guilt-prone people are motivated to fix the situation,
are less likely to become aggressive, and are more
likely to discuss the matter openly and rationally. In
contrast, people prone to feel shame (about the entire
self) are more apt to use aggressive and other destructive
strategies for expressing anger.
Fourth, findings from studies of people from many
walks of life indicate that guilt is useful in helping
people avoid sin and persevere on a moral path
throughout life. For example, among college students,
guilt-proneness is associated with endorsing such
items as “I would not steal something I needed, even
if I were sure I could get away with it.” Guilt-prone
adolescents are less inclined to become delinquent
than their non-guilt-prone peers. Children prone to
shame-free guilt in the fifth grade are, in young adulthood,
less likely to be arrested, convicted, and incarcerated.
They are more likely to practice safe sex and
less likely to abuse drugs. Even among adults already
at high risk, guilt-proneness appears to serve a protective
function. In a longitudinal study of jail inmates,
guilt-proneness assessed shortly after incarceration
was related to lower levels of recidivism and substance
abuse during the first year after release.
Finally, contrary to popular belief, shame-free guilt
does not carry with it high costs in psychological
adjustment and well-being. When measures are used
that are sensitive to the distinction between shame
(about the self) and guilt (about a specific behavior),
the propensity to experience guilt is essentially unrelated
to psychological symptoms. Numerous independent
studies converge: Shame, but not guilt, is related
to anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and a host of
other psychological problems.
When Does Guilt
Become Maladaptive?
Why is guilt frequently cited as a symptom in such
psychological disorders as anxiety and depression?
What is the chronic, ruminative guilt described by so
many clinicians? One possibility is that many of these
problematic guilt experiences are actually feelings of
guilt fused with feelings of shame. It seems likely that
when a person begins with a guilt experience (“Oh,
look at what a horrible thing I have done”) but then
magnifies and generalizes the event to the self (“...and
aren’t I a horrible person”), many of the advantages of
guilt are lost. Not only is a person faced with tension
and remorse over a specific behavior that needs to
be fixed, but also he or she is saddled with feelings
of contempt and disgust for a bad, defective self. In
effect, shame-fused guilt may be just as problematic
as shame itself.
In addition, it is worth noting that most measures
that distinguish between shame and guilt focus on
situations in which responsibility or culpability is
relatively unambiguous. People are asked to imagine
events in which they clearly failed or transgressed in
some way. Problems are likely to arise when people
develop an exaggerated or distorted sense of responsibility
for events beyond their control. Survivor guilt is
a prime example of such a problematic emotional reaction
that has been consistently linked to post-traumatic
stress disorder and other psychological symptoms.
Is Guilt Beneficial?
Guilt’s benefits are most evident when people
acknowledge their failures and transgressions and take
appropriate responsibility for their misdeeds. In such
situations, the interpersonal benefits of guilt do not
appear to come at an undue cost to the individual. The
propensity to experience shame-free guilt in response
to clear transgressions is generally unrelated to psychological
problems, whereas shame is consistently
associated with maladaptive processes and outcomes
at multiple levels. When considering the welfare of the
individual, his or her relationships, and the society at
large, guilt is the moral emotion of choice.
June Price Tangney
See also Depression; Empathy; Regret; Self-Esteem;
Shame

Further Readings
Tangney, J. P. (1990). Assessing individual differences in
proneness to shame and guilt: Development of the Self-
Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 102–111.
Tangney, J. P., Miller, R. S., Flicker, L., & Barlow, D. H.
(1996). Are shame, guilt, and embarrassment distinct
emotions? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
70, 1256–1269.
GUILTY PLEASURES
Definition
A guilty pleasure is an activity with short-term payoffs
that are positive for a person but with long-term
negative consequences. For example, reading a trashy
magazine can be rewarding in the short term because
it is fun, but it can be more negative in the long term
if your friends think less of you for enjoying it. Other
commonly listed guilty pleasures are eating tasty but
unhealthy foods and partying even though it interferes
with work.
Usage and History
Dilemmas of self-control often present a contrast
between immediate payoffs and delayed payoffs.
According to Roger Giner-Sorolla, these dilemmas can
be described either as delayed cost (guilty pleasure) or
delayed benefit (grim necessity). His studies have
shown that people associate different emotions with
different types of consequences. In particular, when
participants were asked for examples of activities with
more positive short-term than long-term consequences,
these guilty pleasures brought up negative
emotions that tended to be more self-conscious. That
is, they dealt with evaluating the self and one’s own
actions, for example, “guilty” and “regretful.” However,
the positive emotions they came up with for these
activities tended to be more hedonic, or concerned
with immediate pleasure in the activity; for example,
“fun” and “happy.” Other studies showed that for
guilty pleasures in particular, self-conscious emotions
that were more quickly reported went together with
greater self-control. In fact, when dieters in an eating
situation were subtly reminded of negative selfconscious
words, they ate lower amounts of unhealthy
snacks.
The point is that emotions can help or hurt selfcontrol,
depending on whether they are of the kind that
deal with short- or long-term consequences. It is particularly
helpful to anticipate self-conscious emotional
consequences before they occur. Bad feelings do no
good if they come after an act, unless a person learns
that future bad feelings will happen if they do the act
again. In fact, anticipated regret can be an important
factor in decision making. For example, male students
in one experiment were told to think about how they
would feel after sex without using a condom, as
opposed to during sex. Those who thought about
“after” feelings reported greater intention to use condoms
and greater actual use, even weeks after the
experiment. Not surprisingly, participants reported
anticipating “after” emotions that were negative and
tended to be self-conscious—guilt, worry, and so on—
while emotions in the “during” condition were more
positive.
Roger Giner-Sorolla
See also Grim Necessities; Moral Emotions; Regret; Self-
Regulation
Further Readings
Guilty Pleasures———405
Cross, J., & Guyer, M. (1980). Social traps. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Giner-Sorolla, R. (2001). Guilty pleasures and grim
necessities: Affective attitudes in dilemmas of selfcontrol.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
80(2), 206–221.
Richard, R., de Vries, N. K., & van der Pligt, J. (1998).
Anticipated regret and precautionary sexual behavior.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28(15), 1411–1428.

HABITS
Habits are learned dispositions to repeat past responses.
They develop because many behavioral sequences
(e.g., one’s morning coffee-making routine) are performed
repeatedly in essentially the same context and
in much the same order. When responses and context
cues repeatedly occur together, the potential exists for
associations to form between these various elements.
Once these associations form, the mere perception of
the context can trigger the response. Contexts include
elements of the physical or social setting (places, presence
of others), temporal cues (time of day), and prior
events (actions in a sequence).
Typing, driving a car, and wrapping wontons all
become habitual with practice. When wontons become
a staple at dinner, one doesn’t need to decide specifically
to wrap. Instead, wrapping is cued by time of
day, hunger, and any standard prior activities. In this
way, the mere perception of context cues triggers
automatically the habitual response without intention.
Once cued, habit performance has a ballistic quality in
that it does not require additional input and is difficult
to inhibit.
Habits are similar to other automatic responses that
are activated directly by context cues (e.g., implementation
intentions, nonconscious goals). However,
habits develop with repetition, and they do not require
intentions to initiate.
Historically, the construct of habits is tied to behaviorism,
especially John Watson’s and B. F. Skinner’s
radical behaviorism that rejected cognition as a cause
H
407
of action and a mediator of stimulus–response associations.
Radical behaviorism built on the classic idea
that learning occurs as the formation of a direct bond
between some physical event or sensory input and a
muscle response, so that the external stimulation
reflexively comes to cause the response. Strict behaviorist
models proved limited in their ability to account
for human functioning. In contrast, in modern perspectives,
habits have moved decidedly into the head.
Control of Responses
Changes With Repetition
There are currently three perspectives on the habit
mechanisms that generate repeated behavior in everyday
life. Observations of college students and adults
in the community suggest that about 45% of everyday
behavior is repeated almost daily and usually in the
same context.
In a direct context cuing account, repeated coactivation
forges direct links in memory between context
and response representations. Once these links are
formed, merely perceiving a context can trigger associated
responses. Supporting evidence comes from
research in which the mere activation of a construct,
such as the elderly stereotype, leads to the activation of
associated behaviors, such as physical infirmity, that
manifests in actual performance.
It is not yet clear whether contexts trigger responses
through such a simple mechanism in the absence of a
relevant goal. Social cognition research has thus far
demonstrated a limited version of direct cuing effects.
Although research has yet to demonstrate that such

408———Habits
activation can initiate responses, the possibility that
action can be directly cued by contexts in the absence
of goal activation is suggested by myriad findings in
cognitive neuroscience revealing reduced involvement
of goal-related neural structures, such as the prefrontal
cortex, when behaviors have come under habitual
control. Furthermore, evidence from animal learning
research using a clever paradigm in which reinforcers
are devalued is also commonly interpreted as indicating
the direct context control of habits. When rats initially
perform an instrumental behavior (e.g., pressing
a bar to receive a food pellet), they appear motivated
by specific goal expectations; they cease the behavior
if the reward is devalued (e.g., by pairing it with a
toxin). In contrast, when rats repeat the behavior sufficiently
to form habits, they appear motivated directly
by the performance context: They continue the behavior
despite reward devaluation. Animal learning research
shows that repeated responding is not oriented to
attaining specific goals.
In the motivated contexts perspective, contexts
themselves can acquire motivational value through
their prior association with instrumental reward. If
contexts predict rewards in this way, then they plausibly
carry the power to energize and activate associated
responses. Evidence of this predictive role comes from
animal studies of the neurotransmitters that mediate
reward learning. For example, Wolfram Schultz, Peter
Dayan, and P. Read Montague found that when monkeys
are first learning that a feature of the environment
(e.g., a light) predicts a reward (e.g., a drop of juice)
when a response is made (e.g., a lever press), neurotransmitter
activity (i.e., dopamine release) occurs just
after receipt of the reward. After repeated practice, the
animal reaches for the lever as soon as the light is illuminated.
Furthermore, the neurotransmitter response
is no longer elicited by the juice reward but occurs
instead following the initial presentation of the light.
The environmental cue has thus come to predict the
reward value of the imminent response.
Reward-predicting environments are thought to
signal the long-run future value, the cached value, of
an action without signaling a specific outcome associated
with it. Put differently, this value reflects a general
appetitive tag associated with the environment
and not a prediction about a specific outcome (e.g., a
food pellet). This diffuse motivation may explain the
relatively rigid pattern of repetition in everyday life,
given that cached values do not convey a specific
desired outcome that could be met by multiple substitutable
means. The motivated environment idea has
been tested primarily with animals, and its ability to
account for human habits has yet to be demonstrated.
However, promising support comes from evidence of
common reward-related neurotransmitter systems
across species (e.g., dopamine is elicited by monetary
reward in humans).
Finally, some researchers have invoked implicit
goals and argued that habits develop when, in a given
context, people repeatedly pursue a goal via a specific
behavior. This leads to the formation of an indirect
association between the context and behavior via a
broader goal system or knowledge structure. However,
the dynamic, flexible nature of goal pursuit—especially
the idea in many goal theories that people substitute
behaviors that serve a common goal—does not map
well onto the rigid pattern of responding that emerged
in diary studies of everyday behaviors. Thus, implicit
goals do not plausibly mediate between contexts and
responses in habit associations.
Assessment of Habit Strength
How should habit strength be assessed? In laboratory
experiments, strong habits are formed by frequent repetition
in stable contexts (e.g., completing a sentence
with the same word on a computer program). In
naturalistic studies, habit strength is measured from
people’s reports of the behavior they frequently performed
in the same contexts (e.g., always reading the
newspaper after dinner). In general, the similar effects
obtained for manipulated and self-reported habits confer
validity to self-report measures. In additional support
of this validity, self-reported habits continue to
predict future performance even when other predictors
are statistically controlled (e.g., behavioral intentions).
Sometimes naturalistic measures of habit strength
assess only performance frequency. This should be
sufficient for actions that are performed in one context
(e.g., wearing seat belts). However, for actions performed
in multiple contexts, habit strength also
depends on the stability of the performance context,
and measures should include this component.
Prediction, Change,
and Regulation of Habits
The context cuing and ballistic progression of habits
should be apparent in research on predicting, changing,
and regulating everyday behavior. Although psychologists
often predict behavior from mindful
constructs such as intentions, attitudes, and decisions,

the best predictor of habit performance should be the
strength of context–response associations in memory.
In support, research has shown that intentions predict
behavior primarily when habits have not been formed.
As habit strength increases, habits tend to be repeated
regardless of people’s intentions. This pattern plausibly
reflects the cuing and ballistic quality of habits; it
is difficult to control habits that do not correspond
with intentions.
Changing habits also poses unique challenges. For
actions that are not easily repeated into habits, changing
intentions tends to change behavior. However,
given that habits are cued by contexts and proceed ballistically,
changing intentions has only limited effect
on habit performance. Thus, changing intentions concerning
diet, seat belt use, and other often-repeated
behaviors may not have much effect on performance.
Yet, the dependence of habits on context cues makes
them vulnerable to other types of interventions. Habit
performance is especially susceptible to changes in the
performance context. Effective habit change interventions
likely involve structural changes that remove triggering
cues or disrupt the automated mechanisms that
generate repetition.
Self-regulation involves actively controlling
behavior. The context-cuing, ballistic features of habit
performance appear to interact with this process by
influencing the ease with which responses can be executed
versus withheld. The unique pattern of habit
regulation emerges most strongly when people’s selfcontrol
resources are low. Then, people are able to
execute habits successfully but are less able to inhibit
habit performance.
Anthony M. Pascoe
Wendy Wood
See also Automatic Processes; Implementation Intentions;
Learning Theory; Memory; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Ouellette, J. A., & Wood, W. (1998). Habit and intention in
everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior
predicts future behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 124, 54–74.
Verplanken, B., & Aarts, H. (1999). Habit, attitude, and
planned behavior: Is habit an empty construct or an
interesting case of goal-directed automaticity? European
Review of Social Psychology, 10, 101–134.
Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in
everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 1281–1297.
Wood, W., Tam, L., & Guerrero Witt, M. (2005). Changing
circumstances, disrupting habits. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 88, 918–933.
HALO EFFECT
Definition
Halo Effect———409
Halo effects refer to the widespread human tendency
in impression formation to assume that once a person
possesses some positive or negative characteristic,
other as yet unknown qualities will also be positive or
negative, in other words, consistent with the existing
impression. It seems as if known personal characteristics
radiate a positive or negative halo (hence the name
halo effect), influencing a person’s expectations about
other as yet unknown qualities. Halo effects reflect
the apparent belief that positive and negative characteristics
occur in consistent patterns. For example,
if you have a positive impression of your colleague
Sue because she is always clean and well groomed,
and somebody asks you whether Sue would be the
right person to organize the office party, you are more
likely to answer yes, not because you have any real
information about Sue’s organizational abilities but
because you already have an existing positive impression
of her.
History and Mechanisms
Halo effects were first described in the 1920s by
Edward L. Thorndike, and numerous experimental
studies have since documented their existence. Halo
effects can operate in strange ways, especially when
the known qualities of a person are totally unrelated to
the characteristics to be inferred. For example, external,
physical appearance often serves as the basis for
inferring internal, unrelated personal qualities. This
was first shown in a study that found that physically
attractive women were judged to have more desirable
internal qualities (personality, competence, happiness,
etc.) than homely, unattractive looking women. In a
similar way, several studies found that attractive looking
people are often judged less severely when they
commit a transgression, and attractive looking children
are punished less severely than unattractive children
when committing the same misdemeanor. The fact that
people are even prepared to make judgments about
another person’s personality, let alone culpability, based

410———Halo Effect
on that person’s physical attractiveness is quite surprising.
People can perform this task only by confidently
extrapolating from physical attractiveness to
other, unknown, and hidden qualities.
Halo effects occur because human social perception
is a highly constructive process. As humans form
impressions of people, they do not simply rely on
objective information, but they actively construct a
meaningful, coherent image that fits in with what they
already know. This tendency to form meaningful, wellformed,
and consistent impressions is also confirmed
by other studies conceived within the Gestalt theoretical
tradition (represented in social psychology by the
work of Solomon Asch, for example).
Research Findings
Halo effects represent an extremely widespread phenomenon
in impression formation judgments. Even
something as innocuous as a person’s name may give
rise to halo effects. In one telling experiment, schoolteachers
were asked to rate compositions allegedly
written by third- and fourth-grade children. The children
were only identified by their given names, which
were either conventional names (e.g., David, Michael)
or were unusual names (e.g., Elmer, Hubert). These
researchers found that exactly the same essay was
rated almost one mark worse when the writer had an
unusual name than when the writer had a common,
familiar name. In this case, names exerted a halo effect
on the way a completely unrelated issue, essay quality,
was assessed.
In some intriguing cases, halo effects also operate
in a reverse direction: Assumed personal qualities
may influence people’s perceptions of a person’s
observable, objective external qualities. In one fascinating
experiment, students were asked to listen to a
guest lecture. Some were told that the lecturer was a
high-status academic from a prestigious university.
Others were told that the lecturer was a low-status
academic from a second-rate university. After the
lecture, all students completed a series of judgments
about the guest lecturer. Among other questions, they
were also asked to estimate the physical height of the
lecturer. Amazingly, those who believed the lecturer to
be of high academic status overestimated his physical
height by almost 6 centimeters compared to those who
believed him to be a low-status person. In this case,
academic status exerted a halo effect on perceptions of
height, despite the fact that height is in fact a directly
observable, physical quality.
When a known negative characteristic gives rise
to unjustified negative inferences about the unrelated
qualities of a person, the halo effect is sometimes called
the devil effect or the horn effect. For example, if your
office colleague is often unshaven or unkempt, people
are more likely to assume that the person is lazy or
incompetent, even though these two qualities may
be unrelated.
Significance and Implications
The existence of halo effects may often give rise to
long-term biases and distortions to the way a person is
assessed. If people expect a person to have generally
positive or negative qualities based on very limited
information, it is usually possible to find subsequent
evidence to confirm such expectations given the
rich and multifaceted nature of human behavior. Such
biases may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, when
people selectively look for and find information to
confirm an unjustified original expectation, often
triggered by an initial halo effect. The practical consequences
of halo effects can be very important in personal
and working life, as people will draw
unjustifiable inferences on limited samples of behavior.
Being untidy, messy, unattractive looking, or late
may lead to more negative judgments about other hidden
qualities. The principle appears to be the following:
Emphasize positive details, and avoid giving
people any negative information about yourself, especially
when they do not know you very well and so are
likely to draw unfavorable inferences based on limited
and easily accessible information.
Joseph P. Forgas
Simon M. Laham
See also Impression Management; Primacy Effect,
Attribution; Recency Effect; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Further Readings
Forgas, J. P. (1985). Interpersonal behaviour. Oxford,
UK: Pergamon Press.

HAPPINESS
Definition
When psychologists use the term happiness, they tend
to mean one of two things. In the narrow sense, happiness
is a specific emotion that people feel when good
things happen. It includes feelings of pleasantness
along with moderate levels of arousal. In addition, the
emotion often co-occurs with a specific facial expression:
the smile. Happiness can be distinguished both
from negative emotions such as sadness, fear, and
anger and also from other positive emotions such as
affection, excitement, and interest. People from around
the world tend to have a similar concept for happiness
and can recognize happiness in others. As a result,
the emotion of happiness is often included as one of a
small number of basic emotions that cannot be broken
down into more fundamental emotions and that may
combine to form other, more complex emotions (in
fact, it is sometimes the only positive emotion that is
considered to be basic). Thus, happiness is an important
concept for researchers who study emotions.
Yet happiness also has a broader meaning, and
an entire field of research has developed around this
more inclusive concept. Psychologists often use the
term subjective well-being to distinguish this broad
collection of happiness-related phenomena from the
more specific emotion. In this broader sense, happiness
is a global positive evaluation of a person’s life
as a whole. As one might expect, people who are
happy in this way tend to experience frequent positive
emotions and infrequent negative emotions. But this
broader form of happiness is not purely emotional; it
also has a cognitive component. When happy people
are asked to think back on the conditions and events in
their life, they tend to evaluate these conditions and
events positively. Thus, happy people report being satisfied
with their lives and the various domains in their
lives.
Interestingly, these different components of happiness
do not always co-occur within the same person. It
is possible that someone could experience a great deal
of negative emotions yet still acknowledge that the
conditions of his or her life are good ones. For example,
someone who works with the poor, the sick, or the
destitute may experience frequent negative emotions
but may also feel satisfied with life because he or she
feels that the work is worthwhile. Similarly, someone
who spends lots of time engaging in hedonistic pleasures
may experience frequent positive affect but may
also feel that life is empty and meaningless. Subjective
well-being researchers are interested in the various
factors that influence these distinct components.
Background
Psychologists are interested in happiness for two reasons.
First, psychologists study happiness because lay
people are interested in happiness. When people from
around the world are asked to list the things that are
most important to them, happiness consistently tops
the list. People rank attaining happiness as being more
important than acquiring money, maintaining good
health, and even going to heaven. Psychologists
believe that they can help people achieve this goal of
being happy by studying the factors that are associated
with happiness.
A second reason why psychologists study happiness
is because people’s evaluative responses to the
world may provide information about human nature.
One of the most basic principles guiding psychological
theory is that people and animals are motivated to
approach things in the world that cause pleasure and to
avoid things in the world that cause pain. Presumably,
this behavior results from adaptive mechanisms that
guide organisms toward resources and away from dangers.
If so, people’s evaluative reactions to the world
should reveal important information about basic characteristics
of human nature. For instance, some psychologists
have suggested that human beings have a
basic need to experience strong and supportive social
relationships. These psychologists point to evidence
from the field of subjective well-being to support their
claim—people’s social relationships are reliably
linked to their happiness. Thus, cataloging the correlates
of happiness should provide important information
about the features of human nature.
Measurement
Happiness———411
It is reasonable to ask whether happiness can even be
studied scientifically. Psychologists can’t see happiness,
and therefore it might seem that happiness would
be difficult to measure. However, psychologists have
spent decades studying happiness measures (including

412———Happiness
self-report measures), and a great deal of evidence now
suggests that these measures are valid. For instance,
when researchers ask people to report on their happiness,
their answers tend to be consistent over time:
People who say they are happy now also tend to say
that they are happy when asked again in the future.
Because the conditions in people’s lives don’t usually
change that frequently, the stability of happiness
measures provides support for the idea that these measures
truly do tap this important construct. In addition,
research shows that when life events do occur, people’s
reports of happiness change in response.
Perhaps more importantly, when psychologists try
to assess happiness in a variety of different ways, these
measures all seem to converge on the same answer. For
instance, when researchers ask people to provide selfreports
of happiness, these reports tend to agree with
informant-reports of happiness, that is, ratings provided
by friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, psychologists
have ways of determining who is happy without
even asking for an explicit judgment of happiness, and
again, these measures tend to agree with self-reports.
For example, some researchers ask people to list as
many positive memories as they can within a minute.
People who say that they are happy tend to be able to
remember and list more things. Psychologists can even
find evidence of happiness in the brain: Certain patterns
of brain activity are reliably associated with happiness.
Together, this evidence makes psychologists confident
that happiness can, in fact, be measured.
Correlates
It is important to first note that although the preponderance
of self-help books might suggest otherwise,
most people are quite happy. When psychologists
track people’s levels of happiness, most people report
being in mildly positive moods most of the time. In
addition, when psychologists ask people to rate their
overall life satisfaction, most people report scores that
are above neutral. This research finding is not limited
to relatively well-off samples (like the college
students who are often asked to participate in psychological
studies). Instead, it has been replicated in
many different populations in many nations around
the world. Thus, when psychologists study the correlates
of happiness, they are usually looking for factors
that distinguish the very happy from the mildly happy
rather than the happy from the miserable.
Psychologists have arrived at several surprising
conclusions in their search for predictors of happiness.
Many of the factors that may first come to mind
do not seem to play a major role in happiness. For
example, although people strive to acquire highpaying
jobs and dream about winning the lottery,
income is not strongly correlated with happiness. Rich
people are happier than poorer people, but the difference
is not very large. As one might expect, the association
between money and happiness is strongest
among very poor groups and among poor nations:
Income leads to smaller and smaller gains in happiness
as income levels rise.
Health also plays a role in well-being, but the associations
are, again, surprisingly small. Surveys of representative
populations show that objective measures
(including doctors’ reports, hospital visits, and lists of
symptoms) are very weakly correlated with happiness.
Subjective reports (such as a person’s own evaluation
of his or her health) tend to correlate more strongly, but
even these associations are, at most, moderate in size.
In addition, although people with major health problems
such as paralyzing spinal-cord injuries are quite a
bit less happy than uninjured people, the difference is
not as large as some might expect. Even people with
very serious illnesses tend to report happiness scores
that are above neutral.
The factor that has been most closely linked to high
levels of happiness is social relationships. Research
consistently shows that people who have strong social
relationships tend to report higher levels of wellbeing.
As with other domains, subjective reports of
relationship quality and relationship satisfaction tend
to exhibit the highest correlations with subjective
well-being. But even more objective measures,
including the number of close friends a person has, the
number of social organizations to which the person
belongs, and the amount of time the person spends
with others, all show small to moderate correlations
with happiness. As one might expect based on this
research, specific types of social relationships are also
important for well-being. For instance, marital status
is one of the strongest demographic predictors of happiness.
Married people consistently report higher levels
of happiness than single people, who report greater
happiness than the widowed, divorced, or separated.
Interestingly, however, it does not appear that marriage,
itself, causes higher levels of well-being. Longitudinal
studies show that people only receive a small

oost in happiness around the time they get married
and they quickly adapt to baseline levels. The differences
between married and unmarried people are due
primarily to the lasting negative effects of divorce and
widowhood, along with selection effects that might
actually predispose happy people to marry.
Other demographic characteristics also show weak
associations with happiness. Religious people tend
to report greater happiness than nonreligious people,
though the size of these effects varies depending on
whether religious beliefs or religious behaviors are
measured. Factors such as intelligence, education, and
job prestige are also only slightly related to well-being.
Happiness does not seem to change dramatically over
the course of the life span, except perhaps at the very
end of the life when declines are somewhat steep. In
addition, sex differences in well-being are not large.
In contrast to the relatively weak effects of external
circumstance, research shows that internal factors
play a strong role in subjective well-being. Individual
differences in happiness-related variables emerge
early in life, are stable over time, and are at least partially
heritable. For instance, behavioral genetic
studies show that identical twins who were reared
apart are quite a bit more similar in their levels of happiness
than are fraternal twins who were reared apart.
This suggests that genes play an important role. Most
estimates put the heritability of well-being components
at around 40% to 50%.
Personality researchers have shown that at least
some of these genetic effects may be due to the influence
of specific personality traits on happiness. For
example, the stable personality trait of extraversion is
moderately correlated with positive affect (and, to a
lesser extent, with life satisfaction and negative
affect). People who are outgoing, assertive, and sociable
tend to report more intense and more frequent
positive emotions. This association is so robust that
some psychologists have even suggested that the two
constructs—extraversion and positive affect—are
controlled by the same underlying physiological systems.
Similarly, researchers have shown that the basic
personality trait of neuroticism is moderately to
strongly correlated with negative affect (and again, to
a lesser extent, with life satisfaction and positive
affect). This and other research on the links between
happiness and traits (including factors such as optimism
and self-esteem) show that personality plays a
strong role in people’s subjective well-being.
Cognitive Processes
That Affect Happiness
Happiness———413
There is a popular notion that the way that people
view the world should influence their happiness.
Some people always look for the silver lining in
things, and presumably this positive outlook shapes
the emotions that they feel. Psychologists, too, believe
that the way that one thinks about the world is related
to characteristic levels of happiness. A great deal of
research has been conducted to examine the cognitive
processes that affect people’s well-being.
For instance, many researchers examine the role
that social comparison processes play in happiness.
Initially, psychologists thought that people evaluated
the conditions in their own lives by comparing them to
the conditions in other people’s lives. Those individuals
who were worse off than the people around them
(in other words, people who experience upward comparisons)
should experience unhappiness; those individuals
who were better off than the people around
them (in other words, people who experience downward
comparisons) would experience happiness.
Although this effect can occur, more recent research
suggests that the processes are a bit more complicated.
For one thing, both upward and downward comparisons
can lead to either increases or decreases in happiness.
A person may look to someone who is better
off and think, “I am doing terribly in comparison,” or
he or she may say, “I can get what she has if I just try
a little harder.” Obviously, these two interpretations
should lead to different effects on happiness. In addition,
research shows that happy and unhappy people
often choose different people for comparison. Happy
people may choose comparison people who serve to
maintain their happiness; unhappy people may choose
comparisons that lead to less happiness. Thus, social
comparison affects happiness in complicated ways.
Psychologists have also shown that goals and aspirations
influence happiness. Not surprisingly, people
who are rapidly approaching a goal tend to experience
higher levels of happiness than people who are
approaching a goal more slowly. But research also
shows that simply having important goals is associated
with greater happiness. Presumably, the sense
of purpose that these goals create may protect people
from the negative effects of temporary setbacks. Interestingly,
the specific goals that people choose may also
affect their happiness. Research suggests that choosing

414———Hardiness
goals that are a challenge, but not unachievable, is
important.
Effects
Although people tend to think about happiness as
an outcome that they desire rather than as a tool that
can be used to achieve additional goals, psychologists
have also begun to ask what function happiness serves.
Barbara Fredrickson has developed what is probably
the most well-known of these theories, and she suggested
that the function of happiness (or more precisely,
the function of positive emotions) is to broaden
one’s thinking and to build one’s resources. According
to this theory, positive emotions lead people to think
creatively and to try new things. As a result, happy
people can develop new ways to approach the world,
new interests, new social relationships, and even new
physical skills. All of these effects lead to positive outcomes
in people’s lives.
Psychologists have begun using experimental and
longitudinal studies to determine whether positive
affect plays a role in future positive outcomes. These
studies provide evidence that happy people are more
sociable and cooperative than unhappy people, are
healthier than unhappy people, and earn more money
than unhappy people. A number of studies have
even shown that happy people live longer than
unhappy people (and this is not just due to the fact that
happy people tend to be healthy). Thus, although most
people want to be happy because it feels good, this
desired goal may lead to other positive outcomes in
their lives.
See also Emotion; Positive Affect
Further Readings
Richard E. Lucas
Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. (1999).
Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress.
Psychological Bulletin, 125, 276–302.
HARDINESS
Definition
Hardiness is a personality trait that is associated with
a person’s ability to manage and respond to stressful
life events with coping strategies that turn potentially
unfortunate circumstances into learning opportunities.
It is characterized by a tendency to be deeply involved,
a need to be in control, and a desire to learn from life’s
events regardless of the outcomes.
History of Hardiness
and Hardy Attitudes
With more than 20 years of theory, research, and practice,
hardiness is a well-established concept in psychology.
The psychological concept of hardiness was
first identified by examining stress reactions among
managers at the Illinois Bell Company over a 12-year
period. Six years into the study, a major corporate
upheaval in its parent company occurred, resulting in
a decrease in half of the work force during a 1-year
period. Over the next several years, two thirds of the
managers showed signs of reactions to stress (e.g.,
heart attacks, depression, suicide, divorce) while one
third of the managers thrived under these stressful
conditions. What was the difference between those
who succumbed to stress and those who thrived?
Managers who exhibited all three attitudes of commitment,
control, and challenge were protected against
stress-related illness. The unique combination of these
three attitudes became known as the 3Cs of hardiness.
Possessing all three hardy attitudes provides
people with the ability to turn unfortunate circumstances
into opportunities for personal growth. The
3Cs are described as (1) the tendency to become
deeply involved in all aspects of life—people, places,
and events (commitment); (2) belief in one’s ability
to influence life outcomes (control); and (3) a desire
to continually learn from both positive and negative
experiences and embrace change (challenge).
Hardiness theory emphasizes that a person must possess
all three of these attitudes to have existential
courage (i.e., courage based upon experience).
The Hardiness Model
Soon after the corporate upheaval, the research findings
were used to develop a training program to assist
managers at the Illinois Bell Company. From this
training program and prior research, a hardiness model
emerged. This model shows that as stressful circumstances
increase, a strain reaction will likely occur. If
this strain reaction continues to build up, it is expected
that performance deficits (e.g., physical illness or mental
breakdown) will follow. However, if hardy attitudes
are strong, the consequence is hardy coping.

Thus, hardy people use active rather than passive
coping strategies and are less likely to avoid coping
with stressful events. Hardy attitudes also motivate
hardy coping, hardy social support (i.e., providing and
receiving social support), and hardy health practices
(e.g., practice of relaxation techniques and exercise).
If a person actively reflects upon each situation, hardy
attitudes can deepen, leading to similar hardy reactions
in new situations.
Lori A. J. Scott-Sheldon
See also Control Motivation; Coping; Meaning Maintenance
Model; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Maddi, S. R. (2004). Hardiness: An operationalization of
existential courage. Journal of Humanistic Psychology,
44, 279–298.
Maddi, S. R., & Khoshaba, D. M. (2005). Resilience at
work: How to succeed no matter what life throws at you.
New York: American Management Association.
HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Health psychology is devoted to understanding psychological
influences on health and disease. According
to Shelley E. Taylor, a leading health psychologist, this
field addresses the psychological factors that determine
how people stay healthy, why they become sick,
and how they respond when they do get sick. Health
psychology encompasses a broad array of topics and
addresses a variety of questions, including health promotion
and health maintenance; for example, why do
some people engage in positive or negative health
behaviors, such as exercise or smoking? Other areas of
health psychology focus on the behavioral and social
factors that could cause illness and how psychological
interventions can help prevent and treat disease. For
example, is low socioeconomic status associated with
the onset of cardiovascular disease (in other words, are
poor people more likely to have heart attacks)? What
are effective behavioral techniques to manage and
alleviate stress; for example, do relaxation exercises
reduce stress levels? Health psychologists also analyze
health care systems; research in this area can inform
policies for improving hospitals, nursing homes, and
Health Psychology———415
health care accessibility. For example, health psychologists
can offer solutions for reducing barriers to adequate
health care (e.g., not trusting/being comfortable
with doctors or fear of medical procedures).
Health psychology is an interdisciplinary field,
which integrates other areas of psychology (e.g., social,
developmental, clinical) as well as other disciplines
(e.g., immunology, public health, medicine). Health
psychologists can conduct basic research and work in
applied and clinical settings. With its emphasis on
holistic health—or treating the body, spirit, and mind
of the patient—training in health psychology can provide
an important perspective for those working in
medical or allied health professions (e.g., occupational
therapy, dietetics, social work). Health psychology
is a relatively new, emerging field with important
implications for how we conceptualize health and disease;
understanding how psychological processes
contribute to health and illness provides a foundation
for improving physical and mental health outcomes.
Biopsychosocial Model
In the biomedical model of health and illness, physicians
look for an underlying biological cause for a
physical disorder and treat it with biological interventions,
such as performing surgery or prescribing medicine.
This perspective, in which diseases or physical
disorders are caused by biological processes, has been
the dominant viewpoint in medicine over the past several
centuries. In contrast, health psychologists view
health and illness through the biopsychosocial model,
which recognizes that biological, psychological, and
social factors can all contribute to health outcomes.
Health psychology research has demonstrated that
the inclusion of psychological and social factors in
this equation is important, as these elements can have
an influence on health. For example, psychological
states, such as thoughts, emotions, or perceptions of
stressors, can be associated with the development and
progression of certain diseases. Social factors, such as
family environment or social status in society, are also
important determinants of health outcomes. To treat
illness, proponents of the biopsychosocial model would
not solely treat the problem at the biological level but
would design and implement interventions that target
psychological and social factors as well.
Physicians were initially reluctant to acknowledge
the role that psychosocial factors could play in health
and disease. However, some very persuasive research
findings have helped the medical community better

416———Health Psychology
understand the importance of the biopsychosocial
model. For example, large prospective studies (which
follow the same individuals over long periods of time)
have found that psychological stressors can lead to the
development of disease; those that experienced more
negative life events were more likely to develop cardiovascular
disease compared to people without as many
major stressors in their lives. Other studies have shown
that having large social networks—or belonging to different
social groups—is associated with increased
longevity, or how long people live. Impressive findings
such as these have helped the biopsychosocial model
gain more acceptance within the medical community.
Physiological Responses
to Stressful Situations
Characterizing how individuals respond and adapt to
stressful situations has been a cornerstone of health
psychology research. Stressors are situations in which
the demands of the situation exceed one’s resources to
cope. Stressors can be major life events, such as experiencing
the death of a loved one or going through a
divorce, but they can also be minor, everyday occurrences,
such as getting stuck in traffic or taking an
exam. Stressors can be categorized as acute or shortterm
(e.g., delivering a speech), or chronic and ongoing
(e.g., caring for a spouse with dementia). Both acute
and chronic stressors can lead to stress responses, the
psychological and physiological changes that can follow
a stressful event (e.g., feeling anxious, pounding
heart).
Research has demonstrated that stressful situations
can have profound effects on the body, including
changes in the how the heart beats (cardiovascular system),
in specific chemicals that are released (hormonal
system), and how the body fights infection (immune
system). In the first half of the 20th century, Walter
Cannon and Hans Selye provided the groundwork for
this area of research. Cannon first described the fightor-flight
response, the body’s reaction to threat and
danger in the environment, which includes physiological
changes that can lead to increases in arousal, heart
rate, and blood pressure. He theorized that this
increased physiological activation helps the organism
quickly respond to the danger, that is, to attack or flee
from the threat. Selye focused more on the endocrine
responses to stressors and their potential effects on
health. He proposed that stressors elicit a constellation
of physiological changes, including secretion of an
important hormone, cortisol. He argued that continued
activation of certain physiological systems could lead
to adverse effects on health. Current research in health
psychology has extended and modified the seminal
contributions of these two scientists. For example, it is
now known that certain types of stressors are more
likely to trigger these physiological responses; uncontrollable
contexts elicit greater changes in certain hormones
in humans and nonhuman animals compared to
situations that are more controllable.
Research in psychoneuroimmunology, the study of
the relationship between psychological states and
the body’s natural processes for fighting off diseases
(called the immune system), has demonstrated that
stressful situations can influence aspects of immunity.
Acute stressors can lead to changes in the number
of immune cells present in the bloodstream as well
as how effectively these cells function. Exposure to
long-term, chronic stressors is associated with a number
of negative effects on the immune system, including
decrements in the function of certain types of
immune cells, impaired responses to vaccination, and
delays in the body’s ability to heal a wound.
Research that documents the effects of stressors on
physiology is important because it provides a pathway
through which stressful life events could translate into
effects on health; in other words, stressors could influence
the body’s processes (like the cardiovascular system),
which in turn could affect health. For example,
if a person experiences a number of stressors that
cause his or her heart to beat much faster than normal,
this accelerated heart rate over time could lead to the
development of disease. Therefore, prolonged activation
of certain body processes (caused by repeatedly
experiencing stressful situations or having greater
physiological responses to stressors) could put individuals
at risk for illness.
Moderators
Not everyone responds in the same way to stressful
situations; individual differences in coping and our
social environment can influence health outcomes.
Coping refers to how we manage the demands of a
stressful situation; effective coping strategies can
dampen or reduce stress responses. Problem-focused
coping involves doing something constructive about
the situation, such as taking direct action or getting

help from others. This can be particularly effective
when something can be done to change the situation
(e.g., preparing for a difficult midterm exam). Emotionfocused
coping involves regulating one’s emotional
response to the situation. This type of coping can be
especially beneficial when acceptance is necessary,
such as when coming to terms with the death of a
loved one. However, there is not a universally effective
coping strategy; both types of coping can be
beneficial, depending on the characteristics of the situation,
the individual, the timing, and the outcome
examined.
Social relationships and social support can also
be important for understanding how psychological
processes can influence health. Social support can be
stress-buffering; that is, it can protect an individual
from the effects of a stressor. For example, having a
supportive partner present during a stressful situation
can lead to decreased emotional and physiological
reactivity in some circumstances. Social support can
also have direct effects on health or be beneficial
regardless of the amount of stressors experienced. For
example, social integration, or having a large social
network, has been associated with increased longevity
(regardless of the number of stressors in an individual’s
life). In other words, people who have many
friends and relatives live longer than other people.
Research has found that individuals with certain
personality traits are more likely to interpret situations
as stressful and react with larger changes than others.
For example, individuals high on hostility interpret
ambiguous situations as threatening and are more likely
to respond to interpersonal stressors with greater physiological
reactivity. Other personality factors, such as
optimism and hardiness, appear to buffer the impact of
stressful events.
Disease Course
Health psychology has made important contributions
in helping to better understand who gets sick, which
factors influence disease course and outcome, and
how individuals adjust to illness and dying.
Who gets sick? Health psychologists have explored
the connections between personality traits and disease
incidence. One example of this line of inquiry has
been in the area of heart disease. Of the many risk factors
studied, hostility has been one of the more widely
investigated; research has consistently found that
Health Psychology———417
hostile individuals are more likely to develop cardiovascular
disease. In addition, researchers have linked
hostility and rates of coronary artery disease survival.
Many have posited that hostile individuals’ increased
health risk could be due to their known exaggerated
reactivity to stressors.
How do psychosocial factors influence the progression
and outcome of disease? Health psychologists
have studied how diseases such as HIV/AIDS
progress as a function of psychological and interpersonal
influences. For example, HIV-positive gay
men with high levels of stressful events in their lives
show faster progression of the disease. However, the
presence of a supportive network can keep people
healthier longer. In addition, cognitive beliefs, such as
negative expectations about the future or negative
beliefs about the self, have been associated with more
rapid declines in the immune system and in physical
health for those with HIV.
How do individuals adjust to terminal illness and
dying? Cancer patients have received a good deal of
attention. Cancer has many negative physical and
emotional consequences, including nausea, weakness,
and hair loss from chemotherapy; disfigurement; and
disability from cancer itself, from surgery to remove
cancer, or both. In addition to these physical ailments,
cognitive responses to the diagnosis and disruptions in
interpersonal relationships can lead to great psychological
distress, such as depression and anxiety.
Health psychology has a lot to offer in the alleviation
of this suffering; some have focused on improving
pain management, increasing social support, and cognitive
therapy (e.g., to improve body image and selfesteem).
Research has generally supported the use of
these techniques with cancer patients for improvements
in quality of life.
Health Behaviors
Many of the leading causes of death are chronic illnesses,
or diseases that develop over a long period
of time (e.g., heart disease, cancer, diabetes). These
chronic illnesses are more prevalent today because the
population is living longer and people are exposed
more to toxic substances. Chronic illnesses are influenced
by psychosocial factors, such as behavior,
lifestyle, and stress. Changes in behavior may help to
prevent many deaths from these leading causes. For
example, quitting smoking can contribute to reduced

418———Health Psychology
risk of lung cancer. Rising health care costs have also
inspired individuals to better understand behaviors
that contribute to poor health.
Researchers have focused on health-related behaviors
and what predicts health-impairing and healthprotective
behaviors. Health-impairing behaviors are
those that harm one’s health (e.g., alcoholism, drug abuse,
and smoking). Health-protective behaviors protect or
support one’s good health; these behaviors include
obtaining regular physical exams (screening), exercising,
wearing seat belts, and controlling one’s weight.
Many factors play a role in determining whether someone
will engage in particular health behaviors, including
social values, genetics, the environment, individual
emotions, beliefs, and experiences.
Health psychology has focused on understanding
why health-related behaviors occur, how they progress,
and how to modify them by identifying points for
intervention. Major models have included the health
locus of control, the health belief model, and the theory
of planned behavior. For example, according to
the health belief model, which was developed in the
1950s, behavior can be predicted by knowing an individual’s
perception of how severe a health threat is and
how successful taking action would be. In other words,
the individual’s view is important in weighing the pros
and cons in deciding a course of action in response
to a health threat. Additional factors have been determined
to influence the perception of threat, such as
the likelihood of developing the health problem, how
serious the problem is, and the individual’s general
beliefs about health. This model has been used to
successfully predict behaviors such as dental checkups,
condom use, breast self-exams, breastfeeding, and
vaccination.
Intervention
Another area of health psychology examines how
health psychologists can get involved in improving
the health of individuals. For example, how can health
psychologists best design and apply programs to teach
behaviors that can have a positive effect on health?
Interventions can take a variety of different forms
(e.g., teaching coping skills or stress management
techniques, providing health-relevant information or
social support), and can occur at different points in the
disease process.
Primary prevention is the process of intervening
before an illness or injury develops. The goal is to
keep people from developing bad health habits.
Commonly, this type of prevention is aimed at promoting
health among young or at-risk populations.
Educating people to wear seat belts, brush and floss
regularly, and get immunized against disease are all
examples of community health promotion. Behavior
change, or altering problem behaviors, is the most
common intervention in health psychology. This can
be challenging when dealing with addictive healthimpairing
behavior, but it is also difficult when individuals
are healthy because there is less incentive to
engage in health-protective behavior, especially
behaviors that are not favorable, such as dieting or
exercise.
Psychological principles have shown to be useful
in understanding how to change problem behavior and
encourage health-protective behavior. One popular
approach is cognitive behavioral; here one focuses on
what circumstances elicit, maintain, and reinforce a
certain behavior. Then one addresses the thoughts and
beliefs about one’s behavior. Cognitive behavior restructuring
has been applied to behaviors such as smoking,
wearing seat belts, diet, and exercise.
Secondary prevention is the process of screening
and diagnosing illness or injury early on. The goal is
to treat the individual immediately and stop the progression
of disease. The most common example is
physical exams, such as vision, hearing, dental, blood
pressure, blood tests, and cancer screening. Health
psychologists conduct research to better understand
why some people do or do not screen for illness. For
example, researchers are studying why individuals at
high risk for certain types of cancer may or may not
choose to screen for the disease.
Tertiary prevention occurs after illness or injury
has progressed, and the focus is on containing illness
or injury to avoid future complications. Goals include
disease management, rehabilitation, and relapse prevention.
To do this, researchers and clinicians have
helped to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of
support groups and therapy for individuals with diseases
such as cancer, alcoholism, and cardiovascular
disease.
Primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs
can help individuals live longer and healthier,
improve the quality of their lives, or both.
Future of the Field
There are a number of exciting areas of research that
health psychologists are now pursuing. Many are now
examining questions of health and disease from a

life-span perspective, from the time of conception
(How do prenatal stressors influence birth outcomes?)
to the end of life (How can clinicians help people die
with dignity?). Others are now discovering how cultural
and gender differences in lifestyles, stress reactivity,
and coping can influence health outcomes. As
the population ages and many develop chronic diseases,
it will be increasingly important to focus on
health promotion and how to help individuals cope
with their diagnoses and improve their quality of life.
As the biopsychosocial model gains acceptance in
the medical community, health psychologists have
increasingly important roles to play on interdisciplinary
teams of health care providers. Health psychologists
have the potential to have a dramatic impact on
the health of individuals by conducting research that
contributes knowledge of how psychosocial factors
can influence behavioral and disease processes and by
intervening to promote health and prevent illness.
Sally S. Dickerson
Peggy J. Mycek
See also Personalities and Behavior Patterns, Type A and
Type B; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Cohen, S., Kessler, R. C., & Gorden, L. U. (Eds.). (1995).
Measuring stress: A guide for health and social scientists.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gurung, R. A. R. (2006). Health psychology: A cultural
approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Lazarus, R. A. (1999). Stress and emotion: A new synthesis.
New York: Springer.
Shumaker, S., Schron, E., Ockene, J., & McBee, W. (1998).
The handbook of health behavior change (2nd ed.).
New York: Springer.
Taylor, S. E. (2003). Health psychology (5th ed.). Boston:
McGraw-Hill.
HEDONIC TREADMILL
It is widely assumed that material circumstances
strongly affect human happiness. However, as the
example of the “poor little rich girl” suggests, objective
outcomes and happiness are not perfectly correlated.
Indeed, many studies suggest that they are hardly correlated
at all. For example, winners of lotteries do not
Hedonic Treadmill———419
report themselves as being much happier than other
people, and those who were paralyzed in an accident
do not report themselves as being much less happy.
Similarly, as nations get wealthier, the reported wellbeing
of its citizens does not increase.
The lack of evidence for a relation between objective
circumstances and reported well-being has given
rise to the concept of a hedonic treadmill, on which
humans’ happiness remains stationary, despite efforts
or interventions to advance it. The metaphor is also
interpreted to mean that humans’ happiness will decline
if their material circumstances remain constant.
The hedonic treadmill metaphor draws support
from adaptation in other domains. Pleasant smells
usually become less intense (and less pleasurable)
with continued exposure, and a 70° Fahrenheit room
that initially feels delightful when one comes in from
the cold ceases to confer pleasure after one has been
inside for a while.
Despite the appeal of these analogies, the suitability
of the treadmill metaphor remains in question. The
conclusion that material circumstances have no effect
on welfare seems implausible and objectionable,
because it implies that economic inequality is irrelevant,
that the poor would be no better off if they were
rich.
The principal critique of the research cited on
behalf of the hedonic treadmill is that happiness measures
rely on subjective self-reports whose interpretation
is unclear. When asked “How happy are you on a
scale from 0 to 100?” respondents must judge for
themselves what the end points of the scale represent.
Someone who has lived a tough life might interpret 0
as unrelenting torture and 100 as pleasant comfort,
whereas someone who has lived an easy life might
interpret 0 as the absence of joy and 100 as heavenly
bliss. If these two people each declared their happiness
level to be a 60 (out of 100), it would obviously
be wrong to conclude that the two people really are
equally happy, since one person has adopted a higher
standard for the internal feeling that warrants that
rating.
Thus, data showing that subjective ratings of happiness
remain constant despite objectively improving
circumstances could instead be explained by a satisfaction
treadmill, whereby improving circumstances
lead individuals to adopt successively higher aspirations
for the amount of enjoyment they regard as
acceptable. To illustrate, consider someone who
moves from an apartment with a view of a parking lot
to one with a view of the ocean shoreline. According

420———Helping Behavior
to the hedonic treadmill hypothesis, the pleasure conferred
by the better view diminishes over time, until
gazing upon waves crashing into the shoreline brings
no more pleasure than formerly derived from gazing
upon cars parked on asphalt. By contrast, according to
the satisfaction treadmill, the ocean view continues to
confer more pleasure, which satisfaction or happiness
ratings fail to reflect, because the person has come to
adopt higher standards for what constitutes a “great”
view or a “great” life (a label they now reserve for living
in a home with unobstructed and panoramic ocean
views on a more scenic part of the coast).
Though the hedonic treadmill and satisfaction
treadmill are competing metaphors, they are not mutually
exclusive, and each might contribute to the finding
that groups in different circumstances report more similar
levels of happiness than one would expect.
Resolving the relative role of each is a central challenge
for happiness researchers. Researchers are relying
increasingly on more objective indicators of
happiness, including biological indicators of stress and
measures of activation in the areas of the brain that are
associated with feelings of pleasure and pain. Some
have also advocated moment-based measures, which
attempt to reconstruct someone’s well-being from his
or her moment-to-moment reports of mood. Momentbased
measures are simpler and may be less susceptible
to scale norming. Respondents need only report
how they currently feel when engaged in some particular
activity, rather than being required to simultaneously
recall and evaluate every aspect of their life.
Shane Frederick
See also Happiness; Research Methods; Self-Reports
Further Readings
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. (1971). Hedonic relativism and
planning the good society. In M. H. Apley (Ed.),
Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–302).
New York: Academic Press.
Frederick, S., & Loewenstein, G. (1999). Hedonic adaptation.
In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwartz (Eds.),
Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology
(pp. 302–329). New York: Russell Sage.
Kahneman, D. (2000). Experienced utility and objective
happiness: A moment-based approach. In D. Kahneman
& A. Tversky (Eds.), Choices, values, and frames
(pp. 673–692). New York: Cambridge University Press.
HELPING BEHAVIOR
Definition
Helping behavior is providing aid or benefit to another
person. It does not matter what the motivation of the
helper is, only that the recipient is assisted. This is
distinguished from the more general term prosocial
behavior, which can include any cooperative or
friendly behavior. It is also distinguished from the
more specific term altruistic behavior, which requires
that the motivation for assisting others be primarily
for the well-being of the other person or even at a cost
to oneself.
History and Background
The value of one person helping another is an ancient
virtue discussed by the Greeks, evident across cultures
and civilizations, and pervasive in world religions.
One ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, suggested that
groups of people needed to form social contracts
to ensure that individuals would restrain their own
selfish behavior for the good of others. Aristotle saw
human nature as more innately good. He also
described the relative positive feelings of the giver and
receiver for one another. According to Aristotle, these
feelings are greater for the person giving help than the
help recipient. The ancient Chinese Confucian value
“Jen” is a benevolence or charity toward others and is
regarded as the highest of Confucian values.
The ancient Greeks and Chinese are not the only
ones concerned with helping behavior. Almost all
world religions have some version of the Golden
Rule—people should treat others as they would like to
be treated. The Christian Bible promotes care for each
other, the poor, and the needy. It also tells the parable
of the Good Samaritan, who helped a stranger in distress
along the roadway. This parable has become the
modern ideal model of positive helping behavior.
Maimonides, the Jewish Rabbi and philosopher,
described the Golden Ladder of Charity, or eight
degrees of goodness in helping others. Charity toward
others is the third Pillar of Islam (Zakat) and involves
an annual obligation to give to those in need.
Buddhism’s Noble Eight Fold Path encourages helping
others through right speech, action, and livelihood.
In Hinduism, kindness to all creatures is
important because all creatures are manifestations of

God. Furthermore, helping to reduce others’ suffering
is good karma, or a positive effect that a person’s
behavior has on subsequent incarnations.
In modern, scientific approaches, social psychologists
have been at the forefront of understanding how
and why people help others. However, very little was
written on helping behavior until a key historical
event: the murder of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese on
March 13, 1964. The failure of people in the area to
help during the attack made newspaper headlines and
spurred a great deal of commentary. Social psychologists
Bibb Latané and John Darley were inspired to
study what decision-making processes were involved
in deciding whether to help in an emergency situation.
Latané and Darley’s work was among the first of thousands
of professional journal articles and books on
the topic.
Types
In people’s everyday lives there are innumerable small
acts of helping, like lending a pen to a fellow student.
There are also very large acts of helping that include
donating large sums of money or rescuing someone
from a burning building. P. L. Pearce and P. R. Amato
classified the kinds of helping as falling along three
dimensions: level of planning and formality, directness
of the help, and seriousness of the need. Level of planning
and formality can range from very formal and
planned, like working as a hospital volunteer each
week, to very spontaneous and informal, like helping
someone who has dropped some papers in the hallway.
Directness of help refers to level of contact with the
recipient of help from very direct, like helping a young
girl tie her shoes, to very indirect, like mailing off a
charity donation to help hurricane victims. Finally, the
seriousness of the need should be taken into account.
There is a big difference in lending someone a few
pennies when he or she is short at the grocery store and
doing CPR and rescue breathing on someone who has
had a heart attack. The consequences of the former are
very small, whereas the consequences of the latter
could mean the difference between life and death.
A. M. McGuire described four different types of
helping behavior. Casual helping involves doing small
favors for casual acquaintances, such as letting someone
borrow your cell phone for a quick call. If you
have ever helped a friend or family member to move,
you’ve engaged in substantial personal helping. This
Helping Behavior———421
helping involves putting out a lot of effort to help
someone over an extended time, so that the recipient
can have a benefit. Emotional helping means providing
care and personalized emotional support to
another, like listening to a friend who has had a bad
day or giving knowledge and advice to someone who
requests it. Finally, emergency helping is assisting
someone who has an acute problem. This would be
like calling 911 when you witness a car accident.
A concept related to McGuire’s classifications of helping
behavior is social support, which can involve providing
both resources to help a person solve a problem
and the emotional or psychological support required
to endure the stresses of life’s problems.
Importance
The importance of this topic is evident. It is the rare
individual who can go through life never needing help
from another person. Most people experience some
sickness, a car break-down, or other problem in which
they need at least the temporary assistance of others,
and many people will experience an emergency or personal
tragedy for which they will need much greater
assistance. Understanding emergency helping behavior
can help researchers better predict who will help
under what circumstances. Then resources can be
focused on getting help where it is most needed at the
time it is needed. Community education efforts can
increase the timeliness and usefulness of help provided
and can direct those in need to appropriate services.
Promoting helpfulness is a benefit to individuals, families,
and communities. If the community is prepared
to be helpful, then the help will be there when each
community member needs it. Better understanding
helping processes may even lead to ways to prepare
those who need help to ask effectively.
Theoretical Explanations
One of the greatest unanswered questions in social
psychology is why people help others, particularly
if that helping comes at a cost to themselves. Three
broad theoretical approaches seek to explain the origins
of helping behavior: natural explanations (including
evolutionary and genetic explanations), cultural
approaches (including sociocultural and social learning
explanations), and psychological or individual-level
explanations.

422———Helping Behavior
Scientists who study evolutionary psychology
or sociobiology explore the evolutionary origins of
human behavior. They may examine human groups or
animal behavior to help learn about the way in which
the human species developed and maintained the ability
to act prosocially. They believe that evolutionary
pressures make people naturally inclined to help others.
However, they qualify that people are most likely
to help those who will help them pass on their own
genes or to pass along similar genes. So, people are
more likely to help relatives than nonrelatives. People
may be more willing to help their own children than
neighbors’ children, because one’s own child has
more related genetic material. Similarly, people are
more likely to help others with similar physical, attitudinal,
and demographic characteristics because they
are more likely to pass along similar genetic characteristics
to the next generation. So, people are more
likely to help their friends, who are like them, than
they are to help strangers, who are not like them.
Attractive group members may receive more help,
because they are more likely to pass along high-quality
genetic traits to the next generation. So, in the evolutionary
past, people with helpful characteristics may
have been more likely to pass their genes to the next
generation, promoting the good of the group and making
those characteristics more visible in subsequent
generations.
Other scientists argue that it is not genetics and
evolution but culture and learning processes that produce
helpful people. These scientists use society’s
rules, called social norms, and society’s child-rearing
processes, called socialization, to explain how people
become helpful. Perhaps the most universal norm in
the world is the norm of reciprocity. This norm suggests
that if someone does something for you, you are
obligated to do something in return. This social pressure
comes with exchange of goods, like birthday presents,
and exchange of services, like giving friends a
ride in expectation that they’ll drive next time. So, to
repay their social debt, people are most likely to help
those who have helped them in the past. People are
also more likely to help those they think might help
them in the future, reciprocating their own good deed.
Another social norm that relates to helping is the norm
of equity. If people perceive themselves to be overbenefited
(getting more than their fair share in life) or others
to be underbenefited (getting less than their fair
share in life), they’ll act to fix the inequity. If they can’t
fix the inequity, however, they may blame the victim
for his or her own misfortune, keeping their perception
of a just and fair world in balance. The third major
social norm related to helping behavior is the norm of
social responsibility. In general, people believe they
are responsible for helping those in their society who
need help or are dependent on them. For example,
people may feel that it is their responsibility to be helpful
to children, the infirm elderly, people with physical
disabilities, and other groups. This norm of social
responsibility is stronger among women than men, and
it is stronger among people with a collectivist orientation
than among people with an individualist orientation.
Also, while people will follow the norm of social
responsibility in most cases, they will not follow it if
they believe the person to be helped was to blame for
his or her own need. For example, a male student may
not help a female friend with lunch money if he knows
that she spent what should have been her lunch money
on video games earlier in the day.
Social psychologists have also explored individuallevel
explanations for why people help. These explanations
concern the rewards received and costs paid
for helping and the emotions around helping. People
may receive rewards for helping others. These rewards
can be physical rewards, like receiving a monetary
award for returning a lost wallet; social rewards, like
having public recognition of a good deed; or emotional,
like feeling good after carrying groceries for an
elderly neighbor. Costs associated with not helping
are also motivating. People may help others specifically
to avoid the guilt and shame associated with not
fulfilling social obligations. People may also fear the
disapproval they would receive from others for not
helping. It would look bad if you stood passively aside
while someone struggled to get through a door with an
armload of boxes, when you could easily have helped
them. Social learning theory suggests that to the
extent people experience these rewards for helping or
costs for not helping, they are more likely to help others
in the future, expecting the next situation to have
similar rewards and costs. So, rewards and costs do
not need to be immediate to influence motivation.
Sometimes people help others because it will aid their
long-term goals of social recognition, fulfill career
aspirations, or increase the social reputation, goods,
money, and services they may receive in the future.
People learn which behaviors produce rewards and
which bring costs, beginning with parental teaching
and modeling of helpful behaviors and continuing
through life as friends, coworkers, and families praise

or criticize people for enacting behaviors. For example,
children who are taught to give to the poor through
food drives and receive praise for doing so are more
likely to continue these behaviors through their life.
Research teams headed by Robert B. Cialdini and
C. Daniel Batson have spurred an ongoing debate concerning
the role of empathy in motivating helping
behavior. Cialdini contends that feelings of empathy
produce a merging with the other and experience of
that person’s emotional pain, so the person helps others
to relieve his or her own emotional pain. Batson
describes the desire to help another out of empathic
concern for the other’s well-being as more genuinely
altruistic. Altruism is defined as helping another
purely for the good of the other person, with no external
or internal rewards for the self, and possibly at
great cost to one’s self. Heroes who rescue people
from burning buildings and saintly figures, like Mother
Teresa, are often described as altruistic.
Deciding When to Help
Whatever the motivation to help, decisions must ultimately
be made to help or not help. Latané and Darley
describe a decision model of helping for explaining
when people will or will not help. This model takes
into consideration individual experiences and social
situations that make a person less inclined to help.
For example, if a person never notices that someone
nearby in a noisy restaurant is choking, the person
won’t be able to help. An example of a situational factor
that influences helping behavior is diffusion of
responsibility. If the same noisy restaurant is crowded
with other people who could potentially help the
choking victim, any one person is less likely to actually
administer assistance, the responsibility for helping
is diffused among the group.
In deciding whether to help, the person also takes
into consideration the current rewards and costs of
helping. Jane A. Piliavin’s arousal: cost–reward model
explains this process. When a person sees another in
distress, such as in an illness or emergency situation,
the person may feel empathy and arousal. Piliavin
states that this empathic arousal motivates helping a
person in need. What the helper actually does to reduce
the victim’s distress depends on the cost to the helper
of acting and the costs for the victim if he or she doesn’t
receive help. Personal costs for helping include injury,
the effort put forth, and potential embarrassment.
Costs for the victim not receiving help are the victim’s
Helping Behavior———423
continued distress and the shame, guilt, and social criticism
directed at the person who does not help. When
the costs to the victim of not getting help are high but
the costs for helping are low, like a child running out
into a busy street, people are likely to directly intervene
(such as catching the child before the child
reaches the street). The more dangerous or costly it
becomes to the self, the less direct help will be offered.
For example, people are less likely to come between
two people having a fistfight at an athletic event
because of the danger of being hurt themselves. In
these cases, people will be more likely to use indirect
helping tactics, such as alerting security staff about
the fight. Other people reinterpret the event so that
they won’t have to feel responsible for helping. For
example, thinking, “Those unruly drunk guys probably
deserve the beating they’re getting from each other.”
When the cost of helping is high and the cost for not
helping is low, people often leave the scene or deny
that there was ever a need for help. In the ambiguous
situation of having a low cost of helping and a low cost
to the victim of not getting help, social norms govern
whether people will provide assistance.
Gender and Other
Individual Differences
There is wide popular perception that women are
more helpful than men, more generally kind and nurturing.
Yet, awards for heroism are much more likely
to go to men than to women. Laboratory studies in
social psychology tend to show either that men are
more helpful or that both genders are equally helpful.
Men play the social role of heroes and protectors in
Western society, encouraging helping behavior. Men
are typically physically larger and stronger than
women, so they may perceive or experience less danger
of being hurt themselves in engaging in heroic
acts. Therefore, we cannot attribute all of heroism to
being biologically wired for helping in emergencies.
Some research suggests that women may be more
likely to help in the context of ongoing family and
friendship relationships. They may also be more likely
to help when the task involves doing things related to
stereotypical gender roles for women, such as helping
a lost child find her parent or delivering meals to
someone who has been sick.
Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner studied the
personality characteristics of some of the heroes of the
Holocaust. These individuals rescued or aided Jewish

424———Helplessness, Learned
people, Polish people, and others who were escaping
the Nazi cruelties. The characteristics they identified
as important in distinguishing helpers from nonhelpers
have been supported in additional controlled research
studies. These characteristics include having empathy
for victims, that is, understanding the feelings of others
and responding to them emotionally. An example
would be feeling teary or sad when you see someone
crying. In helpers this empathy is other-oriented. That
is, it is concern for the welfare of others and a desire to
help them. The Oliners also found that helpers had a
strong sense of personal responsibility for the welfare
of others, a characteristic that comes from high moral
reasoning. During the Holocaust, some supervisors
and teachers hid their loyal Jewish employees or
students until they could escape. Finally, these helpers
displayed a high sense of self-efficacy. They believed
that they were likely to be helpful as they assisted others.
In a natural disaster, the devastation can be so
widespread and so many people can be affected that a
person might feel overwhelmed and ineffective in what
help he or she could offer. However, a person with high
self-efficacy might feel that while he or she could not
solve the enormity of the problems the natural disaster
brought, he or she might be able to help one person or
one family with a donation or by volunteering time in
the clean-up efforts.
Implications
Research in helping behavior has vast benefits for
understanding human behavior, for increasing good
outcomes for individuals, and for the overall good of
society. To the extent that people understand the behavior,
motivations, and personality characteristics of, and
situational influences on, helpers, they may be able to
increase helpfulness toward those who most need help
in their society, benefit from ongoing personal relationships
with others, and generally make the world a better
place to live. Those who have done research on
increasing helpfulness in others have found that explanations
of need, and making kind attributions (internal
explanations) for those needs, increase helping behavior.
Reminding people of their moral responsibilities to
help those in need, telling people how to help, and making
the victims more human also increase helping
behavior. Much research is currently in progress on
linking helping to other positive psychological characteristics
like gratitude and forgiveness.
Shelley Dean Kilpatrick
See also Altruism; Altruistic Punishment; Compassion;
Cooperation; Decision Model of Helping; Diffusion of
Responsibility; Empathy; Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis;
Moral Development; Prosocial Behavior; Reciprocal
Altruism; Reciprocity Norm; Social Learning; Social
Support; Volunteerism
Further Readings
Batson, C. D. (1997). Self-other merging and the empathyaltruism
hypothesis: Reply to Neuberg et al. (1997).
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
73, 517–522.
Batson, C. D., Sager, K., Garst, E., Kang, M., Rubchinsky,
K., & Dawson, K. (1997). Is empathy-induced helping
due to self-other merging? Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 73, 495–509.
Berkowitz, W. (1987). Local heroes. Lexington,
MA: Lexington Books.
Cialdini, R. B., Brown, S. L., Lewis, B. P., Luce, C., &
Neuberg, S. L. (1997). Reinterpreting the empathy-altruism
relationship: When one into one equals oneness. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 73, 481–494.
Neuberg, S. L., Cialdini, R. B., Brown, S. L., Luce, C., &
Sagarin, B. J. (1997). Does empathy lead to anything
more than superficial helping? Comment on Batson et al.
(1997). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
73, 510–516.
Oliner, S. P., & Oliner, P. M. (1992). Altruistic personality:
Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press.
Schroeder, D. A., Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., & Piliavin, J. A.
(1995). The psychology of helping and altruism: Problems
and puzzles. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Wilson, D. S., & Kniffin, K. M. (2003). Altruism from an
evolutionary perspective. In S. G. Post, B. Johnson,
M. E. McCullough, & J. P. Schloss (Eds.), Research on
altruism and love: An annotated bibliography of major
studies in psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology,
and theology (pp. 117–136). Philadelphia: Templeton
Foundation Press.
HELPLESSNESS, LEARNED
Definition
Learned helplessness refers to a phenomenon in
which an animal or human experiences an uncontrollable,
inescapable event and subsequently has difficulty
obtaining desirable outcomes, even when it is
easy to do so. The term is often used to explain why

people may display passive, helpless behavior or
feel powerless in situations that are actually simple to
avoid or change.
Background and History
Martin Seligman and Steven Maier discovered learned
helplessness accidentally while conducting behavioral
research on negative reinforcement with dogs. They
set up a cage with two compartments separated by a
shoulder high wall, called a shuttlebox, that allowed
the dogs to escape a mild but painful electric shock
delivered to the floor of one side by jumping to the
other side. Typically, dogs easily learn to escape
shocks by jumping over the wall in such devices, but
Seligman and Maier found that dogs that had recently
experienced unavoidable shock prior to being in the
shuttlebox tended to passively accept the shock, even
though they could easily escape it. In their classic
study, they compared the performance of dogs that
had previously received inescapable shock to those
who had either received the same amount of escapable
shock or no shock prior to being in the box. From this
and many follow-up studies, they found that it was the
uncontrollable nature of the event experienced in the
previous task (rather whether it was desirable or undesirable
or led to negative feelings) that was responsible
for the dogs’ passive behavior afterward.
Their findings sparked further research, using similar
methods and using both rewards and punishments,
that demonstrated that learned helplessness behavior
could be observed in a variety of other species, including
cats, fish, birds, gerbils, rats, cockroaches, and
humans. Early helplessness research in humans was
conducted in much the same way but used somewhat
different procedures. Such research typically exposed
participants to uncomfortable events (e.g., bursts of
loud noise, unsolvable problems) that were either controllable
or uncontrollable and then administered a different
test task, which participants could control (e.g.,
solvable problems of another kind, avoiding annoying
shock or noise by pressing buttons). The results of
these studies were mixed: Sometimes researchers
found that humans behaved very similarly to animals
and would give up on the second task if they had a previous
uncontrollable experience; other researchers
found that humans would work even harder on the
second task.
Subsequent research on humans has also shown
that relatively simple procedures can reduce learned
Helplessness, Learned———425
helplessness. Those designed to highlight the connections
between a person’s behavior and the outcomes,
whether it is verbal instruction or giving experience
with a controllable task, decreases learned helplessness.
Similarly, prompting people to think of different
explanations for their poor performance also lessens
helplessness. Interestingly, boosting someone’s selfesteem
and improving their mood beforehand have
also been shown to decrease helplessness. In general,
research on learned helplessness was part of a broader
trend in social psychology in the early 1970s that
explored the importance of choice and personal control
in optimizing performance and mental functioning.
For example, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin
found that giving elderly people a choice of activities
and responsibility for caring for a plant increased their
well-being and lengthened their lives compared to a
similar group who had no choice or responsibilities
over the same things.
Reformulated Theory
of Learned Helplessness
Over time, it became clear that learned helplessness
operated differently in humans than in animals, primarily
as a result of humans’ ability to observe and
explain events in different ways. For example, humans
can learn helplessness vicariously by watching another
person responding to uncontrollable events, but animals
cannot. Also, studies found that groups of people
working together can experience learned helplessness,
which was also unique to humans. Furthermore, certain
thinking patterns are associated with helpless
behaviors even when an uncontrollable event had not
been directly experienced
In the late 1970s, Lyn Abramson, Martin Seligman,
and John Teasdale revised and reformulated the theory
of learned helplessness to address these and other
issues. In their reformulation, they argued that certain
ways of explaining negative life events lead people to
perceive life events as uncontrollable, which in turn
lead to expectations that no behavior can prevent
future negative events and other helpless behaviors.
These explanations about the causes of events (also
known as attributions) are particularly likely to lead to
helpless feelings and behaviors when negative events
are seen as stemming from internal, stable, and global
causes. On the other hand, explanations that focus on
external, unstable, and specific causes lead to perceptions
that negative outcomes can be controlled and
prevented in the future.

426———Helplessness, Learned
Internal attributions refer to causes that stem from
the individual, whereas external attributions refer to
causes outside the individual. For example, if someone
fails an exam, an internal attribution might be that the
person has bad study skills, while an external attribution
might be that the test was too difficult. Stable
attributions are explanations that suggest causes that
do not change, whereas unstable attributions are about
causes that are likely to change. An example of a stable
attribution about a poor exam grade would be that
the person is not good at the subject matter, while an
unstable attribution would be that the person was distracted
by a personal problem that day. Global attributions
are explanations that focus on a wide variety of
outcomes and situations, whereas specific attributions
focus on few outcomes or situations. “Stupidity” is an
example of a global attribution for a poor exam performance,
whereas “not liking the teacher’s teaching
style” is an example of a specific attribution.
While some events may seem to clearly have only
one cause (e.g., “I was injured because the flowerpot
fell on my head”), people are free to focus on any
aspect of the situation that may be relevant (e.g.,
“I was injured because I’m not observant enough”).
As a result, researchers have found that people have
typical ways they make attributions about events in
their life; these are called explanatory styles. For
example, in one study, researchers had teachers identify
elementary school students who often acted in
helpless ways and found that those children were
much more likely to have an internal/stable/global
explanatory style (as measured earlier in the school
year) than those who didn’t act helpless. Furthermore,
such pessimistic explanatory styles have been shown
to influence important life outcomes, like academic
performance and a variety of health outcomes, including
more frequent illness, dying sooner from cancer,
and poorer immune system functioning.
The reformulated approach to learned helplessness
theory has also been particularly helpful in understanding
mental health problems. For example, many
of the characteristics of learned helplessness (e.g.,
passive behavior, negative thinking, loss of appetite,
anxiety) are similar to the symptoms of clinical
depression, and researchers have found that learned
helplessness has a role in many aspects of depression.
Longitudinal studies have found that having a pessimistic
explanatory style puts people at greater risk
for developing depression later, while an optimistic
style (making external/stable/specific attributions) is
associated with recovering from depression more
quickly. Furthermore, therapies that focus on changing
pessimistic attributions (e.g., cognitive therapy)
have been shown to be effective in treating depression.
More recent theories have argued that helpless beliefs
in combination with the belief that negative events are
likely to happen in the future are particularly likely to
lead to depression.
Difference Between Learned
Helplessness and Similar Behaviors
The concept of learned helplessness has been popular
to help explain a wide variety of unhealthy behaviors,
from staying in bad relationships to procrastination to
spontaneous death to poor performance in sports and
business. It is important, however, to distinguish other
sorts of helpless behavior from learned helplessness,
because sometimes people may behave helplessly for
other reasons.
According to Seligman, there are three features
that must be present to qualify behavior as learned
helplessness: inappropriate passive behavior, experience
of uncontrollable events (or at least the perception
of uncontrollability), and helpless beliefs. For
example, staying in a violent, abusive relationship may
or may not be a case of learned helplessness. Although
such abuse is often uncontrollable (and perceived as
such), staying in the relationship may or may not be a
passive response. Some people may give up and stay,
whereas others may realize that they have limited
options and make a choice to stay. Likewise, many in
such relationships believe they are helpless, but others
stay because they believe they can change their partner
or because they want to make the relationship
work. Still other people may act helpless, but do so to
get things from others. In sum, human behavior is
complex, and helpless behavior is no exception. Learned
helplessness theory is a useful tool for explaining
some passive behavior but not all.
Anthony D. Hermann
See also Attribution Theory; Control; Learning Theory
Further Readings
Peterson, C., Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1993).
Learned helplessness: A theory for the age of personal
control. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING
Definition
Heuristic processing refers to a mode of thinking that
is based on simple decision rules, or if-then associations,
that people use to judge the quality or nature of
an object. For example, in deciding whether to vote
for a particular candidate, a person might rely on the
opinion of an expert (using the heuristic “if expert,
then agree”), or on the prevailing view of friends and
family (“if there’s a consensus, then assume correctness”).
Heuristic processing is most likely to influence
people’s attitudes when their motivation to think
about something is low (e.g., when they do not care
very much about the outcome of an election) and
when their ability to think carefully is constrained
(e.g., when they are stressed out or pressed for time).
It is a relatively easy and efficient way to make judgments,
but it can also lead to mistakes.
Background and History
In the 1970s and 1980s, persuasion researchers joined
other social psychologists in focusing on the cognitive
processes underlying the effects they studied. In other
words, they wanted to know not just what variables
cause attitudes to change but also why and how attitude
change occurs. At first, most major theories of
persuasion assumed that attitude change always occurs
as a result of careful thought. This suggests that messages
evoking positive thoughts about an issue will be
persuasive, whereas messages that lead to negative
thoughts will be unpersuasive.
In the 1980s, two dual-process models of persuasion
were developed: the elaboration likelihood model,
developed by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo, and
the heuristic-systematic model, developed by Shelly
Chaiken. These dual-process models recognized that
careful, effortful thinking about issues only occurs
when people are both motivated and able to process
information in such a systematic way. Otherwise, these
theorists reasoned, attitude change will occur based
on less meaningful, more efficient ways of thinking
about information.
To describe such a way of thinking, Shelly Chaiken
looked to another area of social psychology, where
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had popularized
the term heuristic in their studies of biases in human
Heuristic Processing———427
decision making. Here, a heuristic describes a welllearned
(and therefore quite efficient) rule of thumb
that helps people solve a problem or form a judgment
but which leads to biases or errors when applied in the
wrong circumstances. In Chaiken’s heuristic-systematic
model of persuasion, heuristic processing describes
attitude change that occurs based on people’s use of
these well-learned decision rules. The distinction
made in the heuristic-systematic and elaboration likelihood
models between two kinds of information processing
(the effortful, reflective, systematic mode and
the quick, associative, relatively automatic heuristic
mode) has become important in many other areas of
social and cognitive psychology.
Importance and Consequences
Heuristic processing can influence attitude change in
two major ways. First, when motivation and ability to
think about information are both low, heuristic processing
directly influences attitude change. In such
situations, people tend to depend on heuristic cues
(such as the likeability, attractiveness, and expertise of
the communicator) in forming their opinions and
judgments. This way of thinking about information is
often very useful and efficient. For instance, it saves
people a lot of time and effort to assume that experts
are typically correct, and it allows them to make
(often good) decisions about important issues such as
whether to take a medicine or what kind of cars are
safe to drive. However, experts are not always right,
and trusting them can sometimes lead people to make
decisions different (and poorer) than the ones they
would have made had they considered all the information
for themselves. For example, diet fads are frequently
endorsed by “experts” but often turn out to be
bogus or downright harmful.
The second way in which heuristic processing can
influence attitude change is by biasing the direction of
the systematic processing that occurs when motivation
and ability to think about information are sufficiently
high. In other words, these relatively automatic
associations people make based on well-learned decision
rules can lead them to have certain expectations
about the information they will encounter, which can
affect how they think about that information. For
instance, if Jill learns that her sorority supports a
tuition increase to improve the quality of on-campus
housing, she may invoke the heuristic “if ingroup,
then agree.” If she is motivated and able to consider

428———Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion
this issue more carefully, she will probably go on to
evaluate arguments for and against the tuition
increase. But, her initial expectation (based on heuristic
processing) that her sorority’s position is the correct
one may bias the way in which she thinks about
the arguments presented. She may selectively attend
to arguments that confirm her sorority’s position and
elaborate on them in ways that increase their persuasiveness
(e.g., she might think to herself, “Not only
would improved housing make our lives better as
current students, but it would also help attract new
students to the school”). Meanwhile, she may dismiss
arguments against the tuition increase, or she may
search more carefully for the flaws that she expects
these arguments to have based on her initial use of the
ingroup agreement heuristic (“Sure, tuition is already
high, but if you can’t afford it, you get a scholarship,
so this will only affect people who have enough money
to pay anyway”).
To study heuristic processing, persuasion researchers
typically present participants with some information
about a particular issue (such as whether a
university should have comprehensive exams).
Researchers can influence participants’ motivation to
think about information by manipulating whether
the issue is of high or low relevance (e.g., whether the
comprehensive exams will be implemented the following
year or the following decade). They can influence
participants’ ability to think carefully about
information by manipulating either the time allotted
for the task or the amount of distraction in the environment.
They can also manipulate aspects of the
message or the person communicating the message.
Using such methods, researchers have shown that
when motivation and ability to process information
are kept low, persuasion depends primarily on heuristic
cues. For instance, participants are more persuaded
when a communicator is attractive, likeable, and expert,
versus when the communicator is not; when there are
many arguments in favor of an issue rather than only
a few; and when a consensus opinion or a social
ingroup favors the issue, versus when it does not.
When motivation and ability to process are higher,
research shows that a heuristic cue (such as the credibility
of the communicator) biases the direction of
systematic thinking about a message and the resulting
attitude change (so that, e.g., participants who hear a
highly credible communicator show more favorable
systematic processing of that communicator’s message,
and more attitude change in the direction of the
message, than do participants who hear a communicator
with low credibility).
Shelly Chaiken
Alison Ledgerwood
See also Affect Heuristic; Availability Heuristic; Dual
Process Theories; Elaboration Likelihood Model
Further Readings
Axsom, D., Yates, S., & Chaiken, S. (1987). Audience
response as a heuristic cue in persuasion. Journal of
Personality & Social Psychology, 53, 30–40.
Chaiken, S. (1980). Heuristic versus systematic information
processing and the use of source versus message cues in
persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
39, 752–756.
Chen, S., Duckworth, K., & Chaiken, S. (1999). Motivated
heuristic and systematic processing. Psychological
Inquiry, 10, 44–49.
HEURISTIC-SYSTEMATIC
MODEL OF PERSUASION
Definition
The heuristic-systematic model is a theory of
persuasion that suggests attitudes can change in two
fundamentally different ways. One way is through
systematic processing, whereby people think carefully
about any available information when forming an
opinion to determine whether the information is accurate
or valid. Attitudes are then based on the conclusions
from this careful consideration of the facts.
However, this kind of thinking takes a lot of effort,
and given that people usually only have limited time
and ability to think carefully, the heuristic-systematic
model suggests that attitudes are often formed in a
more simplified manner. This simplified form of attitude
judgment is called heuristic processing, and it
involves using rules of thumb known as heuristics to
decide what one’s attitudes should be. This model of
persuasion has received a great deal of empirical support
in the social psychology research literature and
has had a major impact on applied fields of research
like health behavior and consumer behavior.

Common Heuristics
A number of different persuasion heuristics can be
used to form opinions. For instance, when using the
consensus heuristic, attitudes are simply based on the
opinions that the majority of other people hold. In this
case, people infer that “if everybody believes something,
then all those people must be right.” For example,
a political speech might be more convincing when
a lot of people in the audience clap than when fewer
people clap, and a consumer product might seem better
when it is the last one left on the shelf. The expert
heuristic is another simple basis for determining attitudes.
In this case, attitudes are based on the opinions
or recommendations of trusted and knowledgeable
experts. The inference here is that “experts are usually
right.” For instance, if a dentist recommends a certain
type of toothpaste for fighting cavities, then it must
work, or if astronauts drink Tang for breakfast, then it
must be good or nutritious. Finally, the length of the
message itself can be used as a rule of thumb for persuasion,
even without thinking carefully about the
information the message contains. The message
length heuristic suggests that longer messages, which
seem to contain a lot of arguments, are more convincing
because people infer that the length of the message
implies it is strong or correct (i.e., length implies
strength). For instance, the same essay might be more
convincing when presented in double-spaced format
than when it is in single-spaced format, even though
the content of the essay is exactly the same in both
instances. Importantly, the model suggests that heuristic
rules of thumb are only used to the degree that the
rule seems valid and reliable. Not everyone thinks
experts are always right, and in such cases, people are
obviously less likely to follow expert advice. Also, the
consensus heuristic may be called into question when
a political poll is based on a very small number of
respondents, in which case people tend to stop using
this heuristic.
Bias in Persuasion
The heuristic-systematic model suggests that opinions
can be biased in a number of different ways. For
instance, heuristic rules can bias the thoughts that
people have when they are thinking carefully about an
issue (i.e., heuristics can bias systematic processing).
This is the case, for instance, when an argument seems
more likely to be correct or persuasive because it
Heuristic-Systematic Model of Persuasion———429
comes from an expert compared to when the same
argument comes from a less impressive information
source. For instance, arguments suggesting that Acme
brand is the best on the market seem more likely to
be true when these arguments come from an expert
source like Consumer Reports magazine than when
the same arguments come from a less credible source
like Wal-Mart.
The heuristic-systematic model also suggests that
certain motives or goals can bias attitudes. People
are typically assumed to be motivated to form accurate
or correct opinions, known as accuracy motivation.
However, in some cases, defensive motives or
impression motives can also have an impact on attitudes.
Defensive motives can bias attitudes by making
people more likely to agree with information that suits
their own self-interests, or desired perceptions. People
tend to agree more with government policies that provide
economic benefits for themselves versus policies
that offer the same benefits to someone else. Also,
most people have a more positive attitude toward
themselves than other people have of them. Impression
motives provide another important source of motivation
that can lead to biased attitudes. In this case, individuals
tend to alter their opinions so that they match
the attitudes of important others to fit in or get along
with those other people. For instance, students may
exaggerate the extent to which they like the Beatles
because they think their friend likes that group, and
they wish to maintain that friendship. Or students may
exaggerate their liking for a particular class when
talking to the instructor, to foster positive interactions
with the instructor in the future.
While heuristic rules certainly lead people to the
wrong conclusion at times, the use of such heuristics is
an essential aspect of everyday life. Persuasion heuristics
provide a relatively easy way to make the numerous
evaluations people are burdened with in their daily
lives, and the use of these heuristics often leads people
to adopt perfectly reasonable opinions. For instance,
many inexperienced consumers find it difficult to buy
their first automobile or computer because there are a
lot of makes, models, and features to consider, and
novice consumers tend to lack the background knowledge
needed to evaluate all of this technical information.
In situations like this, simple rules of thumb can
help greatly in making evaluations (e.g., the car recommended
by Consumer Reports is probably good).
Peter Darke

430———Hindsight Bias
See also Dual Process Theories; Elaboration Likelihood
Model; Fast and Frugal Heuristics; Heuristic Processing
Further Readings
Chen, S., & Chaiken, S. (1999). The heuristic-systematic
model in its broader context. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope
(Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology
(pp. 73–96). New York: Guilford Press.
HINDSIGHT BIAS
Definition
Recollection or reevaluation of past events can be
affected by what has happened since. In particular,
once people know the outcome of an event, they tend
to overestimate what could have been anticipated in
foresight. This effect has been termed hindsight bias
or the knew-it-all-along effect.
Designs, Materials, and Measures
Two different general experimental procedures are
usually employed. In the memory design, people first
give an (unbiased) answer, then receive the solution
and are finally asked to recall their earlier, original
answer. In the control situation, the same items are
given to other people without providing them with the
solution before they recall their original answer. In the
hypothetical design, people receive the solution right
away and are then asked to provide the answer they
would have given without this knowledge. In the control
situation, other people are asked for their answers
without giving them the solution beforehand.
Generally, hindsight bias is said to exist whenever the
estimates made in hindsight lie closer to the solution
than those made in foresight, and when the measure
that captures this difference is significantly larger than
for a control group.
The phenomenon is very robust across content
domains. It has been found in general-knowledge questions,
in political or business developments, in predictions
of elections or sport results, in medical diagnoses
or in personality assessment, to name only a few. It is
also very robust across type of tasks. The following list
is probably not exhaustive, but it covers most of the
types that have been used. Hindsight bias has been
found with two-alternative-forced-choice tasks, both
with respect to choices and to confidence in their correctness
(“Which city has more inhabitants, London or
Paris?”), with confidence in the correctness of assertions
(“True or false: London has more inhabitants
than Paris”), with numerical questions (“How many
inhabitants does London have?”), with predicting outcomes
of survey questions on a percentage scale
(“How many German households currently have
Internet access?”), with rating the likelihoods of possible
developments of a given scenario (e.g., outcomes
of international conflicts, patient histories, or consequences
of business decisions) or with answers on
closed rating scales using a few categories (e.g., rating
one’s own or someone else’s performance, school
grade, satisfaction or personality traits).
The most common measures in the memory design
compare pre- and post-outcome estimates with respect
to their distance to the solution (in the hypothetical
design, pre-outcome and post-outcome estimates are
obtained between-subjects). If the task requires an
answer on a limited scale (e.g., a dichotomous choice
or an answer on a percentage scale), the measure can
be simplified by more or less directly comparing the
responses given in foresight and those given in hindsight.
The memory design involves repeated measurement;
therefore, one can and should, in addition,
determine the proportion of correct recollections.
Because correct recollections have a bias of zero and
thus diminish the overall effect, they may contribute
to the finding that hindsight bias is typically smaller in
the memory than in the hypothetical design.
Relevance, Related Phenomena,
and Theoretical Accounts
Hindsight bias is one of the most frequently cited cognitive
biases. It possesses relevance for theories about
memory storage and retrieval of information but has
several practical implications as well. Consider, for
example, a physician who, knowing the diagnosis a
colleague has made, is asked for a second opinion. Or
consider a researcher who is asked to review a manuscript
but knows the opinion of another reviewer.
Many studies have shown that the new and allegedly
independent judgements are most likely biased toward
those that are already available. In other words, second
judgments are less independent from previous
ones than one would like to think. Moreover, feeling
wiser in hindsight could also lead people to wrong

predictions of how they would have reacted in that
situation (i.e., without the knowledge of how things
would turn out). For example, having understood
why the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster occurred
may affect one’s evaluations of the people involved
and their omissions and commissions.
An experimental paradigm that is closely related to
that of hindsight-bias studies is employed in studies
on anchoring. In a hindsight-bias experiment using a
hypothetical design, participants are informed about
the solution and are then asked what they would have
estimated. In contrast, studies on anchoring do not
provide the solution but introduce an allegedly random
value. Participants are then asked to indicate
whether the true solution lies above or below this
value, and subsequently they give an exact estimate.
Both procedures lead to comparable distortions suggesting
that the hindsight bias and anchoring effects
may be driven by similar (if not identical) cognitive
processes.
Other related research paradigms are the misinformation
effect, observed in studies on eyewitness
testimony (according to which, memory of events is
systematically distorted due to presumptive questions
afterward), and the reiteration effect (according to
which, the confidence in the correctness of a statement
increases due to mere reiteration of this statement).
Both of these phenomena involve a change of
a response over time, in the case of the misinformation
effect due to additional information from a different
source (followed by the question, “What was the
information in the original source?”), and in the case
of the reiteration effect due to another presentation of
the same statement (followed by the question, “How
confident are you now that this statement is true?”).
Two major classes of theoretical accounts have
been proposed: motivational accounts and cognitive
accounts. Although they do not exclude each other
and although there is evidence for both, the overall
picture suggests that cognitive factors are more important.
Within the group of cognitive explanations, some
favor the view that memory of the original response is
impaired due to outcome information, whereas others
locate the bias in systematic distortions when reconstructing
the original response.
Ulrich Hoffrage
See also Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic; Eyewitness
Testimony, Accuracy of; Memory
Further Readings
History of Social Psychology———431
Christensen-Szalanski, J. J. J., & Willham, C. F. (1991). The
hindsight bias: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior
and Human Decision Processes, 48, 147–168.
Hawkins, S. A., & Hastie, R. (1990). Hindsight: Biased
judgments of past events after the outcomes are known.
Psychological Bulletin, 107, 311–327.
Hoffrage, U., & Pohl, R. F. (Eds.). (2003). Hindsight bias
[Special issue]. Memory, 11(4/5).
Pohl, R. F. (2004). Hindsight bias. In R. F. Pohl (Ed.),
Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in
thinking, judgement and memory (pp. 363–378). Hove,
UK: Psychology Press.
HISTORY OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Social psychology is only a bit older than 100 years,
with most of the growth occurring during the past
6 decades. In discussing the discipline’s history, it
should be noted that there are two social psychologies,
one in psychology and the other in sociology,
with the larger of the two being the psychological
branch. The central focus of psychological social
psychology is how the individual responds to social
stimuli, whereas sociological social psychology
focuses on larger group or societal variables, such as
people’s socioeconomic status, their social roles, and
cultural norms. Although there have been calls to
merge the two branches into a single field—and even
a joint psychology–sociology doctoral program at the
University of Michigan from 1946 to 1967—their
different orientations make it doubtful that this will
transpire in the foreseeable future. In this historical
overview, the psychological branch of the discipline
will be highlighted.
Individualism as a Cultural Belief
System Shaping Social Psychology
The most important cultural factor shaping social psychology
has been the ideology of individualism, which
is a cultural belief system asserting that society is a
collection of unique individuals who pursue their own
goals and interests and strive to be relatively free from
the influence of others. In individualism, the focus is
on the person, and individual needs are judged more
important than group needs. In contrast, the belief

432———History of Social Psychology
system of collectivism asserts that people become
human only when they are integrated into a group, not
isolated from it. From this perspective, group needs
are more important than individual needs. Approximately
70% of the world’s population lives in cultures
with a collectivist orientation. However, social
psychology developed primarily within individualist
societies, and as a result, the discipline has a distinct
individualist orientation.
Dawning of a
Scientific Discipline: 1862–1895
German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who is widely
regarded as the founder of psychology, had a hand in
the early development of what would become social
psychology. Beginning in the 1870s, European and
North American scholars and students came to the
University of Leipzig to learn about Wundt’s research
on the components of the conscious mind. Among
these visitors were Émile Durkheim, Charles Judd,
Willy Hellpach, and George Herbert Mead, who later
developed some of the theoretical underpinnings of
the new discipline of social psychology.
Early in Wundt’s career, he predicted that there would
be two branches of psychology: physiological psychology
and social or folk psychology (Völkerpsychologie).
His reasoning in dividing psychology into two
branches was his belief that the type of individual psychology
studied in the laboratory by physiological
psychologists could not account for the type of higher
mental processes exhibited during social interaction.
Although social behavior consists of distinct individuals,
Wundt argued that the product of this social
interaction is more than the sum of the individuals’
mental activities. Because of this distinction, Wundt
asserted that while physiological psychology was part
of the natural sciences, aligned with biology, social
psychology was a social science, with its parent discipline
being philosophy. He further argued that
whereas physiological psychologists should conduct
experiments in studying their phenomena, social psychologists
should employ nonexperimental methods
because such an approach best captured the complexity
of social interaction. Wundt devoted the first half
of his career to physiological psychology and the second
half to social psychology, with his study of language
and the group mind preparing the ground for
later collaborative work between psychologists and
social anthropologists. Largely due to Wundt’s influential
writings and the works of philosopher Moritz
Lazarus and humanist Heymann Steinthal, by 1900
Germany’s annual bibliography of the psychological
literature listed more than 200 articles per year under
the heading “social psychology.”
Despite the fact that Wundt’s 10 volumes of writings
on social psychology influenced scholars in Europe, his
work remained largely inaccessible to American social
scientists because it was not translated into English.
Part of the reason for this intellectual freezing out of his
ideas was that Wundt’s strident support for German
nationalism before and after World War I effectively cut
him off from his many former students in America.
Further hindering Wundt’s ability to effectively shape
the ideas of young American scholars was the fact that
these young scientists were much more interested in
being identified with the natural sciences than with
continuing an alliance with philosophy. Although
Wundt’s notion that social psychology was a social science
was compatible with the 19th-century conception
of psychology as the science of the mind and was
embraced by a number of European scholars, it was
incompatible with the new behaviorist perspective in
the United States that emerged during the early years
of the 20th century.
Underlying behaviorism was a philosophy known as
logical positivism, which contended that knowledge
should be expressed in terms that could be verified
empirically or through direct observation. This new science
of behavior had little use for Wundt’s conception
of social psychology and his admonition that social
scientists rely on nonexperimental methodology. An
emerging American brand of social psychology defined
itself in terms of both behaviorist principles and the
reliance on the experiment as its chosen research
method. This was especially true for the social psychology
developing in psychology, but less so for sociological
social psychology. Psychological social
psychology in America, which would become the intellectual
core of the discipline, developed largely outside
the realm of Wundtian influence. In contrast, American
sociological social psychology was indirectly affected
by Wundt’s writings because one of its intellectual
founders, George Herbert Mead, paid serious attention
to the German scholar’s Völkerpsychologie. Today the
Meadian-inspired symbolic interactionist perspective
remains an active area of theory and research in
American sociology.

The Early Years: 1895–1935
An American psychologist at Indiana University,
Norman Triplett, is credited with conducting the
first empirical social psychological study in 1895.
Investigating how a person’s performance of a task
changes when other people are present, Triplett asked
children to quickly wind line on a fishing reel either
alone or in the presence of other children performing
the same task. As predicted, the children wound the
line faster when in the presence of other children.
Published in 1897, this study formally introduced the
experimental method into the social sciences. Despite
this accomplishment, Triplett did nothing to establish
social psychology as a distinct subfield of psychology.
Credit for establishing social psychology as a scientific
discipline is traditionally given to the first authors
of textbooks bearing that title, namely, English psychologist
William McDougall and American sociologist
Edward Ross, who each published separate texts in
1908. Consistent with the contemporary perspective in
psychological social psychology, McDougall identified
the individual as the principal unit of analysis, while
Ross, true to the contemporary sociological social psychology
perspective, highlighted groups and the structure
of society. Ross’s focus was consistent with
previous work on crowd psychology by French social
scientist Gustave Le Bon. Unfortunately for
McDougall, his brand of social psychology proposed
that social behavior was rooted in instincts and
Darwinian evolutionary processes, a theoretical assumption
soon opposed by the emerging behaviorist perspective
that emphasized learning and the importance
of the immediate environment in shaping behavior.
Thus, McDougall’s social psychology did not gain an
adequate foothold among American psychologists to
become an effective orientation toward theory and
research. Indeed, evolutionary-based explanations of
social behavior remained largely outside the theoretical
domain of social psychology for the next 80 years.
If McDougall failed to properly rally fellow social
scientists around his explanation of the root cause of
social behavior, who is generally recognized as providing
this emerging discipline with a specific focus?
The common answer is Floyd Allport. In 1924, Allport
published a third social psychology text that went a
long way in establishing a distinct identity for psychological
social psychology in America. Reading his
words today, one can see the emerging individualist
History of Social Psychology———433
perspective that would soon permeate the psychological
branch of the field:
I believe that only within the individual can we
find the behavior mechanisms and consciousness
which are fundamental in the interactions between
individuals. ...There is no psychology of groups
which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of
individuals. ...Psychology in all its branches is a
science of the individual. (p. 4)
Allport’s conception of social psychology was proposed
11 years after John Watson ushered in the behaviorist
era in American psychology. His brand of social
psychology emphasized how the person responds to
stimuli in the social environment, with the group
merely being one of many such stimuli. Beyond this
emerging individualist and behaviorist stamp, Allport
further shaped the identity of American social psychology
by extolling the virtues of the experimental method
in studying such topics as conformity, nonverbal communication,
and social facilitation. Allport’s call for
the pursuit of social psychological knowledge through
carefully controlled experimental procedures contrasted
with the more philosophical approach that both
Ross and McDougall had taken 16 years earlier.
The advantage of the experiment for social psychology
was that it allowed the researcher to systematically
examine the effects of single variables, either alone or
in selected combination, while holding all other variables
constant. However, by stressing laboratory experiments
in the study of social phenomena, Allport’s
conception of social psychology downplayed or altogether
ignored cultural and historical levels of reality
and, instead, emphasized how individuals respond to
the presentation of social stimuli. The individual was
studied as an object that was either on the receiving end
of these social influences or on the manipulating end of
them. In such analyses, there was little consideration
given to the possibility that people’s social behavior
was influenced by their actively considering how the
present situation was understood based on their previous
social and cultural experiences. During this same
time period, the less experimentally focused version of
American sociological social psychology was much
more likely to consider the cultural and historical context
of social behavior.
During the 1920s, one notable indication that social
psychology had become a legitimate area of inquiry

434———History of Social Psychology
within the larger discipline of psychology was Morton
Prince’s decision in 1921 to change the name of the
publication, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, to that
of the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
and to add Floyd Allport as a cooperating editor. At
this time, the personality perspectives employed by
American psychologists to understand mental disorders
reflected both European psychoanalytic ideas and
American formulations (such as the trait and behaviorist
approaches) that expressly rejected Freud’s basic
assumptions concerning infantile conflicts and unconscious
motives. Including social psychology within
this discussion was a public recognition within American
psychology that a more complete understanding of
human interaction would be achieved by studying both
personality and situational factors. Furthermore, this
alignment of Allport’s behaviorist brand of social
psychology with the area of clinical or abnormal psychology
was another means of strengthening the behaviorist
stamp on American psychology.
As Allport’s conception of social psychology
gained adherents, one of his basic assumptions about
the social group did not go unchallenged. In the early
1930s, Turkish-born Muzafir Sherif’s research on
social norm development was partly spurred by his
disagreement with Allport’s belief that a group was
merely a collection of individuals and that no new
group qualities arise when individuals form into a collective
entity. Perhaps influenced by his culture’s collectivist
orientation, Sherif countered that a group was
more than the sum of its individuals’ nongroup thinking,
and he tested this hypothesis by studying in the
laboratory how norms develop in a group. These nowfamous
autokinetic experiments identified important
social dynamics underlying socialization and the more
general process of social influence. Ten years later,
Theodore Newcomb extended Sherif’s findings outside
the laboratory with his longitudinal field studies
of reference group influence at Bennington College.
Sherif’s social norm research was also important in
the history of social psychology because it was one
of the first demonstrations of how complex and realistic
social situations could be studied in a laboratory
setting.
Overseas, German social psychology was being
shaped by the Gestalt perspective, which rejected both
the existing European-inspired notion of a group mind
and the American individualist stand that groups were
not real in themselves. Instead, Gestalt social psychologists
contended that the social environment is made
up not only of individuals but of relations between
individuals, and these relationships have important
psychological implications. Thus, Gestalt social psychologists
promoted an understanding of groups as
real social entities, which directly led to the tradition
of group processes and group dynamics that still
exists today. These two schools of thought within psychological
social psychology, one in America and the
other in Germany, which were developing independent
of one another, would soon be thrust together due
to events on the world scene.
The Coming of Age: 1936–1945
During the first three decades of the 20th century,
Allport’s conception of social psychology emphasized
basic research, with little consideration given to
addressing specific social problems or broader issues
bearing on reform. However, by the mid-1930s, the
discipline was poised for further growth and expansion.
The events that had the greatest impact on social
psychology at this critical juncture in its history were
the Great Depression in the United States and the
social and political upheavals in Europe generated by
World Wars I and II.
Following the stock market crash of 1929,
many young psychologists were unable to find or hold
jobs. Experiencing firsthand the impact of societal
forces, many of them adopted the liberal ideals of the
Roosevelt New Dealers or the more radical left-wing
political views of the socialist and communist parties.
In 1936 these social scientists formed an organization
dedicated to the scientific study of important social
issues and the support for progressive social action.
This organization, the Society for the Psychological
Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), had as members many
social psychologists who were interested in applying
their theories and political activism to real-world
problems. One of the important contributions of
SPSSI to social psychology was, and continues to be,
the infusion of ethics and values into the discussion of
social life. Its immediate impact on social psychology
in the 1930s was to infuse a more applied character to
research. New areas of research spawned during this
decade were intergroup relations, leadership, propaganda,
organizational behavior, voting behavior, and
consumer behavior.
In other countries, world events triggered changes
that further distinguished American social psychology
from its scientific cousins abroad. For example, the

communist revolution in Russia at the end of World
War I led to a purging of individualist-oriented research
and theorizing, a development that stood in stark contrast
to the increasing focus on the individual within
American social psychology. In 1936, the Soviet
Union’s Communist Party forbade the use of psychological
tests in various applied settings, which effectively
prohibited the study of individual differences. At
the same time, the rise of fascism in Germany, Spain,
and Italy created a strong anti-intellectual and anti-
Semitic atmosphere in these countries. To escape this
persecution, a number of Europe’s leading social scientists,
such as Fritz Heider, Gustav Ichheiser, Kurt Lewin,
and Theodor Adorno, emigrated to America. When the
United States entered the war, social psychologists,
both American and European, applied their knowledge
of human behavior in a wide variety of wartime programs,
including the selection of officers for the Office
of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central
Intelligence Agency), persuading housewives to cook
with less desirable meat products, and developing propaganda
to undermine enemy morale. The constructive
work resulting from this collaboration demonstrated
the practical usefulness of social psychology to those
governmental and philanthropic bodies that would later
fund research.
During this time of global strife, the most influential
social psychologist was Kurt Lewin, a Jewish
refugee from Nazi Germany. Lewin was instrumental
in founding SPSSI and served as its president in 1941.
He firmly believed that social psychology did not have
to choose between being either a pure science or an
applied science. His oft-repeated maxim “No research
without action, and no action without research” continues
to influence social psychologists interested in
applying their knowledge to current social problems.
By the time of his death in 1947 at the age of 57,
Lewin had profoundly shaped the future course of
social psychology.
With the end of the war, prospects were bright for
social psychology in North America. Based on their
heightened scientific stature, social psychologists
established new research facilities, secured government
grants, and, most important, trained graduate
students. These future social psychologists were predominantly
White, male, and middle class. As in other
professions, many of these graduate students were
returning soldiers whose education was funded by the
federal government under the new GI Bill. Having
grown up during the Depression and influenced by the
History of Social Psychology———435
politics of New Deal Democrats, many young social
psychologists held liberal values and beliefs that
shaped their later research and theories. Many of their
mentors were the European scholars who had fled
their native countries and then remained in America
following the war. Dorwin Cartwright suggests that
the political leanings of these young social psychologists
may partly explain why, up until the 1960s, it
was difficult to establish strong social psychology
programs in the Old South where firmly entrenched
social conservativist and segregationist policies directly
opposed liberal social reforms.
While social psychology was flourishing in
America, the devastating effects of the world war seriously
hampered the discipline overseas, especially in
Germany. In this postwar period, the United States
emerged as a world power, and just as it exported its
material goods to other countries, it exported its social
psychology as well. Beyond the influence exerted by
the liberal leanings of its members, this brand of
social psychology also reflected the political ideology
of American society and the social problems encountered
within its boundaries.
Rapid Expansion: 1946–1969
With its infusion of European intellectuals and the
recently trained young American social psychologists,
the maturing science of social psychology expanded
its theoretical and research base. To understand how
a civilized society like Germany could fall under the
influence of a ruthless demagogue like Adolf Hitler,
Theodor Adorno and his colleagues studied the
authoritarian personality, which analyzed how personality
factors emerging during childhood shape later
adult obedience and intolerance of minorities. Some
years later, Stanley Milgram extended this line of
research in his now famous obedience experiments,
which examined the situational factors that make
people more likely to obey destructive authority figures.
Other social psychologists, inspired by Lewin’s
interpretation of Gestalt psychology, focused their
attention on the dynamics of small groups.
At Yale University, Carl Hovland and his colleagues
relied on behaviorist principles in investigating the
power of persuasive communication. To a large degree,
the impetus for this research came from concerns
aroused during World War II about propaganda, military
morale, and the integration of ethnic minorities
into the armed services. Social psychology’s overall

436———History of Social Psychology
attention to research and theory involving social influence
and social dilemmas during the 1950s were
undoubtedly shaped by anxieties over the stifling of
political dissent precipitated by a more general fear of
communism and issues surrounding the international
conflict with the Soviet Union.
Social psychology’s concern with societal prejudice
continued to assert itself during the 1950s. For
example, the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision to
end the practice of racially segregated education was
partly based on Kenneth Clark and Mamie Phipps
Clark’s research indicating that segregation negatively
affected the self-concept of Black children. In that
same year, Gordon Allport (brother of Floyd Allport)
provided a theoretical outline for how desegregation
might reduce racial prejudice. What came to be
known as the contact hypothesis was a social psychological
blueprint for reducing hostility between
groups by manipulating situational variables. This
perspective toward understanding and “fixing” prejudice
better fit the behaviorist social psychology practiced
in America than the earlier developed
authoritarian personality approach.
Another significant line of research begun during
the 1950s was Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive
dissonance. Festinger, a former graduate student of
Lewin, asserted that people’s thoughts and actions
were motivated by a desire to maintain cognitive consistency.
The simplicity of the theory and its oftensurprising
findings generated interest both inside and
outside of social psychology for many years. However,
the sheer volume of dissonance research declined during
the latter part of the 1960s principally because the
main propositions of the theory had been sufficiently
confirmed in numerous studies.
The decade of the 1960s was a time of social turmoil
in the United States, with the country caught in
the grip of political assassinations, urban violence,
social protests, and the Vietnam War. People were
searching for constructive ways to change society for
the better. Following this lead, social psychologists
devoted more research to such topics as aggression,
helping, attraction, and love. The groundbreaking
research of Elaine Hatfield and Ellen Berscheid on
interpersonal and romantic attraction, for example,
not only was important in widening the scope of
social psychological inquiry, but it also generated considerable
controversy outside the field. A number of
public officials and ordinary citizens thought social
scientists should not try to understand the mysteries
of romance. Less controversial was the bystander
intervention research conducted by Bibb Latané and
John Darley, which was inspired by the 1984 murder
of Kitty Genovese in New York City.
Crisis and Reassessment: 1970–1984
During the 1960s, as the federal government expanded
its attempts to cure societal ills with the guidance of
social scientists, the number of social psychologists
rose dramatically. Among these new social scientists
were an increasing number of women and, to a lesser
degree, minority members. Whole new lines of
inquiry into social behavior commenced, with an
increasing interest in the interaction of the social situation
with personality factors. Today this interactionist
perspective is reflected in the titles of social psychology’s
two premier journals, Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology and Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin.
The explosion of research in the 1960s played a
part in another explosion of sorts in the area of
research ethics because a few controversial studies
appeared to put participants at risk for psychological
harm. The most controversial of these studies was the
previously mentioned obedience experiments conducted
by Milgram in the 1960s, in which volunteers
were ordered to deliver seemingly painful electric
shocks to another person as part of a learning experiment.
In reality, no shocks were ever delivered—the
victim was a confederate and only pretended to be in
pain—but the stress experienced by the participants
was indeed real. Although this study and others of its
kind asked important questions about social behavior,
serious concerns were raised about whether the significance
of the research justified exposing participants
to potentially harmful psychological consequences.
Spurred by the debate surrounding these issues, in
1974 the U.S. government developed regulations
requiring all institutions seeking federal funding to
establish institutional review boards that would ensure
the health and safety of human participants.
At the same time that concerns were being raised
about the ethical treatment of human participants in
research, social psychologists were questioning the
validity of their scientific methods and asking themselves
whether their discipline was a relevant and useful
science. When social psychology first emerged
from World War II and embarked on its rapid expansion,
expectations were high that social psychologists

could work hand in hand with various organizations to
solve many social problems. By the 1970s, when
these problems were still unsolved, a crisis of confidence
emerged. Indeed, Kenneth Gergen argued that
social psychology should be regarded as a historical
discipline, not a scientific enterprise, because the psychological
principles underlying social behavior often
change over time and across cultures. When this disappointment
and criticism of social psychology was
followed by accusations from women and minorities
that past research and theory reflected the biases of a
White, male-dominated view of reality, many began to
reassess the field’s basic premises. Fortunately, out of
this crisis emerged a more vital and inclusive field of
social psychology, employing more diverse scientific
methods while also having more diversity within its
membership.
The 1970s is also important in the history of social
psychology because it was the decade in which a theoretical
shift occurred in a recurring debate concerning
the nature of human behavior. Over the years,
some social psychologists assumed that people are
moved to act primarily due to their needs, desires, and
emotions. This “hot” approach to understanding
human nature argues that cool, calculated planning of
behavior is secondary to heated action that fulfills
desires. The alternative viewpoint is that people’s
actions are principally influenced by the rational
analysis of choices facing them in particular situations.
Followers of this “cold” approach assert that
how people think will ultimately determine what they
want and how they feel. In the 1950s and 1960s, the
hot perspective was most influential, but by the 1980s
the cold perspective dominated the thinking within
social psychology due to the importing of ideas from
cognitive psychology and the resulting ascendancy of
social cognition.
Attribution theory represented one of the early
attempts by social psychologists to test models in
which social judgments were thought to be determined
by rational and methodical cognitive processes. The
various attribution theories developed during this time
drew considerable inspiration and insight from the
separate earlier works of Austrian-born social psychologists
Gustav Ichheiser and Fritz Heider. Whereas
Heider’s work has long been widely recognized as
shaping the development of attribution theory, Ichheiser
battled mental illness and his contributions are only
recently being recognized. Beyond attribution theory,
additional social cognitive theories began providing
History of Social Psychology———437
numerous insights into how people interpret, analyze,
remember, and use information about the social world,
and this perspective infused new energy into areas
such as attitudes, persuasion, prejudice, intimacy, and
aggression. It remains the dominant perspective within
contemporary social psychology.
Accompanying the social cognitive emphasis and
the increased interactionist orientation of research was
renewed interest in the concept of the self, which previously
had been the focus of only sociological social
psychologists. Although the self had been an implicit
notion in attitude research and other areas of social
psychological inquiry for many years, the radical
behaviorism infusing American psychology since
1913 had relegated the study of the self into a Dark
Age of sorts in academia. With the waning influence
of behaviorism, psychological social psychologists
rediscovered the insights of founding social scientists
such as William James, John Dewey, Charles Horton
Cooley, and George Herbert Mead. This renewed attention
to the self was a fulfillment of a wish expressed
by Gordon Allport in his 1943 presidential address to
the American Psychological Association, in which he
stated, “One of the oddest events in the history of
modern psychology is the manner in which the self
became sidetracked and lost to view.” Thirty years
after this pronouncement, the self was on its way in
becoming a central concept within psychological
social psychology.
Expanding Global and Interdisciplinary
View: 1985–Present
By the 1970s, both European and Latin American
social psychological associations had been founded,
and in 1995, the Asian Association of Social Psychology
was formed. The social psychology that developed
overseas placed more emphasis on intergroup
and societal variables in explaining social behavior
than did its American cousin. For example, French
social psychologist Serge Moscovici examined the
process by which shared cultural experiences shape
people’s social perceptions and how minority groups
trigger social innovation and change. Similarly, Henri
Tajfel and John Turner’s analysis of group processes
and social perception contended that social psychologists
should analyze the relations between groups and
how group life shapes the social identity and thinking
of the individual. Tajfel’s work on categorization was
also used to understand the process of stereotyping.

438———History of Social Psychology
The contributions of these European social psychologists
are best seen as intellectual descendants of 19thcentury
scholars such as Durkheim and Wundt and
more directly as the intellectual offspring of early
20th-century Gestalt psychology.
By the mid-1980s, the growing influence of social
psychology beyond the borders of the United States
was well on its way in reshaping the discipline, as
scholars throughout the world actively exchanged
ideas and collaborated on multinational studies. Many
of the new ideas about social behavior were generated
by scholars from collectivist cultures who were raised
within societies that have a very different perspective
on the relationship between the individual and the
group than that within the societies of traditional
social psychologists. Subsequent cross-cultural
research found that certain social beliefs and behaviors
that were previously considered universal were,
in actuality, specific to the socialization practices of
individualist cultures. Based on these findings, considerable
research attention was devoted to determining
which aspects of human behavior are culture
specific—due to conditions existing within a particular
culture—and which aspects are due to humans’
shared evolutionary heritage.
This renewed interest in examining the evolutionary
basis for human social behavior not represented
only a second look at McDougall’s call for an evolutionary-based
social psychology but also an attempt to
exchange ideas with biologists. Although evolutionary
explanations were often presented as direct assaults
against sociocultural explanations, a number of social
psychologists understood that these two theoretical
perspectives were not necessarily incompatible.
Instead, they believed that a more complete understanding
of social behavior could be achieved by
acknowledging that evolutionary forces may have left
humans with particular capacities (such as the capacity
to behave helpfully) and by recognizing that current
social and environmental forces encourage or
discourage the actual development and use of those
capacities.
Despite the dominance of social cognition in the
1980s, some social psychologists raised concerns
about the relative lack of focus on emotions and
motives in explaining social thinking. These critics of
existing social cognitive theories argued that to think
of motives and affect as merely end products in a
central processing system was to dehumanize social
psychology. In the early 1990s, a number of social
psychologists sought to establish a more balanced
view by blending the traditional hot and cold perspectives
into what some have termed the warm look.
These revised social-cognitive theories proposed that
people employ multiple cognitive strategies based on
their current goals, motives, and needs. Theorists typically
developed dual-process models, meaning that
social thinking and behavior are determined by two
different ways of understanding and responding to
social stimuli. One mode of information processing—
related to the cold perspective legacy—is based on
effortful, reflective thinking, in which no action is
taken until its potential consequences are properly
weighed and evaluated. The alternative mode of processing
information—related to the hot perspective
legacy—is based on minimal cognitive effort, in which
behavior is impulsively and unintentionally activated
by emotions, habits, or biological drives, often below
the radar of consciousness. Which of the two avenues
of information processing people take at any given
time is the subject of ongoing research.
This attention to both explicit and implicit cognition
has recently prompted social psychologists to explore
how neural activity in the brain is associated with
various social psychological processes, including
self-awareness, self-regulation, attitude formation and
change, group interaction, and prejudice. Although the
numbers of social psychologists who pursue such
research is still relatively small, the knowledge they
acquire concerning the biology of social behavior will
undoubtedly play a role in reshaping existing theories.
Indeed, the U.S. federal government’s National Institute
of Mental Health, which has an annual budget of $1.3
billion, has recently given priority to research grants
that combine social psychology and neuroscience.
Finally, relative to applied work, contemporary
social psychologists have continued the legacy of
Lewin and SPSSI by applying their knowledge to a
wide arena of everyday life, such as law, health, education,
politics, sports, and business. This interest in
applying the principles and findings of social psychology
is a natural outgrowth of the search for understanding.
However, in this quest for scientific insight,
some social psychologists contend that the discipline
has focused too much attention on negative social
behavior and the flaws in human nature. There are
those in the profession who disagree with this critique,
but others reply that focusing on the problems humans
have as social beings will result in more long-term
benefits than would focusing on human strengths.

If the life of a science is analogous to a person’s
life, then contemporary social psychology is best
thought of as a young adult in the social sciences.
Compared to more established sciences, social psychology
is “barely dry behind the ears.” Yet it is a discipline
where new and innovative ideas are unusually
welcome, where new theoretical approaches and scientific
methods from other scientific disciplines are
regularly incorporated into the study of social thinking
and behavior, and where members of the discipline
regularly question the social significance of their
findings. In this ongoing critical self-assessment, most
social psychologists are confident that their still-young
science will continue revealing important insights into
how humans function as social creatures.
Stephen L. Franzoi
See also Social Cognition; Social Facilitation; Sociological
Social Psychology; Symbolic Interactionism
Further Readings
Allport, F. H. (1924). Social psychology. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Farr, R. M. (1996). The roots of modern social psychology:
1872–1954. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Smith, M. B. (2005). “Personality and social psychology”:
Retrospections and aspirations. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 9, 334–340.
HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE
AND DISADVANTAGE
Definitions
The home-field advantage refers to the tendency for
sports performers to win more often when competing
at their home facility. Studies of professional, collegiate,
and high school sports have consistently found
that home performers defeat visiting performers in
more than half of total games played. The aggregated
winning percentages of home performers vary between
sports and across eras, but they typically range from
just above 50% to as high as 70%. Home-field advantage
effects are common in team sports like baseball,
basketball, and football as well as in individual sports
such as tennis and wrestling.
Home-Field Advantage and Disadvantage———439
Although performing at home is clearly an advantage
more often than not, the home-field advantage can
be eliminated or reversed in some situations. Some
studies suggest that competing at home can actually
handicap performers during crucial, high-stakes
contests. Such home-field disadvantage effects—when
home performers win fewer than 50% of games—have
been found in high-pressure contests such as the
seventh games of World Series and National Hockey
League championships and the final rounds of major
golf championships.
Explanations for the
Home-Field Advantage
Evidence of the home-field advantage is easily
obtained by examining archival records of the outcomes
of competitions, but isolating the mechanisms
responsible for this phenomenon has proven more
challenging to researchers. A number of variables
contribute to home-field advantage effects. One factor
is the extent to which the sport gives home performers
an explicit strategic advantage, such as the baseball
tradition of allowing home teams to bat last. In major
college football, home-field advantage effects are
magnified for powerhouse programs simply because
they pay to fill their nonconference schedule with home
games against inferior opponents with less funding.
However, home-field advantage effects are also found
in sports without such obvious built-in competitive
advantages for home performers.
Additional explanations for the home-field advantage
include factors related to performers’ comfort
with their physical environment. For example, home
performers are more easily able to maintain their routines
of practice and rest compared with visiting performers,
particularly when the visitors must travel
long distances to compete. Moreover, familiarity with
the unique physical characteristics of the competition
venue (such as the outfield walls at Boston’s Fenway
Park) could provide a competitive advantage to home
performers. To date, however, research shows that the
effects of performers’ comfort with the physical environment
are surprisingly weak predictors of homefield
advantage effects.
A potentially powerful contributor to the homefield
advantage is the confidence that performing at
home inspires. Performers recognize the home-field
advantage and therefore expect to win more often at
home and lose more often on the road. A large body

440———Hope
of research has linked expectations of success with
positive performance outcomes while linking failure
expectancies with poor performance outcomes. One
factor that has been found to increase the confidence
of home performers is the presence of a supportive
audience. Most competitors believe their home audience
helps them perform better, and this mere belief
may promote superior performance.
Audience factors can influence the home-field
advantage in several ways. A home audience may
motivate performers to invest extra effort to reward
the audience for their support. In sports like football,
home audiences selectively raise their noise levels to
disrupt the on-field communications of the visiting
team. The emotional intensity of home audiences also
seems to influence decisions made by judges and referees.
Several studies have shown that referee decisions
tend to favor home competitors, and home-field
advantage effects are most evident in sports that rely
on subjective scoring by judges.
Explanations for the
Home-Field Disadvantage
A notable exception to the home-field advantage has
been found for crucial contests that determine championships.
The home-field advantage is most apparent
in relatively low-stakes contests that comprise the
bulk of most sport seasons, but performing at home is
often unhelpful in the pressure-packed key moments
of the most meaningful games. This home-field disadvantage
phenomenon is often obscured by home-field
advantage effects and has received comparatively less
research attention, but several psychological factors
can make home performers more susceptible to choking
(i.e., underachieving) under pressure.
Performers prefer to compete at home in part
because they expect playing at home will help them
win. In the initial stages of a competition, the superior
confidence of the home performers can become selffulfilling,
propelling them to easy victories. However,
if home performers have not separated themselves
from their opponents by the late stages of competitions,
they may struggle to remain confident (and the
confidence of their opponents should increase). When
this occurs, home performers may feel significant performance
pressure, and the competitive advantage can
shift to the visiting performers.
Performance pressure naturally increases for all
competitors in key moments of big games, but home
performers have more reason than other performers to
feel pressure in these situations. One reason is that
home performers know others expect them to defeat
opponents of similar ability. Research has shown that
people perform poorly when observers expect success,
but the performers lack this confidence. The
pressure for home performers is especially great when
they recognize and care about the disappointment
their failure would cause their home audience. Such
elevated levels of perceived pressure often causes performers
to choke by focusing too much on automatic
aspects of performance they normally ignore (trying
too hard), or by failing to concentrate due to heightened
anxiety.
The relatively high cost of failure for home performers
may also lead them to focus more on avoiding
failure than striving for victory. Performers who strive
to avoid failure usually fare less well than those oriented
toward achieving success, so home performers
are handicapped to the extent that the high costs of
failing at home causes them to play not to lose. The
relationship between performing at home and failure
avoidance motives is supported by studies linking supportive
audiences with an overcautious performance
style.
Harry M. Wallace
See also Choking Under Pressure; Social Facilitation
Further Readings
Balmer, N., Nevill, A., & Wolfson, S. (Eds.). (2005). Home
advantage [Special issue]. Journal of Sports Sciences, 23(4).
Butler, J. L., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). The trouble with
friendly faces: Skilled performance with a supportive
audience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
75, 1213–1230.
HOPE
Definition
A typical dictionary definition of hope suggests that
it reflects a goal-related expectation of success. In
psychology, a definition that has gained considerable
attention basically expands on this dictionary one.
More specifically, hope is said to involve goal-directed
thinking in which people perceive that they have the

capacities to produce the routes to desired goals (called
pathways thinking), along with the necessary motivations
to use those routes (called agency thinking).
History
The most famous story about hope is the tale of
Pandora. Zeus was angry with mortals for having
stolen fire from the gods, and, accordingly, he developed
a plan to extract revenge against humans. To do
this, Zeus created a maiden, Pandora, whom he sent
to earth with a dowry jar. Pandora was instructed that,
no matter what, she was not to open this jar. Zeus
evidently was using reverse psychology here, for he
knew that Pandora could not resist taking a peak
at what was inside. Indeed, upon coming to earth,
Pandora opened the lid. Out poured a plague of negative
forces, including colic, rheumatism, and gout for
the body, along with envy, spite, and revenge for the
mind. Pandora was horrified at what she had done,
and she quickly tried to replace the lid. At this point,
however, she supposedly noticed that hope was stuck
under the lid.
Although mythology is vague on whether hope
actually escaped, the usual conclusion is that it did.
Moreover, hope has been viewed as being just as evil
as the forces that did escape. For example, Sophocles
believed that hope only prolonged human suffering.
Plato called hope a foolish counselor. Francis Bacon
said that hope was a good breakfast but a bad supper.
Similarly, Benjamin Franklin cautioned people with
the observation, “He who lives on hope will die fasting.”
Therefore, much of history has been quite negative
about hope. On this latter point, therefore, it
should be noted that the Judeo-Christian viewpoint
has been in the minority when making hope one of its
virtues (along with faith and charity).
It was not until the 1950s that psychologists and
mental health professionals (e.g., psychiatrists,
nurses) began using scientific approaches for exploring
hope. These early scholars generally agreed with
the dictionary definition of hope as involving positive
expectancies for reaching desired goals. Moving into
the 1970s and 1980s, there was yet more interest in
hope by psychologists. Of the various theoretical
approaches, a model known as hope theory has gained
considerable attention. According to hope theory,
hope reflects goal-directed thinking in which people
believe in their capacities to produce the routes to
desired goals (pathways thinking), along with the
mental energies or motivations to use those routes
(agency thinking). Furthermore, the consensus was
that such hope thinking was learned through childhood
experiences rather than being a product of
genetic inheritance. Finally, as psychology began to
pay more attention to human strengths in the 1990s
and beyond, hope has been one of the key concepts.
Evidence
Hope———441
There have been two general approaches taken in hope
research. A first approach has involved the development
of self-report scales and the subsequent study of
how the scores on such hope measures were related
to other variables. A second approach has entailed
attempts to teach people how to become more hopeful,
along with any benefits that may accompany such
increases in hopeful thinking. These lines of research
will be explained briefly in this section.
The scale that has been used frequently in research
is called the Hope Scale. It is an eight-item self-report
measure on which adults rate each item according
to how true it is of them (going from “definitely false”
to “definitely true”). Using the hope theory model to
guide its content, this scale has four pathways items
(e.g., “I can think of many ways to get out of a jam”)
and four agency items (e.g., “I energetically pursue my
goals”). The scores on these eight items are summed,
with higher scores reflecting higher hope. There are
two versions of these trait-like hope scales that tap
thinking across circumstances or situations, with one
being for adults and the other for children. Moreover,
there is a situation-specific hope scale that taps adult
hope in particular circumstances (e.g., work, relationships,
school), and another state hope scale version
that measures hope at any given moment in time (i.e.,
“here and now”).
Results from studies that used these various hope
scales have shown consistently that higher scores are
related to (a) better performances in academics (from
grade school to graduate school) and sports; (b) more
positive outcomes on psychological indices involving
happiness, satisfaction, self-esteem, optimism, and
meaning in life; and (c) superior coping with stressors
stemming from physical injuries, diseases, pain, and a
variety of life impediments. In these previous studies,
it should be noted that the magnitudes of the hope
correlations with the various other markers did not
diminish when measures of natural ability were taken
into account through statistical procedures. In other

442———Hormones and Behavior
words, hope still predicted school achievements when
intelligence was added to the equation. Likewise,
hope still predicted athletic performances when natural
athletic talent was added to the equation.
Hope has long been thought to be the underlying
common process in all successful psychotherapy
approaches. Thus, it should come as no surprise that the
second line of research pertains to teaching people how
to increase their levels of hopeful thinking. In this
regard, there have been successful attempts to enhance
hope in the context of one-on-one settings, couples, and
groups of people. In regard to groups, researchers have
implemented an intervention for depressed older adults.
In 10 group sessions, these elderly adults underwent
activities based on hope theory (to lessen their depression
and raise their physical activities), and the results
showed significant improvements for the people in this
group when compared to people who underwent a commonly
used intervention. In another hope intervention,
the outpatients who were visiting a community mental
health center were taught the basic principles of hope
theory before they entered treatment. Results showed
that these outpatients improved in their later treatments,
and they did so more than clients who had not been
given these pretreatment preparations. In yet another
study, a videotaped treatment involving hopeful narratives
was given to women who had survived childhood
incest. After viewing this tape, these women had higher
levels of hope than did the women who viewed a control
tape (on the topic of nature). In addition, there have
been successful hope educational programs for teaching
goal-directed thinking to students of varying ages
(grade school to college).
Both the correlation-based research using selfreport
measures of hope and the causation-based
interventions aimed at raising the hope levels have
shown that higher hope is beneficial. Likewise, the
power of hope in producing robust correlations to
various other variables cannot be explained by natural
talents (e.g., intelligence or athletic ability). Thus,
there appears to be something particular to hopeful,
goal-directed thinking that makes it effective in yielding
its benefits.
Importance and Implications
In contrast to the negative historical views that hope is
a counterproductive force in the lives of human
beings, the emerging research in positive psychology
shows that hope yields benefits in a variety of life
arenas. Not only is hopeful thinking adaptive during
normal times, but it also appears to be crucial when
people encounter impediments or blockages to their
desired goals. Perhaps the best news in regard to hope
is that is does not appear to reflect genetic endowment;
it is a pattern of thinking that is learned during
childhood. Furthermore, research suggests that should
adults be low in hope, there are ways to teach them to
raise their hopes. Whether it is through educational or
psychotherapeutic approaches, therefore, the principles
of hopeful thinking can be conveyed so that
people can reap its benefits.
See also Coping; Goals; Motivated Cognition
Further Readings
C. R. Snyder
Farran, C. J., Herth, A. K., & Popovich, J. M. (1995). Hope
and hopelessness: Critical clinical constructs. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Groopman, J. (2004). The anatomy of hope: How people
prevail in the face of illness. New York: Random House.
Snyder, C. R. (Ed.). (2000). Handbook of hope: Theory,
measurement, and applications. San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Snyder, C. R. (2004). The psychology of hope: You can get
there from here (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press.
Snyder, C. R., Harris, C., Anderson, J. R., Holleran, S. A.,
Irving, L. M., Sigmon, S. T., et al. (1991). The will and
the ways: Development and validation of an individual
differences measure of hope. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 60, 570–585.
Stotland, E. (1969). The psychology of hope. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.
HORMONES AND BEHAVIOR
Definition
A hormone is something produced in the body that
circulates in the bloodstream and then influences
the activity of living cells that are far from where it
was produced. Because hormones travel to their target
tissue, they are sometimes referred to as signaling
molecules. For example, estrogen is produced by the
ovaries, but effects the functioning of cells in the heart,
uterus, breast, liver, and brain. Any molecule produced

in the body that travels to another tissue via the bloodstream
for its effect is classified as a hormone.
Many hormones affect social behavior, often by
directly influencing some aspect of brain function,
although there are certainly other routes to influencing
behavior. Hormones can only affect tissue that has
receptors for them. If there is no receptor for a hormone
in the brain, it cannot affect brain function.
However, many hormones do have receptors in the
brain. In social psychology, some of the most
researched hormones include testosterone and estrogen
(often called sex hormones), as well as vasopressin
and oxytocin. Although it is often said that
testosterone is the male hormone and estrogen a
female hormone, is should be stated that all people
have all of these hormones—it is just the amount that
differs.
Hormonal links to human behavior are of interest
to a variety of social psychologists but perhaps especially
to those who are trying to understand topics like
falling in love and sexual motivation, dominance hierarchies,
and the reasons that differences exist in the
behavior of men and women.
Testing for Hormone and
Behavior Connections
Psychologists who are interested in understanding the
role that hormones play in shaping human behavior
rely on several types of research approaches. These
would include animal research where hormone levels
are experimentally altered, studies of humans with
certain types of disorders that change the levels of
hormones, direct measurement of hormone levels via
immunoassay, and studies that take advantage of natural
variations that occur in the levels of some hormones.
With each approach, the psychologist is trying
to see if changes in hormone levels relate to changes
in behavior in a predictable way. For example, a social
psychologist might be interested in the reasons that
more females choose to major in psychology (study of
human behavior), while more males major in engineering
(study of mechanical objects). Although most
psychologists would certainly agree that social attitudes
play a major role in career choice, the potential
role of biological differences could also be important.
In fact, girls from a very young age appear to be more
people oriented (playing with pretend people, drawing
more people) and are shown to be more empathic and
interested in feelings on a variety of indicators, while
Hormones and Behavior———443
boys from a young age seem more drawn to nonliving
mechanical objects and later show better spatial skills,
such as the ability to visualize complex objects from a
variety of angles. Because this sex difference is found
all over the world, one might wonder if there is some
biological basis for this difference. To test this, a psychologist
might look at whether levels of hormones
relate to differences in people orientation, empathy, or
mental rotation skills.
First, one might measure the level of hormones in
the bloodstream via immunoassay, or saliva samples
could be used. If the psychologist thinks that testosterone
might relate to performance on a test of spatial
skills, it would be testosterone that would be measured.
If persons with high testosterone levels have
better spatial skills, the idea would be supported. It is
also true that the levels of hormones vary in a predictable
way across time; this knowledge can be used
to test the effects of hormones without taking direct
measures. In women, the levels of estrogen and progesterone
change across a month due to the menstrual
cycle. A psychologist might wonder if high estrogen
levels actually worsen performance on spatial skills
tasks. Thus, he or she might give a test of spatial skills
at day 12 (when estrogen is high) and at day 1 (when
estrogen is low). If the scores at day 12 are lower than
would otherwise be expected, the idea would be supported.
Testosterone, too, follows a predictable pattern
of rises and ebbs, though not a monthly one. The average
testosterone level is higher in the fall and lower in
the spring, so a psychologist could measure a behavior
at two times in the year is a similar fashion.
Animal models are often very useful, as many of
the sex differences of interest to a social psychologist
can be seen in other species as well. Although a person
might suppose that the question of college major
could never be investigated via animal models—after
all, mice do not go to college—but male rats do show
better spatial skills than females. There are tests of
spatial skills for rodents that rely on maze-solving
ability. If a psychologist wonders if prenatal levels of
testosterone are affecting spatial skills, a developing
mouse can be injected with extra testosterone if it is
a female, or, if male, testosterone effects can be eliminated.
If the females with extra testosterone grow
up to be unusually good at solving mazes, especially
if the males denied testosterone grow up to unusually
poor maze solvers, the role of testosterone on
maze solving would be supported. Of course, mice are
not people, and ideally a psychologist would do an

444———Hormones and Behavior
experiment with people, but the obvious problem is
that parents are (of course) reluctant to allow the hormonal
environments of their unborn children to be
manipulated. However, some children are born with
conditions that alter prenatal hormone environments.
A condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia
(CAH) causes a lack of an enzyme needed to tell the
adrenal glands to stop making the male hormones, so
they are exposed to levels that are much too high during
prenatal development. The problem can occur in
either males or females. Upon birth, the problem is
almost always diagnosed and the enzyme supplied via
medicine, and the problem is no longer present. Girls
with CAH are of great interest to a social psychologist
interested in the role of prenatal hormonal environments
on behavior. These girls self-identify as girls,
and society sees them as girls (i.e., they are getting all
the same social messages about what it is to be a girl
as any other girl); the difference is in the prenatal
hormonal environment. In the example about college
majors, a psychologist might try and find out if girls with
CAH have better spatial skills or were more likely to
play with mechanical objects over dolls as children.
Generally, a psychologist would want to see several
different types of research approaches coming
together to support a role for a particular hormone on
an aspect of human behavior (referred to as converging
evidence) before concluding a behavior is influenced
by hormone levels. In the previously mentioned
examples, all of these types of research have been
done, and all support the idea that hormones do have
some influence on spatial skills. It should be noted
that psychologists who conduct this type of research
differentiate between organizational effects of hormones
and circulating effects. Organizing effects refer
to prenatal exposure and how this might alter the brain
and behavior; circulating effects refer to current levels
and how current amounts of hormones in the body
might affect behavior. It is possible for a hormone to
have one type of effect on a behavior but not the other,
both effects, or neither.
Estrogen
What Is Known
Estrogen has myriad effects on the brain and body.
Those relevant to social psychologists include pathology
(depression, borderline personality disorder),
verbal memory, motivation for sex, and emotional
jealousy. The brain has estrogen receptors, and estrogen
has the direct effect of raising the levels of the
neurotransmitter serotonin. This is important because
serotonin is important to understanding depression,
and perhaps schizophrenia and borderline personality
disorder as well. Estrogen supplementation has been
shown to alter the symptom expression of these disorders,
whose courses and prevalence rates are different
for males and females. As for cognition, several types
of research suggest that estrogen may increase performance
on tasks that can be related to verbal skills or
verbal memory and may decrease performance on
certain tests of spatial skills.
Testosterone
Although it has been widely believed that testosterone
promotes aggression, this is only partially true.
The best research suggests that testosterone is more
related to a desire for social dominance and power,
rather than aggression per se (although desire for power
may lead to aggression at times). Other research
suggests that testosterone increases sex drive. As for
cognition, several types of research support that testosterone
has some effect on the expression of spatial
skills, both organizational and circulating levels. Most
research on circulating levels suggests that the low
male range is optimal for enhancing spatial skills.
Oxytocin and Vasopressin
Oxytocin acts directly on both the nucleus accumbens
and amygdala and increases after sex, promoting
a feeling of bonding. Oxytocin has also been found
to increase positive feelings about other people.
Vasopressin levels and receptors within the brain for
this hormone are higher in species in which males and
females form monogamous relationships and who
provide care for their young. Both of these hormones
seem to promote affiliation needs in humans. These
hormones increase when a person falls in love. Animal
research suggests that these hormones are actually
causing affiliative behavior and social bonding since
experimentally altering these levels of these hormones
leads to major changes in pair bonding and parenting
behaviors. Many social psychologists think of these as
being attachment hormones, and oxytocin is sometimes
called the mothering hormone.

Reciprocal Effects
It is important to realize that hormone–behavior
effects are not one-way. This means that hormone levels
affect behavior, but behavior also affects hormone
levels. The best example of this might be the relationship
with testosterone and competitive behavior.
Raising testosterone levels seems to make animals
more competitive, and with enough of a boost, this
translates into an increase in fighting behavior. But, it
is also true that being in a competition has the effect
of changing testosterone levels. It has been shown that
even competition by proxy, such as watching your
favorite sport team win or watching a movie character
win an important battle, leading to an increase in
power will cause a rise in circulating testosterone
levels. Thus, when psychologists find that circulating
levels of hormones are related to a behavior of interest,
they consider that the direction of cause and effect
may go both ways, and conclusions about whether the
hormone is causing a difference in behavior are tentative
without converging evidence in the form of experimental
designs.
M. C. DeSoto
See also Erotic Plasticity; Gender Differences; Genetic
Influences on Social Behavior; Health Psychology;
Research Methods
Further Readings
Geary, D. C. (1998). Male, female. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
HOSTILE ATTRIBUTION BIAS
Definition
The hostile attribution bias (HAB) is the tendency to
interpret the behavior of others, across situations, as
threatening, aggressive, or both. People who exhibit the
HAB think that ambiguous behavior of others is hostile
and often directed toward them, while those who do not
exhibit the HAB interpret the behavior in a nonhostile,
nonthreatening way. Furthermore, people who make
the HAB often respond to the other person’s behavior
in an aggressive manner because they perceive it as
Hostile Attribution Bias———445
a personal threat. When they respond aggressively, this
action is often viewed as inappropriate because the
other person’s original behavior was not intended to be
aggressive. For example, imagine that José accidentally
bumps his shopping cart into Melissa’s cart in a busy
grocery store. Then Melissa mistakenly assumes that
José aggressively bumped her cart to get ahead of her in
the aisle. If Melissa then intentionally hits José’s cart,
she has reacted in an aggressive manner that was inappropriate
to the situation.
An important point is that individuals who show the
HAB often misperceive the intent of the other individual’s
behavior as aggressive or harmful to themselves
or another person, wrongly believing that the person
meant to cause harm in performing the action. This
biased judgment of the other’s intent represents a disruption
in normal cognitive processing of events. Nicki
Crick and Kenneth Dodge developed the social information
processing model, which describes the steps
that are experienced when people cognitively process
information in social interactions. Crick and Dodge
have also conducted several studies that have identified
how aggressive children show different patterns of
information processing than nonaggressive children.
Once these cognitive patterns are developed, they are
considered to be relatively stable through adulthood.
Social Information Processing
According to the social information processing model
and other cognitive theories, children process and act
on information from the social environment through
sequential steps, including (a) absorption of social
stimuli (encoding of social cues), (b) assignment of
meaning to the stimuli (interpretation), (c) determination
of goals, (d) accessing of possible responses,
(e) selection of a response, and (f) performance of a
behavioral act. Progression through these steps usually
occurs rapidly.
Aggressive children have been found to experience
disruptions at most of the stages, particularly at the
encoding, interpretation, and response generation
stages. They tend to focus their attention on threatening
social cues (such as potentially angry facial expressions
of the person talking to them), interpret that
information in a hostile manner, and generate aggressive
responses. An important theoretical concept that
affects how people encode, interpret, and utilize information
is schemas.

446———Hostile Attribution Bias
Aggressive Schemas
Processing social information is cognitively demanding;
therefore, humans use schemas—mental frameworks
of beliefs about people, events, and objects—to
rapidly understand stimuli. Schemas are automatically
activated (brought to mind) when the schema is available
in memory and information relevant to that
schema is encountered. Schemas direct people’s attention
to particular information and guide their interpretation
of it, even to the extent that they may fill in
missing pieces by utilizing the schema. Schemas can
also act like a filter; people tend to pay attention to
information that is consistent with their schemas and
ignore inconsistent information.
People who exhibit the HAB appear to have more
elaborate and complex aggressive information in their
schemas for various events and concepts than do
nonaggressive people. For example, in contrast to a
nonaggressive person, an aggressive person’s schema
for bars might include that they are places where
people get into fights, which may cause the person to
perceive more threats and act aggressively in bars.
Because they have many stored memories of hostile
situations, people who exhibit the HAB may also
more easily bring to mind and apply hostility-related
schemas to social situations. Consistent with the way
that schemas function, a person with hostility-related
schemas would initially attend to more hostile social
cues and fail to pay attention to nonhostile cues. The
schema would also be used to interpret ambiguous
cues. To illustrate, a person with a hostile schema for
bars will enter a bar with this schema easily accessible.
Once the schema is activated, that person will
tend to notice individuals who act in a potentially hostile
way, pay more attention to hostile than nonhostile
cues, and interpret ambiguous behavior (such as the
poke of an elbow in a crowd) as hostile.
Schemas frequently have self-confirming effects.
Crick and Dodge defined reactive aggression as
occurring when ambiguous social information is misinterpreted
as more threatening than it is and the person
tends to respond aggressively to it, often to defend
him- or herself or to retaliate against perceived provocation.
Reactive aggression therefore incorporates
the HAB process, as individuals displaying a HAB
generate aggressive responses to the other’s behavior
and respond aggressively. This response, in turn, is
perceived by others as aggressive and can result in a
hostile reaction. Ultimately, the person with a HAB
experiences a confirmation of their original, but distorted,
belief, and the hostile schema is strengthened.
Development of Aggressive Schemas
Hostile schemas form through repeated exposure to
and experiences with aggressive responses to interpersonal
conflict. Children who are aggressive, or who
experience hostile situations frequently in their daily
lives, are expected to have more well-established and
accessible hostility-related schemas. Such children
may include those who are exposed to community
and/or marital violence, watch violent television, and
play violent video games. Research has shown that
children who frequently experience violent situations,
even who play violent video games, show the HAB.
Adults who have aggressive personalities and who
experience physical pain have also been found to perceive
ambiguously hostile information as more aggressive
than did aggressive and nonaggressive individuals
who did not experience pain. Therefore, certain violent
or uncomfortable situations may induce the HAB,
especially in people with aggressive personalities.
Implications
The reduction of exposure to and positive experiences
with aggressive resolutions of conflict should reduce
the HAB and aggressive responses that result from
this biased processing. Therefore, reduction in aggressive
children’s access to violent media and to witnessing
reinforcing or positive outcomes to aggression
should reduce the accessibility of hostile event
schemas, or at least reduce the likelihood of acting
upon them. Interventions that help people to control
their anger during conflict and to think of nonaggressive
solutions have been shown to be effective in
reducing aggressive responses in children who display
reactive aggression.
Kathryn B. Anderson
Loranel M. Graham
See also Aggression; Attributions; Frustration–Aggression
Hypothesis; Schemas
Further Readings
Anderson, K. B., Anderson, C. A., Dill, K. E., & Deuser, W. E.
(1988). The interactive relations between trait hostility,
pain and aggressive thoughts. Aggressive Behavior, 24,
161–171.
Crick, N. R., & Dodge, K. A. (1996). Social informationprocessing
mechanisms in reactive and proactive
aggression. Child Development, 67, 993–1002.

HOSTILE MASCULINITY SYNDROME
Definition
Hostile masculinity syndrome refers to a personality
profile that includes interrelated attitudes and emotions
that may be grouped within two primary components:
The first consists of hostile, distrustful, insecure feelings
toward people, particularly women, accompanied
by misogynous (woman-hating) attitudes, such as
beliefs that rape victims secretly desire to be victimized.
The second component consists of a desire to
control and dominate women that results in deriving
sexual arousal and gratification from such domination
over women. Men who have such a syndrome typically
also have an insecure sense of masculinity and are
hypersensitive to rejection from women. They are frequently
highly narcissistic as well.
Analysis
Research has shown that not only are there differences
among men within a society in the extent to which
they fit such a profile, but there are some reliable
differences in comparing societies to each other.
Cross-cultural research focusing on some of the key
components of hostile masculinity, such as men’s hostility
toward women, has found not only differences
among different societies but also that such hostility
is highly correlated with women’s hostility toward
women. Interestingly, however, the degree of women’s
hostility toward men was found to be highly correlated
with women’s status in the society. In societies
where women’s status was more equal to that of
men’s, there was relatively less hostility toward men
than in societies with lower status for women. In contrast,
men’s hostility toward women was not found to
be correlated with women’s status in the various societies,
and research continues to look at the factors that
may be responsible for such cross-cultural variation.
The United States was found to be relatively high in
both men’s hostility toward women and women’s hostility
toward men. India was found to be very high on
both, whereas Scandinavian countries (e.g., Sweden)
were found to be among the lowest in both types of
hostility.
Males having such a hostile masculinity syndrome
of feelings and attitudes are expected to be more motivated
to behave in negative ways toward females and
to condone such behavior in others. Research has
found support for such expectations. This profile has
been useful in research predicting which males are
more likely to be sexually aggressive toward females,
with the findings revealing that men who are relatively
high in this syndrome are more likely to sexually
coerce females. This is particularly the case if the men
also have a generally promiscuous sexual lifestyle
whereby they are frequently in relatively short-term
sexual relationships, without much personal attachment
or intimacy.
Hostile masculinity, or some of its key components,
has also been shown to predict other behaviors
in addition to direct sexual aggression. For example,
an association has been found with men’s nonsexual
physical and verbal aggression toward their marital
partners as well as with sexual harassment of women.
In addition to these findings outside the laboratory,
research in laboratory settings has shown some similar
predictive ability of this personality profile. For
example, after being mildly insulted in a laboratory
setting, males who scored higher on hostile masculinity
have been found to give more aversive “punishment”
to females than those lower on this personality
profile and to talk to them in a more domineering and
hostile way. Interestingly, the same personality profile
does not equally predict similar aggression or hostile
speech toward other males, suggesting some specificity
in these men’s motivation to target women.
Neil Malamuth
See also Aggression; Date Rape; Narcissistic Reactance
Theory of Sexual Coercion; Power; Rape
Further Readings
Malamuth, N. (1996). Research on the confluence model of
sexual aggression based on feminist and evolutionary
perspectives. In D. Buss & N. Malamuth (Eds.), Sex,
power, conflict: Evolutionary and feminist perspectives
(pp. 269–295). New York: Oxford University Press.
HOSTILE MEDIA BIAS
Hostile Media Bias———447
Definition
During George W. Bush’s first presidency, conservative
writers Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg published
books accusing the U.S. mainstream media of
liberal bias. Liberal writer Al Franken replied with a
book that denied liberal media bias and claimed that

448———Hot Hand Effect
the same news outlets had right-wing economic and
editorial leanings. Contradictory media critiques are
also found in international political conflicts from the
Middle East to Bosnia. The hostile media bias phenomenon
happens when opposed groups of political
partisans judge the same nonpartisan news coverage
as biased against themselves.
History and Modern Usage
In a typical lab study of hostile media bias, people
recruited from opposing groups in an issue (e.g., the
Arab–Israeli conflict) watch news coverage of that
issue, then make judgments of its bias. Survey research
is also used to study beliefs about media bias in general.
The general finding is that each group judges the
coverage to be biased against its own side and believes
that it would turn neutral viewers against the group’s
own cause.
Many studies in social psychology, however, show
that people overestimate how much public opinion
supports their own view—this is called the false consensus
effect. If groups overestimate their own support
from the people, why do they underestimate their own
support in the media?
It was first thought that group members might actually
selectively remember more material that opposed
their viewpoint from news coverage. However, studies
measuring what people remembered did not support
this. People tended to remember content that supported
their own side but then judged the presentation
as biased against themselves anyway. There is more
support for the explanation that because partisans
believe that the truth is on their side, they judge an
evenhanded report as not showing the truth, therefore
biased. (Consider how you might react to a documentary
evenhandedly assessing Adolf Hitler’s good and
bad points.)
Another well-supported explanation, though,
traces hostile media perceptions to activist culture:
Group members learn claims of hostile media bias and
apply them to coverage they see. At the group level,
this protects group members from exposure to conflicting
viewpoints and leads them to rely on likeminded
media outlets for news. This may make them
less optimistic about popular support, because beliefs
about hostile, influential media tend to undermine the
false consensus effect. These explanations of hostile
media bias can be applied to any situation where a
third party catches flak from conflicting sides, from
the United Nations to football referees.
Roger Giner-Sorolla
See also False-Consensus Effect; Self-Reference Effect
Further Readings
Giner-Sorolla, R., & Chaiken, S. (1994). The causes of
hostile media judgments. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 30, 165–180.
Matheson, K., & Dursun, S. (2001). Social identity
precursors to the hostile media phenomenon: Partisan
perceptions of coverage of the Bosnian conflict. Group
Processes and Intergroup Relations, 4, 116–125.
Vallone, R. P., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1985). The hostile
media phenomenon: Biased perception and perceptions of
media bias in coverage of the Beirut massacre. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 577–585.
HOT HAND EFFECT
Definition
Many sports fans, commentators, players, and even
coaches share a belief that a particular player can for
some period of time have the hot hand; that is, be “in
the zone,” “on a roll,” “unstoppable,” or “playing their
A-game.” The hot hand effect refers to the tendency
for people to expect streaks in sports performance to
continue. For example, people believe that a basketball
player’s chances of making a shot are higher if the
player had just made the previous shots, and gamblers
believe in bettors being “on fire” and having lucky
winning streaks.
The hot hand effect is typically discussed in two
ways. In the basketball-shooting example, the hot
hand effect pertains to the belief that a hot player has
an increased likelihood of making the next shot he or
she takes. Recently, the term hot hand effect has been
used more generally to refer to when people expect
streaks to continue for any sequence of events with
just two outcomes (e.g., hits vs. misses in basketball
shooting, or wins vs. losses in roulette betting).
It is important to distinguish between two terms:
the hot hand effect and the hot hand (also sometimes
labeled positive recency). The former refers to
people’s beliefs about hot hand performances, while

the latter refers to the actual occurrence of hot streaks
in sports performances.
Evidence
Although belief in the hot hand in basketball is quite
common, analyses of the shooting statistics of professional
basketball players playing for the Philadelphia
76ers, New Jersey Nets, New York Knicks, and the
Boston Celtics showed that, in fact, basketball players
do not get the hot hand. The disparity between
people’s perceptions of streaks and the existence of
actual streaks was confirmed with a controlled experiment
in which varsity college basketball players
made free throws. Before each shot, both the players
and observers predicted the outcome of the attempt.
Both players and observers believed that some players
were hot while shooting free throws, but only 1 out of
the 26 players actually showed positive dependencies
between shots and an unusual number of streaks.
Psychologists and statisticians have examined athletic
performances from a variety of sports other than
basketball to seek evidence for streaky performances.
They have analyzed playing records and tested for one
or more of the following indicators of the hot hand:
positive dependencies, unusually long streaks, or an
unusually high number of streaks. In addition to basketball
shooting, researchers have failed to document
evidence for the hot hand in baseball hitting and scoring,
professional golf putting, volleyball scoring, and
baseball and basketball game winning.
Altogether, the bulk of research findings indicate
that actual hot (and cold) playing streaks are more rare
in sports than people believe. However, some evidence
for streaky performances was found in bowling,
hockey goaltending, billiards, horseshoes, tennis,
darts, and amateur golf putting in a laboratory setting.
This seems to suggest that nonreactive, turn-based,
uniform, individual sports are more likely to yield evidence
of hot hand performances than are more reactive
team sports events that involve more external and
situational factors.
Research on gambling beliefs also supports the hot
hand effect. Gamblers’ responses to a survey indicated
that they believe that three distinct factors contribute to
winning: chance, skill, and luck. Belief in the power of
skill and luck could account for the findings that gamblers
playing roulette (a) had more confidence that
they would win a bet after having won the previous
Hot Hand Effect———449
bet(s) and (b) also increased their bet amounts. Belief
in lucky winning streaks persists even if the game is
based purely on chance (e.g., roulette) and despite the
fact that the odds of most casino games are not in the
gamblers’ favor.
Psychological Mechanism
Belief in the hot hand has been explained within the
framework of the representativeness heuristic. People
believe that very short sequences should be representative
of long sequences produced by the same process.
For sequences produced by a random process, people
expect the prototypical random sequence to be composed
of approximately equal proportions of the possible
outcomes (50–50), balanced in unrealistically
short runs, and not patterned in any obvious manner.
Hence, there is a tendency for people to expect an
excessive number of alternations and short streaks in
judgments of random sequences.
Given this concept of the prototypical random
sequence, when people observe a sequence with seemingly
few alternations and long streaks (as is often
the case with basketball shooting), they will judge the
sequence as being unrepresentative of a random
process. The idea of a random mechanism is therefore
rejected and replaced by an expectation of hot hand
patterns.
For example, people’s misconception of what a
random sequence should look like leads them to perceive
a basketball player who has just hit four baskets
in a row as hot, when in fact it is not unusual for a
truly random sequence to contain a streak of four.
Implications
The hot hand effect has implications for financial decisions
and behaviors, such as gambling or investing
money. The tendency for people to perceive unusual
streaks that do not actually exist can cause them to bet
money on outcomes that they mistakenly believe they
can predict. For example, research shows that people
sometimes overinvest in stocks that are doing well in
the short term and not think enough about the longterm
behavior of stock prices. Predicting outcomes
based on a misperception of streaks and short sequences
can be financially costly.
An T. Oskarsson
Joanne Kane

450———Hyperbolic Discounting
See also Gambler’s Fallacy; Representativeness Heuristic
Further Readings
Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand
in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences.
Cognitive Psychology, 17, 295–314.
HYPERBOLIC DISCOUNTING
Definition
Hyperbolic discounting refers to the tendency for
people to increasingly choose a smaller-sooner reward
over a larger-later reward as the delay occurs sooner
rather than later in time. When offered a larger reward
in exchange for waiting a set amount of time, people
act less impulsively (i.e., choose to wait) as the
rewards happen further in the future. Put another way,
people avoid waiting more as the wait nears the present
time. Hyperbolic discounting has been applied to
a wide range of phenomena. These include lapses in
willpower, health outcomes, consumption choices
over time, and personal finance decisions.
Background and History
The notion of discounting future rewards relative to
immediate pleasure has a long history. People generally
want rewards sooner rather than later. Thus,
options that delay a reward appear less attractive, and
people discount them. The neoclassical view of economics
assumes that people discount a future reward
by a fixed percentage for each unit of time they must
wait. If the discount rate is 10% per year, a person
should equally like $100 now and $110 a year from
now. As well, the same person should also equally like
$100 in 1 year and $110 in 2 years. According to this
view (called exponential discounting), the amount
people discount a future reward depends only on the
length of the wait and a discount rate that is constant
across different wait times.
Although exponential discounting has been used
widely in economics, a large body of evidence suggests
that it does not explain people’s choices. People choose
as if they discount future rewards at a greater rate when
the delay occurs sooner in time. To illustrate, many
people prefer $100 now to $110 in a day, but very few
people prefer $100 in 30 days to $110 in 31 days. It
appears people would rather wait 1 day for $10 if the
wait happens a month from now. However, they prefer
the opposite if they must wait right now. More generally,
the rate at which people discount future rewards
declines as the length of the delay increases. This phenomenon
has been termed hyperbolic discounting by
the psychologist Richard Herrnstein.
There are several reasons why people might rationally
choose a smaller reward now over a larger reward
later. They may like the sure thing, their preferences
could change, or they may have an urgent need such as
hunger or paying the rent. Even so, people still seem to
show inconsistencies in their choices over time. When
choosing between $100 or $110 a day later as in the
earlier example, people believe that in a month they
will want to wait a day for an extra $10. Yet after a
month passes, many of these people will reverse their
preferences and now choose the immediate $100 rather
than wait a day for an additional $10. In sum, even
when facing the same exact choice, people act impulsively
in the short term but exhibit greater patience in
the long term.
The amount that people discount future rewards
has been mathematically represented in several ways.
The classical economic view of exponential discounting
reduces a future reward by a factor of 1 / (1 + k) t
where k is the constant discount rate per time unit and
t is the length of the delay. The amount a future reward
is discounted depends only on the length of the delay,
given a constant discount rate. Alternatively, hyperbolic
discounting reduces a future reward by a factor
of 1 / (1 + kt) β/α where α and β are greater than zero.
The term hyperbolic is used because this formula is
the generalized function for a hyperbola. With hyperbolic
discounting, the rate of discounting decreases
as the delay occurs further in the future. Thus, the
amount a future reward is discounted depends on
the length of the delay and when the delay occurs.
Hyperbolic discounting will generally discount future
rewards more than exponential discounting for short
delays, yet less than exponential discounting for long
delays.
Two simpler versions of hyperbolic discounting
have also been proposed and widely used. First, the
psychologist Richard Herrnstein has modeled some
behaviors quite well by assuming that α and β are
equal. In this formulation, future rewards are discounted

y a factor of 1 / (1 + kt). Second, the economist
David Laibson has accounted for several phenomena
using a particularly simple form of “quasi-hyperbolic”
discounting. Here, future rewards are discounted by a
factor of βk t for any t > 0 where β < 1. This implies
that people discount future rewards by a constant factor
to reflect the presence of a delay. As well, they also
discount by an exponential factor that grows at a constant
rate with the length of the delay. Although not
truly hyperbolic, this simpler formulation still captures
many of the basic aspects of hyperbolic discounting,
such as greater impulsivity in the short term.
Applications of Hyperbolic
Discounting
Of particular importance to personal well-being,
hyperbolic discounting has been linked to the problems
of addiction and self-control. As an example,
overweight people may realize that they need to
improve their health through more exercise and a
better diet. For the future, they vow to forego all shortterm
temptations in exchange for the greater longterm
rewards of improved health. Presumably, they
prefer this because they use a small discount rate for
all rewards in the distant future. However, after their
next meal, they can not resist having chocolate cake
for dessert. They focus on the instant pleasure the
chocolate cake can provide and heavily discount the
future rewards of better health. After eating the cake,
they may once again intend to follow a diet in the
future. They believe that next time they will want to,
and be able to, turn down the cake. Although these
people really want to follow the regimen necessary for
better health, the immediate reward from short-term
deviations drowns out the heavily discounted future
benefits of healthier eating. Their preference for
healthy eating simply does not hold up in the heat of
the moment. Similar explanations have also been
offered to help account for drug addictions, procrastination,
and other problems of willpower.
Hyperbolic discounting also has important consequences
for how people choose experiences over time.
Given a fixed pool of resources (e.g., money or time),
people might want to choose a sequence of experiences
to maximize their overall enjoyment. Unfortunately,
hyperbolic discounting makes this difficult.
People fail to take advantage of liked options that
become particularly pleasurable only when rarely
Hyperbolic Discounting———451
experienced. For example, the psychologist Richard
Herrnstein proposes that people choose alternatives
over time such that the average pleasure is the same
across every alternative (this is called melioration).
Here, people focus too much on how much pleasure
an item provides at the current rate of consumption.
They should also consider the potential pleasure that
could be obtained by waiting to consume an item. For
example, a steak dinner might be especially enjoyable
when eaten once a month, yet it becomes nothing special
when eaten every other day. In contrast, pizza
might remain moderately enjoyable regardless of
the rate of consumption. By meliorating between the
two options, people fail to maximize their enjoyment.
They choose their current favorites (e.g., steak) too
often rather than keeping them special for a future
occasion.
The economist David Laibson has used hyperbolic
discounting to explain why people simultaneously
have large credit-card debts at a high interest rate and
pre-retirement wealth growing at a lower interest rate.
As predicted by hyperbolic discounting, the rewards
provided by buying something today often outweigh
the discounted displeasure of future payments. This
leads to a sizable credit-card debt. However, when
thinking about their retirement savings in the far
future, people use a much smaller discount rate for
delayed rewards. This makes it more attractive to
invest in alternatives providing a higher expected
return in the long run. Consistent with hyperbolic discounting,
people’s investment behavior exhibits
patience in the long run and impatience in the short
run. People choose to build up sizable credit-card
debts while also prudently accumulating wealth in
homes and retirement programs. The classical economic
view of exponential discounting cannot easily
account for these personal saving decisions using a
single constant discount rate.
Individual and Contextual
Differences
The extent to which people exhibit hyperbolic discounting
of future rewards depends on a number of factors.
Some people (and species) show more hyperbolic
discounting than others across most choice situations.
People also tend to show less hyperbolic discounting
with age, more favorable social comparisons, and more
hedonic rather than utilitarian experiences. Likewise,

452———Hyperbolic Discounting
people find waiting for a larger reward more difficult
when an immediate reward is physically close to them,
openly visible, or partially sensed (e.g., aroma, noise).
Across these diverse conditions, the phenomenon of
hyperbolic discounting does not disappear; rather, it
just influences behavior more or less.
Joseph P. Redden
See also Delay of Gratification; Preference Reversals
Further Readings
Frederick, S., Loewenstein, G., & O’Donoghue, T. (2002).
Time discounting and time preference: A critical review.
Journal of Economic Literature, 40(2), 351–401.

IDENTITY CRISIS
Definition
Erik H. Erikson coined the term identity crisis to
describe the uncertainty, and even anxiety, that adolescents
may feel as they recognize that they are no
longer children and become puzzled and confused
about their present and future roles in life.
Context and Importance
You may recall a time during the teenage years when
you were confused about who you were, what you
should be, and what the future might hold in store
for you. Forming an adult identity involves grappling
with many important questions: What career path best
suits me? What religious, moral, or political values
can I call my own? Who am I as male or female and
as a sexual being? How important are marriage and
raising children to me? Just where do I fit in to society?
These identity issues, often raised at a time when
teenagers are also trying to cope with their rapidly
changing body images and more demanding social
and academic lives, can add significantly to one’s confusion
about who he or she is (or can become).
The Process of Forging Identities
Researchers have developed elaborate interviews,
questioning adolescents and young adults to determine
if interviewees have experienced a crisis (grappled with
identity issues) and whether or not interviewees have
I
453
made commitments (i.e., resolved any issues raised) with
respect to forging occupational, interpersonal, political,
and religious identities.
Based on the answers provided, the interviewee is
classified into one of four identity statuses for each
identity domain:
Identity diffusion: Persons classified as “diffuse” have neither
thought much about nor resolved identity questions
and have failed to chart future life directions. Example: “I
haven’t really thought much about religion and I’m not
sure what to believe.”
Foreclosure: Persons classified as “foreclosed” have
committed to an identity, or identities, without experiencing
the crisis of deciding if these commitments really
suit them well. Example: “My parents are Lutherans and
so I’m a Lutheran; it’s just how it is.”
Moratorium: Persons in this status are currently experiencing
an identity crisis and are asking questions about
various life choices and seeking answers. Example: “I’m
exploring my religious teachings, hoping to determine if
I can live with them. I like some of the answers provided
by my Baptist upbringing, but I’m skeptical about so
much. I’ve been looking into Unitarianism to see if it
might help me overcome my doubts.”
Identity achievement: Identity-achieved individuals
have raised and resolved identity issues by making wellthought-out
personal commitments to various life
domains. Example: “After much soul-searching about
my religion, and other religions too, I finally know what
I believe and what I don’t and how my beliefs will affect
the way I’ll live my life.”

454———Identity Status
Although Erikson assumed that the painful aspects
of identity crises occur early in adolescence and are
often resolved between the ages of 15 and 18, his age
norms are overly optimistic. Research with 12- to
24-year-olds consistently reveals that the vast majority
of 12- to 18-year-olds are identity diffuse or foreclosed,
and not until age 21 and older had the majority
of participants reached the moratorium status (crisis)
or achieved stable identities in any life domain. There
is one intriguing sex difference. Although today’s college
women are just as concerned as men are about
achieving an occupational identity, they attach greater
importance than men do to aspects of identity that
focus on sexuality, personal relationships, and how to
balance career and family goals.
The process of identity achievement is often quite
uneven. One study assessed the identity statuses of
participants in four domains: occupational choice,
gender-role attitudes, religious beliefs, and political
ideologies. Only 5% of participants were in the same
identity status in all areas, with 95% being in two
or even three statuses across the four domains. So
adolescents and young adults may have achieved a
strong sense of identity in one area but still be searching
in others.
How Painful Are Identity Crises?
It may be unfortunate that Erikson used the term crisis
to describe a young person’s search for identity,
because adolescents in the moratorium status do not
appear all that stressed out. In fact, these active identity
seekers typically feel much better about themselves and
their futures than do same-age peers still stuck in the
diffusion or foreclosure statuses. So the active search
for identity is often more uplifting than deflating.
What is most painful or crisis-like about identity
seeking is a long-term failure to establish one. Older
adolescents and young adults still stuck in the diffusion
status are often apathetic and sometimes even
suicidal; alternatively, they may adopt a negative identity,
drifting into antisocial or delinquent behaviors.
These are the individuals who may experience a true
identity crisis after all.
Parenting and Identity Crisis
Parenting clearly affects how adolescents experience
and manage the identity crisis. Individuals who feel
alienated from parents often remain diffuse and experience
serious adjustment problems, whereas those
who feel close to controlling parents often simply
foreclose on identities that parents suggest or dictate
to them and that may prove unsatisfying. Adolescents
who forge healthy identities that suit them well typically
have warm and accepting parents who encourage
identity explorations and who permit their teens to
take their own stands on issues and to become individuals
in their own right.
See also Identity Status; Self; Self-Concept
Further Readings
David R. Shaffer
Archer, S. (1994). Interventions for adolescent identity
development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.).
New York: W. W. Norton.
Kroger, J. (2007). Identity development: Adolescence through
adulthood (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Marcia, J. E., Waterman, A. S., Matteson, D., Archer, S.,
& Orlofsky, J. L. (1993). Ego identity: A handbook for
psychosocial research. New York: Springer.
IDENTITY STATUS
A widely read book by Erik H. Erikson launched a set
of ideas that stimulated the formulation of the concept
of identity status. Writing from a psychoanalytic perspective,
Erikson construed that individuals at each
stage of life (e.g., infancy, childhood, adolescence,
adulthood) have a crisis to resolve, with all positive
resolutions enhancing the foundation of ego identity
that is created during adolescence. Each society is
thought to provide early enhancements of a child’s
imitation and identification with parents. This process
stimulates, in the early years of childhood, an identity
that is based on parental ideals, values, or beliefs.
But during adolescence, society offers a psychosocial
moratorium for the youth to experiment with ideas
about roles, values, goals, and possible commitments
that could expand identity beyond parental ideals to
a more self-constructed identity. During the psychosocial
moratorium (i.e., a time to be free to explore
personal and career goals and options), adolescents
struggle with an identity crisis and formulate an identity
or experience an unsettling state of role confusion
and self-consciousness. By resolving the identity crisis,
an extreme occupation with self-consciousness is

diminished, and a youth identifies a set of goals, values,
and commitments that become the foundation
for an adult identity. Identity resolution brings with it
several strengths in personality, particularly, when the
identity is well received by adult society and is encouraged
and recognized by adults as a useful direction to
life. This recognition can occur through ceremonies,
rituals, or rites of passage (e.g., graduation, scout badges,
or communion).
James Marcia used Erikson’s theory to devise a
concept and research tool to assess identity. The identity-status
paradigm utilizes Erikson’s concepts of crisis
and identity commitments. Crisis means a turning
point, a time for action, a period of exploration and discovery.
Identity commitments refer to the establishment
of goals, accepted values, and faith of the use and
importance of ideologies (such as capitalism, denominational
faith, or political party affiliation). When crisis
or exploration is crossed with commitments, four
identity statuses are defined. These identity statuses
are labeled diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and
achievement. Diffusion status represents a person who
has little or no sense of crisis or exploration and no
firm set of commitments. Foreclosure represents an
individual who has accepted commitments but not
based on exploration or searching. The foreclosed person
has commitments based on parental or adult values
without the experience of exploration. This form of
identity is mostly based in imitation, identification
with parental ideals, and conformity without critical
inspection. The moratorium status involves a person
who is in a deep state of exploration and discovery but
is not ready to make lifelong commitments. Identity
achievement is the pinnacle of identity development.
Individuals who report a state of exploration and firm
commitments are identity achieved.
Identity statuses are categories of four different
states in identity formation. Therefore, identity statuses
are a set of typologies. Four identity statuses are
readily found in any population of adolescents or
emerging adults. Furthermore, over time and with
increasing maturity, a youth can evolve into another
typology. Most longitudinal evidence suggests that
diffused youth can become foreclosed or move into a
moratorium status. And most moratorium-status youth
become identity achieved. However, youth can also
reverse their growth from moratorium back to diffusion
or maybe foreclosure. Also, identity-achieved
individuals can return to moratorium but usually
mature back into a new form of identity-achievement
status. There is always a possibility of progression to
Identity Status———455
more exploration, commitment, or both, but regression
is possible where a youth reverses direction to a simpler
or less complex form of identity.
Each identity status is associated with very different
kinds of personal and social characteristics. Diffused
youth tend to be isolated; conform to peer pressure; go
along with fads; manifest depression, self-consciousness,
and lower self-esteem; and are likely to engage in
delinquent or criminal acts. The absence of values and
goals leave the diffused youth vulnerable to undesirable
social influences. Foreclosed youth conform to
current social norms or rules, are rigid, and have shallow
or pseudo intimacy with their friends and romantic
partners. Moratorium youths are inclined to be
anxious, have positive self-concepts, feel incomplete
and in need of direction, but have good emotional relationships
with others. Identity-achieved youth are goal
directed, make judgments about life from a firm set of
values, and manifest many positive personality characteristics
indicative of positive mental health. They also
have intimate and mature social relationships with
peers and opposite-sex partners.
Identity achievement is associated with several positive
ego mechanisms or cognitive operations. Identityachieved
youth have greater understanding of the self,
have goals and directions in life, feel they are consistent
and coherent as a person, see themselves as having
free will to choose who they are or can become,
and see that their futures have many positive possibilities.
The other identity statuses have very little of these
ego-identity strengths. Identity achievement also brings
a feeling of fidelity, that is, a feeling that whatever
they commit to will be received positively by others.
There are several social conditions that enhance
identity achievement with its states of exploration and
commitment. Parenting that is warm, democratic, and
allows for increasing emotional and physical autonomy
as a youth matures is connected with identity
achievement. Schools that provide supportive and
involved faculty are facilitative of identity achievement.
Positive peer relationships, whereby the adolescent
feels he or she matters to friends, are associated
with identity achievement.
Each of the forms of identity can also be unproductive
in certain social contexts. Diffused status
makes it very difficult for adolescents and emerging
adults to profit from educational environments. Foreclosed
youth become anxious and depressed when
their personal values are threatened or when they lose
close relationships that force them to move on. Moratorium
youth are anxious and unhappy in environments

456———Ideology
that demand conformity and little or no room for exploration.
Identity-achieved youth become uncertain and
self-conscious when they find their firm goals and values
are not proving to help them achieve success.
Gerald Robert Adams
See also Identity Crisis; Influence; Moral Development; Self
Further Readings
Adams, G. R. (1999). The objective measure of ego identity
status: A manual on theory and test construction.
Retrieved from http://www.uoguelph.ca/~gadams
Adams, G. R., Gullotta, T. P., & Montemayor, R. (1992).
Adolescent identity formation. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage.
Marcia, J. E., Waterman, A., Matteson, D., Archer, S., &
Orlofsky, J. (1993). Ego identity: A handbook for
psychosocial research. New York: Springer.
Schwartz, S. J. (2001). The evolution of Eriksonian and
neo-Eriksonian identity theory and research: A review and
integration. Identity, 1(1), 7–58.
IDEOLOGY
Definition
Ideology refers to a system of interrelated beliefs and
values belonging to an individual or group, usually but
not exclusively in the political realm. It is typically
measured on a left or right (or liberal or conservative)
dimension. Research in psychology focuses largely
on the extent to which people’s attitudes are organized
according to ideological schemata and whether they are
linked to personality and other individual differences.
History of the Concept
The concept of ideology originates in the late 18th
century and was used first to refer to the science of
ideas, a discipline that is now called the sociology of
knowledge. The term was later adopted by Karl Marx
and Friedrich Engels and was used in two different
senses, both of which are still common: (1) a neutral
sense, in which ideology refers to any abstract or symbolic
meaning system; and (2) a pejorative (insulting)
sense, in which ideology denotes a web of ideas that
are systematically distorted, contrary to fact, and subject
to false consciousness. Typically, an ideology
stands in relation to a social system, either as an affirmation
of the status quo or in opposition to it.
Although specific ideologies can pertain to cultural,
economic, political, religious, and even scientific matters,
the most common use of the term is in the political
realm. Examples of political ideologies include communism,
socialism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism.
Most political ideologies can be located parsimoniously
on a single left–right dimension that captures
attitudes toward social change versus traditionalism
and egalitarianism versus hierarchy.
Research in Social Psychology
Research at the intersection of psychology and other
social sciences has adopted the value-neutral definition
of ideology but reframed it as an attribute of individuals
rather than collectivities. Thus, ideology is
treated as a complex belief system that is highly integrated
(i.e., logically or psychologically consistent)
within the mind of an individual. Two research questions
have guided much empirical work over the past
50 years. First, does ideology exist? And second, are
there psychological differences that accompany ideological
differences?
P. E. Converse’s 1964 analysis of public opinion
data concluded that the general public is not very
“ideological” in the sense of being constrained by
scholarly definitions of terms such as liberalism and
conservatism. Nevertheless, most people are able to
reliably locate themselves on ideological dimensions,
and doing so seems to have at least symbolic meaning
for them. It is also clear that ideological belief systems
are internally coherent in people who are highly educated,
politically involved, or both, as noted in 1981
by Charles Judd, Jon Krosnick, and Michael Milburn.
In one of the earliest attempts to link personality and
ideology, Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik,
Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford found in 1950
that a rigid, closed-minded, and “authoritarian” personality
style characterized people who are drawn to rightwing
ideologies. Although this work was harshly
criticized, many of its claims have been vindicated. The
weight of evidence indicates that right-wing conservatives
are, on average, lower in open-mindedness and
cognitive complexity and higher in mental rigidity and
personal needs for order, structure, and closure, in

comparison with moderates and liberals, as noted in
2003 by John T. Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie W. Kruglanski,
and Frank J. Sulloway.
See also Attitudes; Authoritarian Personality; Beliefs;
Political Psychology
Further Readings
John T. Jost
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., &
Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality.
New York: Harper.
Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass
publics. In D. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent
(pp. 206–226). New York: Free Press.
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J.
(2003). Political conservatism as motivated social
cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.
Judd, C. M., Krosnick, J. A., & Milburn, M. A. (1981).
Political involvement in attitude structure in the general
public. American Sociological Review, 46, 660–669.
ILLUSION OF CONTROL
Definition
The illusion of control (also known as illusory control)
refers to the tendency for people to exaggerate
their ability to produce a desired outcome. Even when
it comes to controlling random events, people believe
they have control.
Factors That Influence
Illusory Control
Traditionally, people assumed accurate self-knowledge
was crucial for survival and health. In this formulation,
people possessed the ability to correctly judge control
over their environments; accurate knowledge of when
one’s actions produced particular outcomes—and
when they did not—was thought to be critical for functioning
effectively in the world. In a broad sense, this
is true. For example, mentally healthy people know
they cannot control whether the sun rises and sets each
day. At the same time, though, a feeling of being in
control is vital for self-esteem and mental health. The
Illusion of Control———457
problem is people generally overestimate the amount
of control they have over events.
People do not always overestimate their control,
however; contextual factors and characteristics of
the people involved are both very important. At least
six factors contribute to an illusion of control. First,
people must themselves produce the action; others
cannot act for them. Second, the situation is familiar,
rather than unfamiliar. Third, people know in advance
their desired outcome. Fourth, people believe they
exert more control in successful situations than in failure
situations: No one wants to assume unnecessary
responsibility when things go wrong. Fifth, people in
depressed moods tend to believe they have less control
over events than people in nondepressed moods.
(Interestingly, depressed individuals are usually less
susceptible to the illusion of control than nondepressed
individuals; their apparent underestimation of
control actually turns out to be somewhat more realistic.)
Sixth, a personality variable that researchers call
the need for control seems to influence illusions of
control, though this topic requires further study.
Evidence
A large body of evidence supports the illusion of control.
Gambling, for example, would likely lose much
of its appeal without people’s slightly altered perceptions
of control. When gambling, people believe they
can control chance events. For example, studies have
demonstrated people think they have more control
over the outcome of a dice game if they throw the dice
themselves than if someone else throws the dice for
them, and they are less apt to sell a lottery ticket they
chose than a ticket chosen by someone else (presumably
because people errantly infer the odds of winning
increase because they threw the dice or bought the
ticket). In another study, participants cut cards against
a competitor (the person drawing the highest card was
the winner). In one condition in the experiment, the
competitor dressed poorly and appeared nervous; in
the other condition, the competitor dressed elegantly
and looked poised. Even though the appearance of the
competitor has no objective influence on the outcome
of the game, participants wagered more money when
playing against the nervous competitor than when
playing against the composed competitor.
Research also seems to confirm that depressed
individuals are less susceptible to illusions of control

458———Illusion of Transparency
than nondepressed individuals. In an early experiment
on this topic, researchers told participants that pressing
a button might (or might not) turn on a green light
(in reality, whether the light turned on was prearranged;
button pressing actually had no effect). In
one condition, participants gained $0.25 for every
time the light appeared. In another condition, they lost
$0.25 each time they “failed” to make the light appear.
Participants then rated the extent to which their
actions (pressing the button) caused the result (the
light turning on). Results of the study demonstrated
nondepressed individuals thought they were more
responsible for the light turning on than depressed
individuals, especially when their actions brought about
desired outcomes (i.e., gaining $0.25 as opposed to
losing $0.25).
Why People Overestimate
Their Personal Control
Less research has examined the origins of the illusion
of control, but some explanations have been offered.
Originally, researchers thought people simply confused
chance and skill, because situations conducive
to the illusion of control are often similar to situations
in which people demonstrate skill (i.e., a situation in
which people are familiar with the outcomes, personally
active, and successful). More recently, researchers
have proposed the illusion of control might instead be
a heuristic (a rule of thumb people use to make quick
judgments without much thinking). The illusion of
control, then, might result from the continued pairing
of one’s own behavior in a situation with a desired
outcome. Like most heuristics, most of the time this
pairing is correct, but sometimes it is incorrect, as in
situations in which the outcome occurs randomly.
Implications: Is Illusory
Control Healthy?
Feeling out of control is definitely not healthy. People
who feel out of control develop a state of learned helplessness
(i.e., they quit trying and give up). But is feeling
in control healthy, even if it is only an illusion?
On the positive side, perceiving unwarranted control
leads people to experience positive emotions and try
novel, challenging tasks. On the negative side, perceiving
unwarranted control leads people to take foolish,
unnecessary risks, especially in a gambling context.
Overall, illusory control is a trade-off. There probably
exists an optimal level of illusory control, which depends
on situational and personal factors.
Scott J. Moeller
Brad J. Bushman
See also Apparent Mental Causation; Illusory Correlation;
Positive Illusions
Further Readings
Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgments of
contingency in depressed and nondepressed students:
Sadder but wiser? Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 108, 441–485.
Langer, E. J. (1975). The illusion of control. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311–328.
Thompson, S. C. (1999). Illusions of control: How we
overestimate our personal influence. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 8, 187–190.
ILLUSION OF TRANSPARENCY
There are times when people wish to conceal their
thoughts, feelings, and emotions from others. Anxiety
over approaching a potential romantic partner, feelings
of disgust over a disagreeable entrée one is served
at a dinner party, nervousness over delivering a public
speech, or uneasiness stemming from telling a lie—all
are internal states that people may wish, for a variety
of reasons, to keep private.
How well can people conceal their internal states,
and how well do they believe they can do so? Research
suggests that people are often better at keeping their
internal states hidden than they believe—that people
tend to overestimate the extent to which their thoughts,
feelings, and emotions leak out and are apparent to
others. This tendency is known as the illusion of transparency
because people seem to be under the illusion
that others can “see right through them” more than is
actually the case. The illusion of transparency is similar
to the predicament depicted in Edgar Allan Poe’s
classic tale, The Tell-Tale Heart. In that story, Poe’s
character falsely believes that some police officers can
sense his guilt and anxiety over a crime he has committed,
a fear that ultimately gets the best of him and
causes him to give himself up unnecessarily.
Researchers have examined the illusion of transparency
in a wide variety of different studies. In one

experiment, for example, research participants were
placed into a situation that was a mild version of the
one from Poe’s story; that is, they were asked to tell a
number of true and false statements to an audience
and then to predict the success with which the audience
could spot their lies. Just like in The Tell-Tale
Heart, participants in that study believed that they had
leaked more cues to their deception than they actually
had, causing them to overestimate the degree to which
the audience could detect their falsehoods. Although
observers can sometimes tell when people are lying,
most people are better liars than they realize!
In another experiment, participants were asked to
keep a straight face as an observer watched them sip a
number of different drinks, one of which had an
extremely disagreeable taste. When participants tasted
the disagreeable drink, they felt as though their disgust
was “written all over their face,” despite their best
efforts to conceal it, and that observers would therefore
be able to tell which drink had been the disagreeable
one based solely on their reactions. And yet, just
like in the lie-detection study, observers who studied
the tasters’ facial expressions were hardly able to tell
which drink was which, and tasters overestimated the
degree to which their disgust was perceptible by a
considerable margin.
Other experiments have demonstrated the illusion
of transparency in a number of other domains. In one
study, individuals who took part in a negotiation
thought that their privately held preferences—that is,
which issues they valued highly and which ones were
less important to them—were more apparent to their
negotiation counterpart than was actually the case. In
another study, research participants who gave extemporaneous
speeches in front of a video camera believed
that their nervousness was more noticeable than it actually
was. In yet another study, participants who committed
a mock-crime (e.g., pretending to steal some
money) overestimated the extent to which an interrogator
could detect their guilt. Although all of these various
studies differ from one another in many ways, the basic
finding is the same across all of them: People feel as
though their internal sensations leak out of them more
than they actually do. People are simply not as transparent
as they think.
Why do people succumb to the illusion of transparency?
The phenomenon appears to stem from what
is known as an anchoring effect. When a person
attempts to determine how his or her internal state
appears (or, more accurately, does not appear) in the
eyes of others, the person is likely to have difficulty
getting beyond his or her own, private, phenomenological
experience. In effect, individuals “anchor” their
judgments on their own experience of their internal
states, which can be quite powerful, and adjust insufficiently
when they attempt to determine how things
appear to others. It can simply be difficult to realize
that the intensity with which one feels an internal state
may not be matched by an outward expression that is
equally as intense. As a result, people exaggerate the
extent to which their internal states leak out and overestimate
the extent to which others can detect their private
feelings.
The illusion of transparency is similar to a number
of other egocentric biases in human judgment. In particular,
it resembles both the spotlight effect, people’s
tendency to overestimate the extent to which others
notice their appearance and behavior, and the curse of
knowledge, people’s difficulty setting aside their own
private stores of knowledge when they imagine how
the world appears to others. In each case, people err in
assuming that others are necessarily aware of or attentive
to the same thing that they themselves are. Both
of these phenomena may thus represent instances of
a more general difficulty people have distinguishing
between internal stimuli (e.g., how nervous one feels)
and external perceptions (e.g., how nervous one
appears)—a difficulty that can impair one’s ability to
take others’ perspectives and see things (including
oneself) as they do.
Ken Savitsky
See also Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic; Deception
(Lying); Self-Presentation; Spotlight Effect
Further Readings
Illusion of Transparency———459
Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (1999). The spotlight effect and
the illusion of transparency: Egocentric assessments of
how we’re seen by others. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 8, 165–168.
Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The
illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’
ability to read our emotional states. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 75, 332–346.
Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of
transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 618–625.
Van Boven, L., Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (2003). The
illusion of transparency in negotiations. Negotiation
Journal, 19, 117–131.

460———Illusory Correlation
ILLUSORY CORRELATION
An illusory correlation occurs when a person perceives
a relationship between two variables that are not in
fact correlated. In the first study to demonstrate this
phenomenon, participants were presented with pairs
of words from two stimulus lists. Each word from the
first list was paired an equal number of times with each
word from the second list. Later, when participants
were asked to estimate the number of times words
from each of the two lists had been paired together,
they consistently overestimated the number of pairings
that had occurred between (a) pairs of words that differed
visually from the others (i.e., unusually long
words) and (b) pairs of words that shared some semantic
association (e.g., lion and tiger). Thus, although all
pairs occurred equally often, people gave higher frequency
estimates for certain types of word pairs.
The importance of this bias for social psychology
concerns its role in stereotyping. Historically, stereotypes
were believed to result from defective personality
types or were based on overgeneralization of some
kernel of truth that existed in the world. Illusory correlation
studies provided another basis of stereotyping
by suggesting that people might form a stereotype
about a group simply as a by-product of the way their
minds normally process information about the world.
In a study to test this hypothesis, researchers presented
participants with a series of statements about
members of two groups, Group A and Group B. The
statements described members of the groups performing
desirable (e.g., “John, a member of Group A, visited
a sick friend in the hospital”) or undesirable (e.g.,
“John, a member of Group A, always talks about himself
and his problems”) behaviors. Each participant
read 18 desirable statements and 8 undesirable statements
about members of Group A and 9 desirable
statements and 4 undesirable statements about members
of Group B. The total number of statements about
Group A was double that of Group B (i.e., 26 statements
vs. 13 statements), but the ratio of desirable to
undesirable statements was identical for both groups
(i.e., 18 desirable and 8 undesirable vs. 9 desirable
and 4 undesirable).
Because membership in Group B and the undesirable
statements were the two less frequent occurrences
(like the pairs of longer words in the original
research), they were more noticeable. Later, participants
overestimated the number of times they had
read about a member of Group B doing something
undesirable. Moreover, participants also rated Group B
less favorably than they did Group A. Thus, people perceived
a relationship that didn’t exist in what they read.
In another experiment, desirable behaviors were
used as the novel social occurrence. Participants again
read statements about Group A and Group B. However,
this time both groups performed more undesirable
than desirable behaviors (i.e., Group A: 16 undesirable
and 8 desirable; Group B: 8 undesirable and 4
desirable). Again, the ratio of desirable to undesirable
statements was the same for both groups. When asked
to estimate how many undesirable versus desirable
behaviors members of both groups had performed,
participants consistently overestimated the frequency
of members of the smaller group (i.e., Group B) performing
the less frequent behavior (i.e., desirable
behavior). Consequently, in this study, Group B was
rated more favorably than Group A.
Although evaluatively equivalent information was
provided about both groups, people perceived the
groups differently because of the effect of distinctive
information. This is known as a distinctiveness-based
illusory correlation because a relationship is believed
to exist between two variables as the result of the
special attention given to distinctive (i.e., infrequent)
information.
Expectancy-based illusory correlations are misperceptions
of relationships due to people’s preexisting
expectations. They provide an explanation for how
stereotypes are perpetuated based on an individual’s
preexisting belief about a group. They are often studied
using similar techniques to those found in distinctiveness-based
illusory correlation research.
In one experiment, participants read sentences
describing people with different occupations. Each of
the sentences described a person with a trait word that
was stereotypic of the occupation (e.g., a helpful
doctor, a busy waitress) or neutral (e.g., a humorous
doctor, a humorous waitress). All of the adjectives
were paired with all of the occupations an equal number
of times. Yet when participants were asked to estimate
the number of times each pairing occurred, they
consistently overestimated the number of times that
the stereotypic-traits had been paired with their corresponding
occupations. The effect is known as an
expectancy-based illusory correlation because people’s
stereotypic expectancies about certain occupations
lead them to perceive a relationship where none actually
exists.
Alternative theories have been provided to explain
why illusory correlations occur. One alternative

suggests that research participants are motivated to
make sense out of information they receive during a
study. Because participants receive information about
individuals from two different groups, the participants
may assume that some difference must exist between
the groups. The participants’ attempts to distinguish
between the two groups produce different evaluations.
Another theory proposes that illusory correlations are
due to information loss. Participants are not able to
remember all of the information presented about the
groups; however, because they learn more information
about the larger group, they remember more information
about this group when asked to make an evaluation
about it later. Because they remember more
information about the larger group and the majority
of the information they remember is positive, participants
evaluate the larger groups more favorably.
Similarly, another explanation suggests that illusory
correlations occur not because pairings of infrequent
occurrences are more distinctive but rather because
information about the most common pairings (i.e.,
larger group with the more frequent behaviors) is so
easy to recall.
The findings from both distinctiveness-based and
expectancy-based illusory correlation studies are
important because they demonstrate how a perceptual
bias can result from normally functioning cognitive
mechanisms. When this research was first reported, it
challenged the then-conventional beliefs that stereotypes
were the result of individual personality syndromes
or that they were derived from an underlying
reality. Distinctiveness-based illusory correlation
research demonstrates how stereotypes are constructed
by the everyday cognitive mechanisms that are constantly
operating within the human mind. Similarly,
research on expectancy-based illusory correlations
demonstrates how stereotypic beliefs are perpetuated
through the biased processing of information when it is
guided by a perceiver’s prior beliefs.
David L. Hamilton
Joel A. Thurston
See also Availability Heuristic; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Hamilton, D. L., & Gifford, R. K. (1976). Illusory correlation
in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of
stereotypic judgments. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 12, 392–407.
Implementation Intentions———461
Hamilton, D. L., & Rose, T. L. (1980). Illusory correlation
and the maintenance of stereotypical beliefs. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 832–845.
Stroessner, S. J., & Plaks, J. E. (2001). Illusory correlation
and stereotype formation: Tracing the arc of research over
a quarter century. In G. B. Moskovitz (Ed.), Cognitive
social psychology: The Princeton Symposium on the
legacy and future of social cognition (pp. 247–259).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
IMPLEMENTATION INTENTIONS
A goal intention specifies a desired future state in the
form of “I intend to perform/achieve Z!” (e.g., to exercise
frequently/to be thin). However, merely setting a
goal, or wanting very much to achieve it, is not sufficient
to actually attain it. The correlation between goal
intentions and actual behavior is quite low; the strength
of one’s goal intention typically explains only 20% to
30% of the variance in goal achievement. One strategy
designed to improve goal attainment is to additionally
form an implementation intention. An implementation
intention is a simple plan in the form of “If X, then
I will Y!” that specifies an anticipated goal-relevant
situation, X, and a goal-directed response, Y, that will
help achieve the goal. For example, an implementation
intention formed to support the goal intention “to exercise
frequently” would follow the form of “If it is
sunny outside when I get up in the morning, then I will
walk to work rather than take the bus.” In other words,
saying “I want to exercise more” doesn’t accomplish
very much. But planning, “If it’s a sunny morning,
then I’ll walk to work,” can increase one’s chances of
actually reaching that goal of exercising more.
How Do Implementation
Intentions Work?
An implementation intention is formed by a conscious
act of will. Its effects, however, come about by automatic,
effortless action control that is based on the following
psychological mechanisms. First, specifying an
anticipated critical situation in the if-component of the
implementation intention (i.e., the sunny morning)
serves to heighten the activation of its mental representation
(i.e., sunny mornings are more noticeable to
you). As a consequence, the critical situation is more
easily recognized, more readily attended to, and more
effectively recalled. Second, implementation intentions

462———Implementation Intentions
facilitate goal pursuit by making the planned response
(specified in the then-component) automatic in response
to that critical situation. Once a link is formed between
the anticipated critical situation and the goal-directed
response in the form of an if-then statement, the individual
encountering the situation is able to enact the
response immediately, efficiently, and without a second
act of conscious will. In other words, when our
aspiring athlete sees the sun when she wakes up, she’ll
think “I’ll walk to work”—right away, without effort,
and without having to decide again what she should
do on sunny mornings to achieve her goal of exercising
more. This automaticity has been supported in several
studies demonstrating immediacy (i.e., quicker
responding), efficiency (i.e., requiring fewer cognitive
resources), and the redundancy of consciousness (i.e.,
initiation occurred even without conscious awareness
of the presence of the critical situation). By creating
strong mental links between an anticipated situation
and a planned response, implementation intentions
allow people to work toward their goals automatically,
like a habit formed through the pairing of situations
and responses repeatedly in daily life. Implementation
intentions, for this reason, have been said to create
instant habits or strategic automaticity.
What Kinds of Problems Can
Implementation Intentions Solve?
Implementation intentions have been used to combat
four potential problems for goal pursuit: failing to get
started, getting derailed, becoming rigid, and overextending
oneself.
First, once a goal has been set, people often fail to
initiate goal-directed responses when given the opportunity.
There are a number of reasons for this: Individuals
may fail to notice that an opportunity to get
started on their goal pursuit has arrived, may be unsure
of how they should act when the moment presents
itself, or may simply forget about their goal when busy
with other things. As described earlier, implementation
intentions make the critical situation easier to notice
and the response easier to perform. It is not surprising
then that implementation intentions reduce this problem
of getting started on one’s goals even when busy
with other things. In one study, implementation intentions
helped individuals perform the necessary behavior
when their goal intention (i.e., writing about their
Christmas Eve) had to be performed at a busy time (i.e.,
during Christmas Day). Or, in another study, individuals
who formed implementation intentions about when
and where to exercise were more likely to exercise at
the place and time specified and therefore more likely
to achieve their overall goal to exercise more. Implementation
intentions have helped people achieve other
health goals, such as regular breast self-examination,
cervical cancer screenings, mammography, medication
compliance, and healthy eating. Moreover, implementation
intentions were found to facilitate the attainment
of goals that are easy to forget (e.g., regular intake of
vitamin pills).
Second, individuals may fail to achieve their goals
because they get derailed from a goal-directed course
of action. Because many goal pursuits entail continuous
striving and repeated behavioral performances,
one must shield goal pursuit from distractions. These
distractions can come in the form of temptations,
moods that can unknowingly affect one’s ability to
succeed, or habits that compete with one’s chosen
course of action. For example, implementation intentions
were found to block the distracting effects of
temptations in the form of entertaining advertisements
(during a math test) by inhibiting attention to the distraction.
Implementation intentions were also found to
effectively counteract the adverse effects of moods for
goal pursuit. Implementation intentions can also protect
goal pursuit from unwanted habits (e.g., ordering
unhealthy food in a restaurant) in favor of a newly set
change goal (e.g., eating healthy food). Research has
found that habitual eating behaviors and implementation
intentions each have an independent effect on
subsequent healthy eating. That is, no matter whether
the old unhealthy eating habits were weak or strong,
implementation intentions improved the individual’s
diet. Prejudicial feelings and stereotypical beliefs are
another habitual response that can be managed with
implementation intentions; implementation intentions
helped participants suppress the automatic activation
of prejudicial feelings and stereotypical beliefs when
mere fairness goals could not.
Third, individuals may fail to achieve their goals
because they become rigid in their goal pursuit. They
may either need to disengage from their goals because
of new information that changes the value of the goal,
or they may need to switch their means of approaching
that goal because it has become ineffective.
Research has shown that there are a number of ways
that implementation intentions combat rigidity in goal
pursuit:
1. Goal pursuit by implementation intentions respects
the quality of the superordinate goal, including its

level of situational activation (i.e., if the goal is relevant
in a given situation), the degree to which the
goal is still held, and the strength of the goal.
2. Specifying a good opportunity to act on one’s implementation
intention does not make a person oblivious
to alternative better opportunities.
3. Forming implementation intentions does not make a
person unresponsive to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness
of his or her if-then plans (i.e., if these plans
turn out to be counterproductive, they are discarded,
and the individual is able to operate on the goal
intention alone).
4. Implementation intentions can be used to disrupt the
escalation of commitment (i.e., when one course of
action isn’t working, but the individual keeps increasing
his or her effort rather than abandoning his or her
pursuit).
A final obstacle to goal pursuit is overextending the
self. Individuals who expend effort on a given goal
pursuit experience a subsequent reduction in the ability
to self-regulate; this is called ego depletion. Ego
depletion results from having drained one’s regulatory
resources by exercising self-control in a demanding
first task; the ego-depleted individual then shows lowered
performance in a subsequent task because these
self-regulatory resources are now lacking. Because
implementation intentions make self-regulation more
automatic, they can be used to prevent the emergence
of ego depletion (on the first task) as well as to enhance
performance (on the second task) once ego depletion
has occurred.
Research on implementation intentions has demonstrated
that making if-then plans is a very effective
self-regulation strategy of goal striving. The positive
effects of this strategy are based on intentionally
switching action control from conscious guidance by
a goal intention to direct control by preplanned critical
situational cues.
See also Ego Depletion; Goals
Further Readings
Elizabeth J. Parks-Stamm
Anja Achtziger
Peter M. Gollwitzer
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1993). Goal achievement: The role of
intentions. European Review of Social Psychology,
4, 141–185.
Implicit Association Test———463
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong
effects of simple plans. American Psychologist,
54, 493–715.
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation
intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of
effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, 38, 69–119.
Sheeran, P., Milne, S., Webb, T. L., & Gollwitzer, P. M.
(2005). Implementation intentions and health behaviors.
In M. Conner & P. Norman (Eds.), Predicting health
behaviour (2nd ed., pp. 276–323). Buckingham,
UK: Open University Press.
IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST
Definition
Psychologists have long suspected the existence of
thoughts and feelings that are not accessible by simply
asking a person to report them. It may be that
people are unwilling to report what they think and
feel. Or, even more likely, people may not be aware of
everything that they think and feel. Beginning in the
1980s, efficient alternatives to self-report measures
were invented to study implicit or unconscious forms
of thoughts and feelings. One such measure is the
Implicit Association Test (IAT).
The IAT requires respondents to rapidly sort items
from four different categories into groups. For example,
imagine sorting a deck of playing cards—with red
hearts, red diamonds, black clubs, and black spades—
two times. For the first time, all the hearts and diamonds
are sorted into one pile and all the clubs and
spades are sorted into a second pile. This would be
quite easy to do because the suits are being sorted by
a common perceptual feature—color. Now imagine
doing the same task but this time sorting clubs and
hearts into one pile and diamonds and spades into the
other. This would probably be harder and take longer
to complete because clubs and hearts are not as related
to each other as are hearts and diamonds. The simple
idea is that things that are associated by some feature
are easier to put together than things that are not
associated.
Now translate the idea of sorting cards by their suit
to sorting items by their social categories. A gender
IAT, for example, would provide a measure of the relative
strength with which female and male are associated
with family versus career concepts. Like sorting
cards by their suit, sorting female with family and male

464———Implicit Attitudes
with career would be easier than sorting female with
career and male with family. The IAT can thus provide
a measure of the strength of association between mental
constructs: categories such as “female” or “male”
on the one hand and attributes such as “family” or
“career” on the other. A gender IAT of this type functions
as a measure of implicit stereotype. It measures
strength of association between category and attribute
by using the time it takes to make the pairings, and the
number of errors in classifying, while respondents are
trying to respond rapidly. The strength of association
between categories and evaluative attributes such as
good and bad provides a measure of implicit attitude,
and the strength of association between self and evaluative
attributes provides a measure of implicit selfesteem.
The IAT is best administered via computer
and can use words, pictures, or sounds to represent
concepts. This makes the IAT flexible enough to
administer to the blind, young children, and others
who are unable to read.
How to Make an IAT
Several articles have described methods of constructing
an IAT. Sample IATs may be found at https://implicit
.harvard.edu, and background papers and information
about programs appear at http://projectimplicit.net/.
Facts About IAT Results
• The IAT has been used in research all over the world,
revealing the pervasiveness of phenomena of implicit
attitudes and stereotypes.
• Implicit biases revealed by the IAT are often not
observed on parallel self-report (explicit) measures.
• Because of the frequent deviation of IAT measures
from parallel explicit (self-report) measures, IAT
results sometimes surprise a person—revealing information
that was not consciously available.
• Implicit bias is observed even in children as young as
4 years of age.
• Implicit biases have been observed to vary as a function
of one’s own group membership and life experiences.
• IAT measures have effectively predicted behavior
such as friendliness, giving resources, and other preferential
decisions about members of different groups.
That is, those people who show stronger IATmeasured
biases against a target social group are also
more likely to discriminate against that target group
and its members.
• IAT measures can be influenced by situations of
administration but nevertheless show stability across
time.
Dana R. Carney
Brian A. Nosek
Anthony G. Greenwald
Mahzarin R. Banaji
See also Accessibility; Implicit Attitudes; Research Methods;
Self-Reports; Social Cognition
Further Readings
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social
cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.
Psychological Review, 102, 4–27.
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K.
(1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit social
cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1464–1480.
Greenwald, A. G., Nosek, B. A., & Banaji, M. R. (2003).
Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: I.
An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 85, 197–216.
Nosek, B. A., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2005).
Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: II.
Method variables and construct validity. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 166–180.
Poehlman, T. A., Uhlmann, E., Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji,
M. R. (2006). Understanding and using the Implicit
Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity.
Manuscript under review.
IMPLICIT ATTITUDES
Attitudes provide summary assessments that assist
in decisions about how to interact with the world. An
attitude is an association between a concept and an
evaluation—positive or negative, favorable or unfavorable,
desirable or undesirable. Attitudes help guide
people’s judgment and behavior. Should I approach
the bear with the big claws or run away? Should I eat
this cactus? Do I like members of that group? In short,
is this thing good or bad?
One way that attitudes can be measured is by asking
people to report their feelings. For example, to find
out someone’s attitude toward ice cream, we might ask

the person to rate his or her attitude on a response scale
ranging from 1 (dislike ice cream very much) to 8 (like
ice cream very much). Alternatively, attitudes might be
inferred indirectly, based on performance on a task
designed to measure associations between concepts
and evaluations. For example, imagine a deck of playing
cards that, instead of four suits, had examples of
flowers and insects, such as tulip and beetle, and words
with good or bad meaning, such as wonderful and horrible.
Someone with positive associations with flowers
and negative associations with insects would probably
sort these cards into two piles faster if “flowers” and
“good” things have to go in one pile (and “insects” and
“bad” words in the other), compared to sorting “flowers”
and “bad” things into one pile (and “insects” and
“good” things in the other). The ease of putting flowers
and insects with good things compared to bad
things is an indirect indication of attitudes. This example
describes the logic of the Implicit Association Test.
The two ways of measuring attitudes (described
in the previous paragraph) are quite different. One
requires that people self-assess their feelings and then
provide a rating that summarizes the feeling (I like ice
cream, “6”). The other does not require any direct
thought about how one feels. Instead, a respondent
sorts concepts as quickly as possible, and attitudes are
inferred based on the performance. These two types
of measurement approaches are interpreted to reflect
different types of attitudes—explicit attitudes and
implicit attitudes.
Implicit Attitudes
Psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin
Banaji defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively
unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past
experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling,
thought, or action toward a social object” (p. 8).
What does that mean? The last part of the definition
“favorable or unfavorable feeling ...toward a social
object” links the definition to attitudes—associations
between evaluations and concepts. The phrase “introspectively
unidentified” means that implicit attitudes
exist outside of conscious awareness. People cannot
just search their minds for these attitudes, and in trying
to find them, they may be “inaccurately identified.”
By this definition, people can have two types of
attitudes: conscious, explicit attitudes that are experienced
as their feelings and implicit attitudes that are
not part of their conscious experience. This implies
Implicit Attitudes———465
that implicit attitudes could be quite different from
explicit attitudes.
“Traces of past experience,” in Greenwald and
Banaji’s definition, refers to the presumed origins of
implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes are thought to
reflect an accumulation of life experience. For example,
a person might regularly be exposed to negative
ideas about old people and aging. Consciously, this
person might disagree with the negative ideas and
maintain a positive explicit attitude toward the elderly
and aging. Implicitly, however, this negative information
may be stored as associations between negativity
and old age. As is evident in this example, implicit
attitudes are not more real or true than explicit attitudes.
Explicit attitudes reflect conscious values,
beliefs, and desired responses. Implicit attitudes reflect
experience—whether the person agrees with it or not.
Both types of attitudes can be important in shaping
thought, judgment, or action.
Consequences of Implicit Attitudes
An active area of research seeks to identify when
implicit and explicit attitudes predict behavior. The
existing evidence suggests that explicit attitudes tend
to predict deliberate behaviors that are fairly easy to
control. For example, one’s explicit attitude toward
ice cream might predict whether one chooses ice
cream when given as much time as necessary to make
a choice among snacks. Implicit attitudes, on the other
hand, tend to predict behaviors that are more spontaneous
and difficult to control. So, implicit attitudes
might predict the snack choice when a person is in a
hurry and just grabs the first snack item that seems
appealing.
Relationship Between Implicit
and Explicit Attitudes
Another research area seeks to identify when implicit
and explicit attitudes will be related or unrelated, and
why. The most extensively studied influence is selfpresentation—whether
people are motivated to adjust
their explicit responses because they are unwanted or
they are unwilling to make them public. For example,
it is generally not socially acceptable to express negative
attitudes about African Americans, people with
disabilities, or children. So, if people feel negatively
about these groups, they may resist reporting those
feelings explicitly. However, implicit responses are

466———Implicit Personality Theory
relatively uncontrollable, so people may express negativity
toward some groups implicitly even when they
are trying to avoid it. Another predictor of consistency
between implicit and explicit attitudes is attitude
strength. Domains that are considered more important,
or ones that people have thought about a lot, tend
to show more consistency between implicit and explicit
responses than those that are unimportant or rarely
considered.
Open Questions
Besides the issues already described, there are a variety
of questions that researchers are actively investigating
to better understand the implicit attitude
concept; these include the following:
To what extent are implicit attitude measures assessing the
concept “implicit attitude” as it was defined? For example,
is it unconscious, or more like a measure of gut feelings?
How do implicit attitudes form?
How stable are implicit attitudes?
How do implicit attitudes change?
Kate A. Ranganath
Brian A. Nosek
See also Attitudes; Dual Attitudes; Implicit Association Test
Further Readings
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social
cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes.
Psychological Review, 102(1), 4–27.
Wilson, T. D., Lindsey, S., & Schooler, T. Y. (2000).
A model of dual attitudes. Psychological Review,
107(1), 101–126.
IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORY
Definition
An implicit personality theory refers to a person’s
notions about which personality characteristics tend to
co-occur in people. Can one assume, for example, that
a person with a sense of humor is also intelligent?
Is a charming person likely to be honest or dishonest?
Is a leader someone likely to be friendly or aggressive?
Implicit personality theories guide the inferences
that social perceivers make of other people. For
example, if a perceiver sees someone act in an energetic
style and presumes that energy is linked to intelligence,
then the perceiver will likely infer that the
other person is intelligent.
History and Background
The notion of implicit personality theories was introduced
into modern psychology by Lee Cronbach in the
1950s, with his notion of “the generalized other.” This
“other” contained the person’s beliefs about the attributes
and abilities that the typical person exhibited,
along with how those attributes and abilities interrelated.
Importantly, Cronbach believed that people’s
theories about attributes and abilities aligned those
qualities into a few major dimensions of personality,
and subsequent work by numerous researchers set out
to discover what those dimensions were. Different
researchers came to different conclusions about what
the major dimensions of personality were, but some
dimensions frequently uncovered were good versus
bad traits, socially skilled versus unskilled, intellectually
gifted versus not, active versus passive, friendly
versus unfriendly, dominant versus submissive, and
accepting versus rejecting of authority.
One major controversy regarding implicit personality
theories is whether they reflect reality or distort
it. For example, when people associate leadership
with a dominant personality, are they merely reflecting
the social world as it truly exists, or are they
making an assumption not supported by real-world
evidence—and perhaps only reflecting the fact that
leadership and dominance are words that overlap in
their dictionary meaning? Although any conclusion
would still be contentious, one way to read the
research is that implicit personality theories mirror
reality somewhat but overstate it: Many people overestimate
how related some traits really are in people,
although those traits, in truth, are somewhat related.
It should be noted that the term implicit personality
theory more recently has been used to denote another
way in which theories about personality attributes may
differ. According to the work by Carol Dweck, people
differ according to whether they believe personal
attributes, such as intelligence, can be modified or
enhanced through effort versus remaining stable and
immutable regardless of what the person does. This

use of the term implicit personality theory is completely
separate from the one defined in this entry.
Implications
Implicit personality theories carry many implications
for social judgment. They have been shown, for example,
to influence performance evaluations in organizations—
if an employee shows one trait, a person evaluating
them assumes that they have other traits as well. Such
theories have also been shown to influence memory
for other people, in that social perceivers tend to
remember traits and behaviors heavily suggested by
their implicit personality theories that were actually
not present.
Two specific types of implicit personality theories
have received special attention in psychological
research. First, the halo effect refers to the tendency to
conclude that a person has a number of positive attributes
if they display a few good ones (and to infer a
number of negative traits if the person exhibits an
undesirable one). Second, physical attractiveness
tends to lead people to infer that an individual has a
number of desirable traits. Physically attractive people
are assumed to be warmer, more socially skilled, and
even more intelligent, for example, than their peers.
One notable example of the implications of
implicit personality theories centers on HIV/AIDS
prevention. People assume they can tell who is HIVpositive
just by looking at them—and seeing, for
example, whether the person is well dressed. There
is no evidence of a link between attire and health
status—and so using such an implicit personality theory
in this realm is, at best, worrisome.
David Dunning
See also Halo Effect; Illusory Correlation; Personality
Judgments, Accuracy of
Further Readings
Borkenau, P. (1992). Implicit personality theory and the
Five-Factor Model. Journal of Personality, 60, 295–327.
Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: A review.
Psychological Bulletin, 79, 294–309.
Sedikides, C., & Anderson, C. A. (1994). Causal perceptions
of inter-trait relations: The glue that holds person types
together. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
20, 294–302.
Impression Management———467
IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Definition
Impression management refers to the activity of controlling
information to steer others’ opinions in the
service of personal or social goals. Although people
can manage impressions of almost anything (e.g., a
clothing brand, a political position), people most commonly
manage the impressions others form of themselves,
a subtype of impression management that is
often termed self-presentation.
History and Modern Usage
Many writers and philosophers have observed that
people engage in strategic behaviors to control the
impressions that their audiences form. The sociologist
Erving Goffman popularized this idea further, arguing
that ordinary people in everyday life work to convey
desired impressions to others around them, just as
actors on a stage work to present their characters to
audiences.
Of course, given that actors are pretending to be
people they are not, this metaphor implies that impression
management is intentional and duplicitous.
While early research reflected this assumption, more
recent research has revealed that people engage in
impression management even when they are not intentionally
trying to do so. For example, even if you feel
like you can just “be yourself” around close friends
and family members, you may find yourself acting
quite differently—or presenting a somewhat different
version of yourself—around your best friend than
around your mother, without really thinking about it.
You might exhibit such different behavior not only
because of your own desire to be viewed somewhat
differently by your friend versus your mother, but also
because your friend and your mother have different
expectations or demands regarding what sort of person
you should be. Thus, engaging in impression
management can help to ensure that social interactions
go smoothly.
Impression management is not risk-free, however.
Becoming excessively concerned over others’ opinions
can cause anxiety, thereby increasing health
problems. And engaging in highly deceptive forms of
impression management runs the risk that people will
see through the act (although “getting caught” seems

468———Independence of Positive and Negative Affect
to be the exception rather than the rule). Conversely,
impression management may sometimes be too effective;
for example, if you try to act like a rebel in one
situation, your impression management may carry
over such that you start to see yourself as relatively
more rebellious and behave in a rebellious manner in
subsequent situations. Of course, to the extent that
people generally try to put their best foot forward,
such carryover effects of impression management
may have positive consequences.
Impression management can also be used prosocially
to benefit friends. People commonly describe
their friends in ways that help to support their friends’
desired images. Thus, impression management can
be undertaken in the service of self-serving or more
other-oriented goals and represents a central component
of everyday social life.
See also Exemplification; Self-Enhancement; Self-
Presentation
Further Readings
Elizabeth W. Dunn
Noah Forrin
Schlenker, B. R., & Pontari, B. A. (2000). The strategic
control of information: Impression management and
self-presentation in daily life. In A. Tesser, R. Felson,
& J. Suls (Eds.), Perspectives on self and identity
(pp. 199–232). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
INDEPENDENCE OF POSITIVE
AND NEGATIVE AFFECT
Definitions
Positive and negative affect are often referred to as the
Big Two emotions. They each refer to superfactors
of emotion, and according to Randy J. Larsen and Ed
Diener, each consists of several subcomponents of different
feeling states. Positive affect refers to all highenergy
emotions that feel good or pleasurable. Some
varieties of such positive emotions are feeling energetic,
enthusiasm, engagement, and joy. The situation
is similar with negative affect, which has subcomponents
of high-energy ways of feeling unpleasant, such
as anxiety, worry, and distress as well as fearfulness,
anger, hostility, and disgust. As such, positive and
negative affect are each composed of several subfactors
of emotion that go into defining them.
Conceptual Distinctions
One important distinction concerns the difference
between emotional states and emotional traits.
Emotion states are feelings that come and go fairly
quickly, often are intense, and their cause usually lies
outside of the person. You might say you are in a state
of anger and that you are angry because of a specific
event. The anger may be intense, but it will likely dissipate.
Trait emotions, on the other hand, last longer
and refer the cause, in part, to some characteristic of
the person. You might say, for example, that someone
is an angry kind of person, meaning that this person is
frequently angry or has a low threshold for becoming
angry. This describes a characteristic of the person
more than a particular state caused by some event in
the environment. Positive and negative affect can be
thought of as states or traits, as transient emotions
caused by specific events or as relatively enduring
characteristics of persons.
The following example makes clear the distinction
between states and traits. Consider the two emotions
sadness and anger. In terms of states, people are rarely
sad and angry at the same time. A person may be
angry, but it is very rare for the person to simultaneously
be sad. However, if one thinks about traits over
a longer time frame, say, over the past 6 months, and
ask the question how angry and how sad has a person
been over the past 6 months, it is likely that a person
reporting a high level of anger will also report a high
level of sadness, just not at the same time. So in terms
of traits, people who are frequently angry are also frequently
sad. Again, just not at the same time. At a trait
level, anger and sadness can be highly correlated (they
are both part of the negative affect superfactor),
whereas at a state level, anger and sadness are not correlated
because they do not co-occur at the same time.
Another important distinction is between categorical
and dimensional views of emotion. In the field of
psychology, some researchers prefer to think of emotions
as distinct categories. These researchers often
have a list of specific emotions that they consider
to be fundamental, usually between six and nine different
emotions. These researchers do not clump

emotions into positive and negative groups, but rather
feel that it is important to maintain distinctions
between specific emotions. On the other hand, another
group of researchers find some value to the idea that
all emotions fall along a few specific dimensions and
can thus be grouped. Researchers who prefer to think
about positive and negative affect as superfactors are
in this camp.
An interesting finding is that there are many more
negative emotions than there are positive emotions. It
seems humans are constructed in such a way that there
are only a few ways to feel positive but many ways to
feel negative. For example, negative affect includes
such emotions as anxiety, anger, fear, distress, guilt,
embarrassment, sadness, disgust, and shame. All of
these negative emotions may have distinguishable
feeling states; anger feels different from anxiety, for
example. Nevertheless, anger and anxiety are both
negative. Plus, the empirical finding is that at a trait
level, these negative emotions tend to correlate with
each other. Researchers who believe in the dimensional
approach find it useful to consider all negative
emotions under the single dimension of negative
affect and all positive emotions under the single
dimension of positive affect.
Background and History
During the early parts of psychology’s history, emotion
was a topic that received very little attention.
When it was considered at all, emotion was thought of
as disregulated cognition, as dysfunctional forms of
mental activity. Starting in the late 1970s, psychology
began a fresh consideration of emotion. At this time,
positive and negative affect were thought of as separate
ends of a single bipolar continuum. That is, it was
thought that the more a person had of one emotion
type, the less they had of the other. In fact, measures
of positive and negative affect at this time were constructed
in such a way that they ensured positive and
negative affect would not be independent. It was simply
felt at the time that positive and negative affect
were the opposite sides of the same coin.
In the mid-1980s researchers began to question this
view. They focused on constructing separate measurement
scales, with positive affect being measured from
zero to high levels and negative affect being measured
on another scale from zero to high levels. Research
began to accumulate showing that positive and negative
Independence of Positive and Negative Affect———469
affect were uncorrelated and correlated with other variables
in different ways.
One way to think about the independence of positive
and negative affect is to consider what makes you
happy and what makes you sad. Those things that
make a person happy, when they are absent, do not
guarantee that person will feel sad. Similarly, those
things that make a person feel sad, when they are
absent, do not guarantee that the person will feel
happy. In other words, the positive and negative affect
systems appear to respond differently to different
events in people’s lives. It is also likely that the brain
centers that are responsible for generating the experience
of positive and negative affect are separate.
Reward circuits in the brain are partly responsible for
positive emotions, and these positive emotions are
transmitted through humans’ nervous systems by the
neurotransmitter known as dopamine. In fact,
dopamine is activated by those events that typically
create pleasurable feelings. For example, many drugs
of abuse, such as cocaine, activate the dopamine system
and are responsible for the intense feelings of
pleasure that accompanies the ingestion of this addictive
drug. Dopamine is also activated by other events
that generate pleasure; for example, a kiss from someone
a person loves or eating a meal that a person
particularly likes. Similarly, other brain centers, particularly
the limbic system, are responsible for feelings
of negative affect (fear, anger, hostility, etc.) and
are potentially distributed through the nervous system
through the serotonin neurotransmitter system. As
psychology has matured and its consideration of emotion
has continued, evidence has accumulated that
positive and negative affect function differently, have
different biological bases in the nervous systems, and
are responsive to different events in people’s lives.
Consequences
One consequence of the realization that positive and
negative affect are independent is the creation of measures
that tap each of these emotions separately. There
are now a number of published measures for assessing
these emotions, such as the Positive and Negative
Affect Schedule. Another consequence of the independence
of the positive and negative affect is
research on the different operating characteristics of
each of these emotional systems. One way to summarize
this is the simple phrase that “bad is stronger than

470———Independence of Positive and Negative Affect
good.” For example, a life event that is negative, say
of the value –1 will cause more negative emotion than
a positive event of +1 will cause positive emotion. The
psychologist Danny Kahneman has shown that losses
are more powerful than equally strong gains; for
example, losing $50 will make people feel sadder than
winning $50 will make them feel happy. In other
words, gains and losses of equal magnitude nevertheless
result in negative affect and positive affect of different
magnitudes. Another example from the social
psychological literature is that a negative first impression
will last longer than an equally positive first
impression. There are many examples where bad is
stronger than good. In fact, this effect is called the
negativity bias; people respond stronger to bad events
than they do to equally good events. However, another
concept applies to positive affect, which is called
the positivity offset. This refers to the fact that most
people, most of the time, are in a slightly positive
state. In other words, the default human emotional
condition is not zero but slightly positive.
Another consequence of the independence of positive
and negative affect concerns overall well-being. If
psychological well-being is thought of as the ratio of
positive to negative emotions in a person’s life over
time, then it suggests that there are two routes to wellbeing.
One route would be to maximize the numerator
in this ratio, that is, to try to maximize positive affect.
The other route would be to try to minimize the
denominator, that is, to limit the amount of negative
affect. These two routes to well-being are a consequence
of the finding that positive and negative affect
are independent.
Individual Differences
At a trait level, positive and negative affect correlate
in different ways with measures of personality.
Positive affect is highly correlated with Extraversion
and many of its facets. For example, people high on
positive affect tend to be very sociable persons: They
are outgoing, like to be with other people, like being
the center of attention, and tend to be talkative and
engaging. Positive affect also correlates with high
activity level: People high on positive affect tend to be
lively and animated and engaged in whatever activity
they are involved in. Finally, positive affect correlates
with Agreeableness: People who experience high levels
of trait positive affect tend to get along well with
others, are cooperative, are consensus builders, and
work well in groups.
Negative affect at a trait level also correlates with
specific personality dimensions. People high on negative
affect tend to be high on a personality dimension
known as Neuroticism. Neuroticism describes a cluster
of traits that includes being pessimistic, always
thinking on the negative side of things, and expecting
the worst to happen. It also correlates with being dissatisfied
in general, with the tendency to complain a
lot about anyone or anything. People high on this
dimension also report a lot of psychosomatic symptoms,
such as backaches, stomachaches, and headaches.
And finally, people high in negative affect tend to
worry a lot; they expect the worst to happen and they
worry whether they will be able to cope with what the
future holds.
These personality correlates of positive and negative
emotion raise the interesting question about
which is causing which. That is, from a correlation
perspective, researchers don’t know whether personality
is causing the emotion or whether there may be a
third variable that may be related to both. For example,
it could be that extraverts engage in the kind of
activities that generate positive emotions, and it is
these activities, not Extraversion per se, that are
responsible for heightened positive affect. However,
an alternative model is that extraversion represents a
lower threshold for experiencing positive emotions.
Research has come in on both sides of this debate.
Nevertheless, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest
that extraverts, in fact, do have higher levels of
positive emotions in their lives and that people high
on the dimension of Neuroticism have high levels of
negative emotions in their lives.
See also Affect; Emotion; Positive Affect
Further Readings
Randy J. Larsen
Larsen, R. J., & Diener, E. (1992). Problems and promises
with the circumplex model of emotion. Review of
Personality and Social Psychology, 13, 25–59.
Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988).
Development and validation of brief measures of positive
and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1063–1070.

INDEPENDENT SELF-CONSTRUALS
Definition
Self-construal refers to the way in which a person
thinks about and defines the self. Importantly, selfconstrual
is not only a way of viewing oneself but also
a way of understanding one’s relationship to the larger
social world. When people are construing or thinking
about themselves in an independent way, they are
likely to think first and foremost about the personality
traits (e.g., “I am outgoing”), abilities (e.g., “I am a
great cook”), and preferences (e.g., “I love the purple
jellybeans but hate the green ones”) that, in combination,
create a profile of the self that is uniquely their
own. An independent self-construal, because of its
emphasis on internal and distinctive personal characteristics,
is thus one in which the self is seen as a
unique individual, fundamentally separate from others.
Interestingly, thinking of the self in this independent
way has been shown to have a profound influence on
both cognition and behavior.
Background
Given that viewing the self relative to one’s unique
personality and distinct abilities and attitudes is what
has traditionally been thought of as self-definition, one
could argue that much of the existing research on the
self has explored independent self-construals. Indeed,
the recognition that an independent construal of the
self might be just one of several types of self-views
wasn’t widely accepted until the early 1990s, after
cross-cultural research by Hazel Markus and Shinobu
Kitayama revealed that describing the self in terms of
unique attributes was a typical North American and
European construal of the self but did not adequately
portray the self-views of members of East Asian and
Latin American cultures, because they typically
describe the self in a more social fashion through referring
to important relationships and groups. The recognition
that thinking about the self as unique was
a distinct type of self-construal opened the door to
research that would better reveal its cognitive and
behavioral consequences.
Subsequent research also paved the way by revealing
that independent self-construals could be activated
in everyone, regardless of culture. Independent
Independent Self-Construals———471
self-construal can be understood as thinking of the
self as only a “me” rather than as part of a larger “we.”
Researchers discovered that an independent selfconstrual
could be encouraged by either directly asking
participants to describe themselves in ways that
made them different from others, or by indirectly
priming them to think of the self this way by reading
independently focused stories or even having them
circle the words I, me, and mine. This methodological
discovery allowed research to be conducted that could
specifically assess what effects holding an independent
construal had, regardless of cultural context.
Cognitive Effects
One of the most interesting discoveries about independent
self-construal concerned its impact on overall
perception and cognition. Researchers have found that
defining the self in an independent way encourages
one to perceive the world in a more independent or
context-free way. In an ingenious set of studies, Uli
Kuhnen and Daphna Oyserman showed that when one
is thinking of the self as a unique individual regardless
of social relations, one also attends and processes the
physical world in terms of unique objects rather than
their relations. In other words, people with an independent
self-construal truly do ignore the forest by
paying too much attention to the trees! This finding
has implications for social perception—and may
explain why North Americans so easily fall prey to the
fundamental attribution error, or failing to think about
the pressures of the social situation when explaining
another person’s behavior (e.g., assuming someone
who is late to a meeting is irresponsible, rather than
considering that he may have been caught in traffic).
Interestingly, this focus on other people’s dispositions
rather than the situation as the cause of their behavior
could be simply a social side effect of the more general
cognitive processing style of paying attention to
individual actors and objects rather then considering
their broader context.
Values and Social Behavior
When people construe the self as independent, it
increases the importance of maintaining autonomy
from others. Values like freedom, choosing one’s own
goals, and leading a pleasurable life take precedence,

472———Individual Differences
and independent people are uncomfortable with punishing
people who engage in negative interpersonal
behavior and break social norms to the extent that it
could interfere with the individual right to “do your
own thing.” In addition, the construal of the self as
separate from others means that personal pleasures
and accomplishments are the primary basis for life
satisfaction and well-being. Researchers who study
the influence of self-construal on well-being have
consistently found that for people with an independent
self-construal, personal self-esteem has much more of
an impact on their reported life satisfaction than does
the quality of their social relationships. Moreover,
when individuals are thinking of the self in an independent
fashion, they pay more attention to, and more
actively pursue, tasks that seem to offer a high likelihood
of personal success.
As for social behavior, the data concerning independent
self-construal are mixed. On the one hand,
several researchers have shown that thinking of the
self in an independent fashion appears to have detrimental
consequences for social interaction and behavior.
Many studies have shown that independent
construals result in people’s behaving more competitively
with one another, working less hard on group
tasks, becoming less helpful to others, and performing
poorly at group problems and social dilemmas.
However, a recent line of research by Sonja Utz has
revealed that the relationship between independent
self-construal and social behavior may be more complex
than it originally appeared. Her work points out
that an independent self-construal fundamentally
focuses the person inward, activating the self-concept,
and motivates the person to behave in a way that is
consistent with his or her unique personality. Thus, to
the extent that someone holds a strong and central
value for cooperation, making the person think of the
self as independent may actually result in cooperative
rather than competitive behavior because of the
coherence of the behavior with the person’s own selfconcept.
In other words, it seems than an independent
self-construal may encourage a person’s core personality
characteristics, whether prosocial or selfish, to
drive behavior.
See also Interdependent Self-Construals; Self
Wendi L. Gardner
Erica Slotter
Further Readings
Gardner, W. L., Gabriel, S., & Lee, A. Y. (1999). “I” value
freedom but “we” value relationships: Self-construal
priming mirrors cultural differences in judgment.
Psychological Science, 10, 321–326.
Kuhnen, U., & Oyserman, D. (2002). Thinking about the self
influences thinking in general: Cognitive consequences of
salient self-concept. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 38, 492–499.
Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self:
Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.
Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
Utz, S. (2004). Self-activation is a two-edged sword: The
effects of I primes on cooperation. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 769–776.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Individual differences are the more-or-less enduring
psychological characteristics that distinguish one person
from another and thus help to define each person’s
individuality. Among the most important kinds of individual
differences are intelligence, personality traits,
and values. The study of individual differences is called
differential or trait psychology and is more commonly
the concern of personality psychologists than social
psychologists. Individual differences are neither a
fiction nor a nuisance; they are enduring psychological
features that contribute to the shaping of behavior
and to each individual’s sense of self. Both social and
applied psychology can benefit by taking these enduring
dispositions into account.
Background and History
Individual differences in cognitive abilities have been
studied since the 19th century, when Sir Francis Galton
published Hereditary Genius, and they have continued
to occupy the attention of psychologists, including
Alfred Binet and David Wechsler, who produced some
of the most widely used measures of intelligence. Individual
differences in personality traits were studied conceptually
by Gordon Allport and more empirically by
Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck. Current views on
individual differences in personality are dominated by
the Five-Factor Model or Big Five.

Most individual differences are a matter of degree.
Although it is convenient to talk about introverts and
extraverts as if these were two distinct classes of
people, in fact most people have some features of both
introversion and extraversion and would fall near the
middle of the distribution. Most traits are distributed
in the familiar bell-shaped curve; there is little evidence
for distinct types in psychology.
At any given time, people differ in their moods and
their opinions of the weather. But the individual differences
of greatest interest are those that reflect some
enduring aspect of the individual. Both cognitive and
personality traits meet this description. Longitudinal
studies conducted over periods as long as several
decades show that in adults, traits like verbal intelligence,
emotional stability, and musical ability are
exceptionally stable, with very gradual changes and
high rank-order consistency. Young adults who are
bright, unflappable, and tone-deaf are likely to be
bright, unflappable, and tone-deaf 40 years later.
Several explanations have been offered for the stability
of traits. For example, it is sometimes said that
people build a life-structure that sustains their traits.
The intellectually curious woman subscribes to magazines
that continue to stimulate her curiosity and exercise
her intellect. The sociable man acquires a circle
of friends who reinforce his sociability. In addition,
however, there is now compelling evidence from hundreds
of studies that both cognitive and personality
traits are substantially heritable, and the same genes
that make one, say, suspicious at age 30 make one suspicious
at age 70.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American transcendental
philosopher, was dismayed by the evidence of trait
consistency he saw, because it seemed to him to
deprive people of freedom of will: “Temperament,” he
wrote, “puts all divinity to rout.” But people generally
embrace their own traits, recognizing them as integral
parts of their identity. People might sometimes wish to
be more assertive, organized, or imaginative, but in the
long run, most accept their traits as their own authentic
selves.
The consistency of traits over time is not matched
by their consistency over situations. Sometimes
friendly people smile at strangers; sometimes they
don’t. They may be preoccupied by an upcoming
interview or depressed by the morning’s news. When,
in the 1960s, psychologists began to document this
inconsistency in laboratory studies of behavior, it
Individual Differences———473
ignited one of the most celebrated controversies in the
history of psychology, the person–situation debate.
Some researchers were so struck by inconsistency that
they came to believe that traits were completely fictional,
that is, stories people made up about themselves
or adopted from others. The consistency of
traits over time was, these skeptics thought, merely
the stability of a myth.
Eventually a more sophisticated understanding of
traits emerged. Traits are only one of many influences
on behavior at any particular time, so consistency
between one situation and another is quite limited.
But traits are enduring, so over a period of days or
months, they have a cumulative effect on the pattern
of behavior that we recognize as sociability or nervousness
or stubbornness, and it is this general pattern
that is stable over time. In gambling casinos, the house
sometimes wins, sometimes loses—but in the long
run, owning a casino is almost guaranteed to make
you rich. Traits operate in the same probabilistic way.
Individual Differences and
Social Psychology
Curiously, individual differences first came to the
attention of experimentalists as a source of consistent
error. In the 19th century, astronomy depended on
human recordings of the precise moment when an
object crossed a specified point in the sky, and different
astronomers reported slightly different values.
Charles Wolf noted that these discrepancies were
consistent, and he developed personal equations to
correct the reports of different observers. Studies of
perceptual speed and reaction time grew out of this
observation.
For some social psychologists, individual differences
are nuisance variables that make life more difficult.
In the typical social psychology experiment,
subjects are randomly assigned to different conditions
and exposed to different experimental manipulations;
their behavior is then recorded. In this way, the experimenter
hopes to learn how people respond to different
situations. For example, terror management theory suggests
the hypothesis that people should become more
patriotic when reminded of death. So subjects might be
shown scenes either of a cemetery or a parking lot and
then be asked their evaluation of the national flag. One
would expect a range of responses, but if the theory is
right and the experiment well done, then on average

474———Inference
those individuals who saw the cemetery should report
more positive feelings about the flag.
But there are also enduring individual differences
in patriotism, and those are likely to cloud the results.
By randomly assigning subjects to conditions, one
hopes to equalize the effects of individual differences,
but they still contribute noise. In principle, one could
assess patriotism separately (perhaps a month before
the experiment) and remove its effects statistically. In
practice, this is rarely done.
Other social psychologists, however, realize that
individual differences can be utilized as a natural
experiment. Arie Kruglanski and colleagues proposed
that decisions are often made on the basis of a need
for closure—the need to reach a definite conclusion
(regardless of its correctness). Experimentally, this
need can be manipulated by varying time pressure on
subjects or even by making the task unpleasant by
conducting the study in the same room as a noisy
computer printer. Under these conditions, people tend
to seize on the first information they are given and
freeze their opinions. But Kruglanski also realized
that there may be individual differences in the need
for closure (in fact, related to the personality trait of
low Openness to Experience) and that individuals who
are high in need for closure may habitually react like
people put under time pressure. A series of experiments
confirmed this hypothesis.
Individual differences may also interact with experimental
manipulations. The sight of a cemetery may
be a much more powerful cue to death for someone
chronically high in anxiety and thus may have a correspondingly
stronger effect on subsequent patriotism. A
stubborn and antagonistic subject may resent the experimenter’s
attempted time pressure manipulations and
deliberately ignore them. Social psychologists routinely
examine their data to see if the effects are different
for men and women; perhaps they should routinely
assess traits and their interactions with manipulations.
Most of the topics of interest to social psychologists,
including attachment, achievement motivation,
risk-taking, prejudice, altruism, and self-regulation,
are associated with enduring individual differences.
Social psychologists usually study the mechanisms
by which these phenomena operate or the conditions
that enhance or reduce them. By understanding the
processes that give rise to behavior, social psychologists
hope to be able to develop interventions to
change them. Individual differences are, by and large,
not easily altered, so they sometimes seem irrelevant
to interventionists.
But it makes sense to consider trait levels in attempting
to change behavior. For example, researchers may
wish to help dieters control their eating behavior.
Researchers know that people high in Conscientiousness
are more self-disciplined than those low in
Conscientiousness, and this information can figure into
the approach to the problem. For conscientious dieters,
researchers might need only to focus on education: If
they understand the principles of nutrition and the
health risks of obesity, they may have enough incentive
to change their eating habits. Dieters low in Conscientiousness
need more help; extra encouragement, group
support, or a locked refrigerator may be required. Other
individual differences might also be relevant to the
selection of treatments. Some people eat less when
alone or when eating with other people who are also
dieting. Assigning introverts to the former condition
and extraverts to the latter might facilitate self-control
in a congenial setting.
Robert R. McCrae
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Genetic Influences on
Social Behavior; Personality and Social Behavior;
Research Methods; Traits
Further Readings
Carver, C. S. (2005). Impulse and constraint: Perspectives
from personality psychology, convergence with theory in
other areas, and potential for integration. Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 9, 312–333.
Costa, P. T., Jr., & McCrae, R. R. (1998). Trait theories of
personality. In D. F. Barone, M. Hersen, & V. B. V.
Hasselt (Eds.), Advanced personality (pp. 103–121).
New York: Plenum.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated
closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing.”
Psychological Review, 103, 263–283.
McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (2003). Personality in
adulthood: A Five-Factor Theory perspective (2nd ed.).
New York: Guilford Press.
INFERENCE
Definition
Inference is the act of judging a person, even when
limited information is available. People usually form
their inferences by paying attention to important

information around them and then using a set of rules
to come to some decision. When people infer why
something happened, they often consider whether the
outcome was positive or negative. Positive outcomes
tend to be socially desirable, whereas negative outcomes
are perceived as socially undesirable. Thus,
the social desirability of a behavior determines the
qualities people infer about the person who committed
the act.
Prominent Perspectives
Fritz Heider’s attributional perspective tries to explain
how regular people decide where the behavior of
others originates. When people infer that someone’s
behavior was the result of stable personality traits,
they make a dispositional inference, but when behavior
is thought to result from external, contextual sources,
they make a situational inference. Research generally
finds that people make dispositional inferences about
others because it provides a template for how the others
will behave in other situations.
Harold Kelley’s covariation theory predicts that
people make inferences by estimating the extent to
which causes and outcomes are related. More simply,
people are more likely to infer that A caused B if they
both occurred similarly in time. If an outcome has
more than one potential cause, then people tend to discount
all those potential causes, making it hard to
determine the actual cause of the outcome. When the
sole cause of an outcome can be determined, the inference
is easier to make.
Inferential Errors
The inferential process is imperfect and subject to systematic
errors. The correspondence bias is the perception
that behaviors correspond with underlying
traits, even when this may not be the case. The actor–
observer effect is the tendency to overemphasize the
situation when inferring about one’s own behavior but
not the behavior of others. One’s inferential errors are
usually self-serving, in that they tend to enhance positive
perceptions of the self and negative perceptions
of others.
Why Is Inference Adaptive?
Inference serves three adaptive purposes: understanding,
controlling, and self-enhancement. In an unpredictable
social world, making causal inferences
creates a sense of understanding with the added possibility
to influence outcomes. The inferential process
also fosters a sense of control over the environment, as
people come to expect some relationship between
causes and effects. By making trait inferences for
other peoples’ negative acts, people view themselves
more positively by comparison, simultaneously maintaining
a positive sense of self. In general, the inferential
process is both functional and adaptive.
Devin L. Wallace
See also Attributions; Kelley’s Covariation Model; Self-
Enhancement
Further Readings
Fiske, S. T. (2004). Social beings: A core motives approach
to social psychology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
INFLUENCE
Influence———475
Every species of social animal and eusocial insect
must have a means of social influence—a way for one
or more members of the species to direct, coordinate,
and influence other members of the species. Such
social influence tactics determine the allocation of
resources within a community of the species and also
provide an evolutionary advantage to social species in
their quest to gain the resources needed for survival.
For example, Pogonomyrmex barbatus (red harvester
ants) dynamically allocate tasks within their colonies
(e.g., forging, patrolling, midden work) by having each
ant follow a social consensus rule of “the more contact
with another ant succeeding at a task, the more likely
I should switch to that task.” Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees)
use a number of social influence tactics to
establish social relationships and to allocate resources,
including coalition formation, reciprocity, submissive
greetings to establish a dependency relationship,
empathy, and the establishment of norms. Humans
(Homo sapiens) employ a variety of social influence
techniques that are highly adaptive to a range of social
and environmental situations.
Social influence means any noncoercive technique,
device, procedure, or manipulation that relies on the
social psychological nature of the organism as the
means for creating or changing the belief or behavior
of a target, regardless of whether or not this attempt is

476———Influence
based on the specific actions of an influence agent or
the result of the self-organizing nature of social systems.
It can be contrasted with two other forms of
influence: (1) power or the control of critical resources,
including its most extreme application of war; and
(2) outright deception to lead an organism to believe
he or she is doing X but in reality is doing something
else. In other words, social influence uses tactics that
appeal to the social nature of the organism. Among
humans, it is their nature to fear, feel dissonance,
return a favor, value what is scarce, empathize with
others, make judgments dependent on context, seek
phantom goals, and easily adopt the social roles of
their social group, along with other characteristics.
Social influence tactics make use of these attributes of
human nature to invoke such processes as conformity
(creating or changing behavior or belief to match the
response of others), persuasion or attitude change
(change in response to a message, discourse, or communication),
compliance (change in response to an
explicit request), yielding to social forces (change in
response to the structure of the social situation), or
helping (change in response to someone’s need).
History of Social Influence Research
Throughout human history as a species, human beings
have attempted to understand what influences and persuades
them. Some of these attempts were based on
superstitions and pseudoscientific beliefs and thus
have missed the mark. For example, at various times in
human history, people have believed that the stars and
the planets (astrology), bumps on our head (phrenology),
the four humors (or special fluids of blood, yellow
bile, black bile, and phlegm), magnetic forces
(Mesmerism), and witches, demons, and angels have
mysteriously controlled human behavior.
Nevertheless, some members attempted to use
empirical observation to understand persuasion and
influence. The first recorded attempt to classify social
influence tactics was conducted by the Sophists
(including Protagoras, Isocrates, and Gorgias) of 5th
century B.C.E. Greece. (In China in the 3rd century
B.C.E., Han Fei Tzu developed a handbook with a
similar goal.) The Sophists were itinerate teachers
of persuasion and created handbooks of “commonplaces”—general
arguments and techniques that could
be adapted for a variety of persuasive purposes. Sometime
around 333 B.C.E., Aristotle began compiling a list
of these influence techniques (mostly taken from the
Sophists) in his book Rhetoric, the earliest surviving
book on influence. The next great attempt to codify the
ways of influence occurred in Rome with the efforts of
the lawyer Cicero and the rhetoric instructor Quintilian.
However, it was not until the late 19th century that
the scientific method was used to explore the ways of
social influence. In 1898 Norman Triplett conducted
the first social influence experiment by having people
turn fishing cranks either alone or in the presence of
others. He found evidence for social facilitation or
faster cranking turning when others were present.
Also in the late 19th century, Gustave Le Bon popularized
a theory of crowd behavior based on the
metaphor of hypnosis or the notion that the crowd
took over the will of the person much like the suggestions
of a hypnotizer commands the unconscious of
the hypnotized. Although popular in his day, Le Bon’s
theory has not stood the test of time, but it did serve as
a foil to stimulate later research.
World War I changed the trajectory of social influence
research. In the United States and Britain, the war
was marked by a period of patriotism; after the war,
many citizens became disillusioned by the results and
came to feel that they had been duped by propaganda.
The zeitgeist of the times championed the belief that
social influence and mass propaganda were all-powerful
(based on either suggestion theories from psychoanalysis
or behaviorism’s belief in malleable human
behavior). Researchers and scholars began documenting
this belief as well as attempting to find ways to
inoculate citizens from propaganda. Social influence
research during the interwar period featured the use of
the experimental method to document that “persuasion
happens,” case studies of propaganda, and the development
of survey methods. In the 1930s, a group of
scholars formed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis
with the expressed goal of teaching Americans about
how to counter propaganda.
As with World War I, World War II also changed
the trajectory of social influence research. As part of
the war effort, many scholars became deeply involved
in social influence research, including campaigns to
maintain and promote the morale of the public and
troops and to counter Nazi propaganda. After the war,
these researchers returned to their universities and
began (along with their students) to study social influence
phenomena that had been at the heart of the war
effort, such as conformity, mass communications, prejudice,
power, and obedience to authority. The result
was a flourishing of exciting scientific research on

social influence and the development of a large body
of knowledge about how influence works and why. To
give a flavor for research on social influence during the
1950s and 1960s, this entry briefly describes three
lines of research.
At Yale University, Carl Hovland conducted a program
of experimental research investigating the effects
of various variables (e.g., source credibility, individual
differences, organization of the message) on persuasion.
The results, in contrast to assumptions made during
the interwar years, showed weak effects of these
variables on social influence. Similar minimum effects
were being obtained in survey research, which found,
for example, that few voters changed their voting preferences
as a result of mass media content. The resulting
model of influence was termed minimum effects
and posited that persuasion was the result of a series of
steps (attention to the message, comprehension, learning
of message, yielding, and behavior), each with a
decreasing probability of occurring.
In 1968 to account for empirical anomalies in the
Hovland model, Anthony Greenwald presented a
revision, which replaced the intervening steps with one
core process: cognitive response. The resulting approach
to persuasion, known as the Ohio State School, states
that influence is the result of the thoughts running
through a person’s head as he or she processes a persuasive
communication. (In this case, the power of the
mass media is dependent on its ability to change cognitive
responses, which can vary as a result of a number
of factors.) Subsequent research has focused on the
question, “What determines a person’s cognitive
response to the message?” with one of the most comprehensive
answers provided by the elaboration likelihood
model of Richard Petty and John Cacioppo.
A second line of research stems from Leon
Festinger’s 1957 book, titled A Theory of Cognitive
Dissonance. In this book, Festinger puts forth a deceptively
simple thesis: When a person is confronted with
two conflicting thoughts, it creates a tension state; that
individual is highly motivated to reduce that tension or
dissonance. This simple theory stimulated a wealth of
interesting research hypotheses and experiments about
the nature of social influence. The research on dissonance
has been very useful for identifying and understanding
a range of social influence tactics, such as
effort justification, insufficient justification, commitment,
and guilt, and has provided researchers a means
of understanding seemingly counterintuitive instances
of influence.
Influence———477
The final line of research obtained what is perhaps
the single most important discovery in social influence
research and most likely within the discipline of
psychology itself—that situations are more powerful
in controlling human behavior than most people think.
This line of research began by questioning research
results presented in a dissertation in 1935 by Muzafer
Sherif. In that research, groups of people judged the
movement of the autokinetic effect (an illusion that a
light moves when placed against a dark background).
Sherif’s results showed that groups quickly developed
norms for making these judgments and that these
norms would guide their subsequent judgments. In the
late 1940s, Solomon Asch looked at the conformity
results obtained by Sherif to conclude that the findings
were dependent on the nature of the ambiguous
autokinetic stimuli used in the research; Asch further
reasoned that surely conformity would not occur if a
group of people made obviously incorrect judgments
of an unambiguous stimulus. In the true spirit of science,
Asch promptly designed a set of experiments to
prove himself wrong. In his studies, Asch had a group
of confederates judge the length of lines and clearly
provide a wrong answer. Surprisingly, he found that a
majority of subjects went along with the group.
In the early 1960s, Stanley Milgram was interested
in explaining obedience to authority in terms of personality
and culture-based character traits (e.g.,
“Germans are most obedient” as an explanation for
the Holocaust). He also believed that Asch’s line judgment
task had no personal consequences for the subjects
and thus was not a full test of conformity. Milgram
designed his famed “obedience to authority” procedures
to take account of these hypotheses. The results
showed that a majority of people were willing to give
another person painful shocks when commanded to do
so by an authority and that character and personality
did not explain these results. Instead, Milgram’s research
was a powerful demonstration of the power of the
social situation to control behavior—a finding that has
been repeatedly demonstrated in studies such as Bibb
Latané and John Darley’s bystander apathy research
and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment.
The modern era of social influence research began
with the 1984 (last revised in 2001) publication by
Robert Cialdini of his book Influence. This seminal
work summarized past social influence research,
categorizing it into six core principles of influence:
reciprocity, scarcity, consistency, authority, liking,
and social proof. More importantly, it serves as an

478———Influence
inspiration for a new generation of social influence
researchers. In no uncertain terms, Cialdini showed
that complex influence processes can be understood in
terms of basic principles and that these principles can
be powerful in understanding and changing the social
world. In his empirical work, Cialdini has shown
that seemingly intractable social influence processes
can be untangled and made sense of through the careful
application of the experimental method, thereby
inspiring the next generation of researchers to do the
same.
Social Influence Analysis
To understand a eusocial or social species and to predict
the behavior of its members, it is essential to analyze
the nature of social influence within that species.
Such a social influence analysis consists of a description
of the social influence tactics used by species
members, principles or psychological processes
underlying those tactics (e.g., dissonance, social cognition
principles), how influence is exchanged within
a community (e.g., likely tactics employed, profiling
of influence agents), patterning of influence within a
species and its communities (e.g., communication networks,
channels of influence, social institutions), and
theories and models of the operation of influence.
Table 1 Some Common Social Influence Tactics
Tactic
Authority
Commitment
Comparison Point or Set
Define and Label an Issue
Door-in-the-Face
Emotional See-Saw
Description
While a complete presentation of a social influence
analysis is beyond the scope of this entry, this entry
will present examples of such analyses and give an
overview of how to make sense of the power of the situation.
At the heart of a social influence analysis is an
understanding of the social influence tactics used in
the situation. Table 1 presents a list of 21 common
influence tactics culled from a list of 107 experimentally
investigated tactics presented by Anthony R.
Pratkanis. These tactics can then be used to understand
the influence occurring in any situation. For example,
the Milgram obedience experiments made use of
authority, foot-in-the-door, and increasing levels of
commitment. Pratkanis and Doug Shadel recently analyzed
undercover investigation tapes of con criminals
attempting to convince victims to part with their hardearned
cash. They found that con criminals serve up an
“influence cocktail” by using such tactics as phantom
fixation, authority cues, friendship relationships,
scarcity, norm of reciprocity, along with other tactics.
The value of such a social influence analysis is that
the seemingly mysterious power of a situation can be
understood in simple terms, resulting in the ability of
an influence agent to intervene and change the dynamics
of the situation (hopefully) for positive results.
Anthony R. Pratkanis
Authority increases obedience and compliance with commands. Example: Con criminals
play the role of law enforcement, bank president, or CEO.
Securing a commitment to a course of action increases the likelihood that a person will
comply and perform that behavior. Example: The frequency of recycling can be increased
by obtaining a commitment to recycle.
Options are evaluated by comparison to salient alternatives with an advantage gained by
making certain comparisons more salient. Example: Sales agents selectively compare their
products to make them appear more attractive.
How an issue is labeled controls and directs thought that then facilitates persuasion.
Example: A lawsuit against quack medicine is defined as “anti–freedom of choice” not
“pro–consumer protection.”
Asking for a large request (which is refused) and then for a smaller favor. Example:
Commonly used in fund-raising appeals.
Inducing a change in emotions (happy to sad or vice versa) increases compliance.
Example: Used in interrogations to extract confessions.

Tactic
Expectations
Fear Appeals
Foot-in-the-Door
Friend (Liking)
Granfalloon
Imagery Sells
Misleading Questions
Norm of Reciprocity
Phantom
Projection
Repetition
Scarcity
Social Consensus
Storytelling
Vivid Appeal
Description
Influence———479
Expectations guide interpretations to help create a picture of reality that is congruent with
expectations. Example: Politicians set expectations low so that a victory can be claimed
when expectations are exceeded.
Fear is aroused, and a simple, doable recommendation for eliminating the fear is
suggested. Examples: The “Daisy” ad and the “Willie Horton” ad used in the 1964 and
1988 U.S. presidential campaigns, respectively.
Asking for a small request (which is granted) and then for a larger favor. Example: The
Viet Cong infiltrated villages by asking for a small favor (glass of water) followed by
larger requests.
Close relationships such as friendships and love relationships create obligations to place
the needs of others before our own and to go along with their requests for help. Example:
Con criminals play the role of friend and even lover to secure compliance with their
demands.
A social identity is used to tell a person what to do (people believe X because they are Ys)
and to provide a source of self-esteem. Examples: Nazi, al Qaeda, Ku Klux Klan member.
Imagining the adoption of an advocated course of action increases the probability that that
course of action will be adopted. Example: Effective sales agents have customers
imagine using the product.
Ask questions to structure information and to imply certain answers. Example: False
memories of child sexual abuse can be elicited by symptom questionnaires.
Provide a gift or favor to invoke feelings of obligation to reciprocate. Examples: Hare
Krishna members gave potential donors a flower in hope of obtaining a donation.
An unavailable option that serves as a reference point and as a source of motivation for
obtaining a goal. Example: Cult leaders dangle worthy but phantom goals of a perfect
world and bliss to motivate members.
To cover one’s misdeed, one accuses another person of the negative behaviors to deflect
attention away from one’s own misdeeds and toward the accused. Example: During the
Korean War, North Korea claimed U.N. forces were using chemical warfare resulting in
illnesses, when in fact the sicknesses were the result of typhus brought to Korea by
Chinese soldiers.
Repeating the same information increases the tendency to believe and to like that information.
Example: The Marlboro man has been repeated in ads many times since the 1950s.
Scarce items and information are highly valued. Example: “Offer available for a limited
time only.”
If others agree, it must be the right thing to do. Example: Mao’s propaganda posters often
showed many people engaged in a state-approved behavior.
A plausible story serves to guide thought and determines the credibility of information.
Example: Lawyers embedded the facts of their cases in compelling stories.
Vivid (concrete and graphic) images can be compelling. Example: War propaganda often
consists of vivid pictures and reports.
Source: Adapted from Pratkanis, A. R. (2007). Social influence analysis: An index of tactics. In A. R. Pratkanis (Ed.), The science of
social influence: Advances and future progress (pp. 17–82). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

480———Informational Influence
See also Compliance; Conformity; Helping Behavior;
Persuasion
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence (4th ed.). Boston: Allyn &
Bacon.
Pfeffer, J., & Salancik, G. R. (1978). The external control of
organizations. New York: Harper & Row.
Pratkanis, A. R. (2006). Why would anyone do or believe
such a thing? A social influence analysis. In R. J.
Sternberg, H. Roediger III, & D. Halpern (Eds.), Critical
thinking in psychology (pp. 232–250). Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Pratkanis, A. R. (Ed.). (2007). The science of social
influence: Advances and future progress. Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
Pratkanis, A. R. (2007). Social influence analysis: An index
of tactics. In A. R. Pratkanis (Ed.), The science of social
influence: Advances and future progress (pp. 17–82).
Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (2001). Age of propaganda:
The everyday use and abuse of persuasion. New York:
W. H. Freeman.
Pratkanis, A. R., & Shadel, D. (2005). Weapons of fraud:
A source book for fraud fighters. Seattle: AARP
Washington.
Social Influence [scientific journal devoted to the study of
social influence]. Retrieved from http://www.tandf.co.uk/
journals/titles/15534510.asp
INFORMATIONAL INFLUENCE
Definition
Informational influence refers to new information or
arguments provided in a group discussion that change
a group member’s attitudes, beliefs, or behavior.
Informational influence is likely to be stronger when
a person is uncertain about the correct interpretation
of reality and/or the correct behavior in a given context
and therefore looks to other group members for
guidance.
History and Usage
The concept of informational influence was originally
proposed by Morton Deutsch and Harold B. Gerard,
who were trying to understand why group members
holding a minority view tended to adopt the group
majority’s view. They argued that there were two
ways that groups can affect individuals. Deutsch and
Gerard sought to clarify earlier research that failed to
distinguish between these two ways and the related
types of motivation that people may have for “going
along with the group majority.” One motivation is the
desire to have an accurate view of reality: When the
group majority provides information to a person about
reality that is not consistent with that person’s view,
the person may change his or her view to be correct.
This change can be said to result from informational
influence.
The second motivation is the desire to be liked by the
group. Here, influence occurs when a person changes an
attitude, belief, or behavior to be more similar to the
group’s attitude, belief, or behavior to be accepted by
that group. This second form of group influence is often
called normative influence because the individual follows
the group norm—which is what the group believes
the individual ought to do—regardless of whether it
reflects that individual’s attitudes or beliefs.
The effects of informational influence have been
clearly demonstrated in social psychological research.
The leading explanation for these effects is known as
the persuasive arguments theory, which states that the
persuasive argument or information the majority uses
to influence a person must be perceived by the person
to be both novel (new to the person) and valid.
Informational influence has often been examined
in the context of group decision making. For instance,
a jury may be divided as to the guilt or innocence of a
defendant. The group majority will attempt to convince
members of the minority to change their votes
to match the majority’s vote. The majority will be
better able to exert informational influence over the
minority if it offers new arguments that the minority
perceives to be valid or correct. Simply stating the
same old arguments again and again or making arguments
that the minority views as incorrect will not
typically produce informational influence.
One issue that has been raised with regard to informational
influence is whether it is truly distinct from
normative influence. The question boils down to how
people decide if the information or argument provided
by the group majority that is designed to influence the
minority is itself true. The group majority has already
decided that the information or argument is true, and
it expects the minority to agree. Since the information
provided by the majority also represents what it wants

the minority to accept, that information acts like a
group norm. Influence stemming from this informational
norm reflects both informational and normative
influence.
See also Conformity; Normative Influence
Further Readings
Daniel W. Barrett
Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. B. (1955). A study of normative
and informational social influences upon individual
judgment. Abnormal Psychology, 51(3), 629–636.
Turner, J. C. (1991). Social influence. Pacific Grove,
CA: Brooks/Cole.
INGRATIATION
The term ingratiation refers to behaviors that a person
illicitly enacts to make others like him or her or think
well of his or her qualities as a person. There are many
ways in which people can ingratiate themselves. One
that is frequently used is to show interest in another
person; ask questions, pay attention, and single out the
person so that you make him or her feel special. A
second strategy is do favors or to help or assist a person.
For instance, you can bring your colleague a cup
of coffee or help an attractive stranger with car trouble.
Third, you may show support and loyalty, for
instance during a meeting, when you express agreement
with your supervisor. A fourth way to make
people like you is simply to smile and be friendly,
cheerful, and positive. Fifth, you can directly express
admiration by flattering people and telling them what
you like or admire about them. There are many other
ways to make people like you; the bottom line is that
any behavior that potentially has the effect of enhancing
your likeability and is enacted for this reason can
be seen as an instance of ingratiation.
This does not mean that all likeable behaviors are
examples of ingratiation; the crucial point is what the
motive for the behavior is. For instance, if you support
your boss in a meeting because you really agree with
him or her, or if you help someone for totally altruistic
reasons, the behavior is not ingratiating. Of course,
the boundary is quite fuzzy here, because people are
not always aware of their true motives. You may
Ingratiation———481
consciously think that you really agree or that you are
really being altruistic, whereas unconsciously you
may want to ingratiate yourself. Many instances of
ingratiation are unconscious, so ingratiation happens a
lot more than one might think.
On the part of the target—the person being
ingratiated—too, ingratiation is not always recognized
as such. Whereas observers tend to quickly notice
when ingratiation occurs (especially when a person
behaves more favorably toward people he or she
depends on than toward others), targets of ingratiation
are less suspicious. Thus, the behavior is generally
quite effective precisely with respect to the person for
whom it is intended, the target. So, when you flatter a
teacher or go out of your way to assist him or her, your
fellow students who see this may immediately suspect
your motives, but the teacher may simply appreciate
your help or your excellent judgment of character and
like you as a result.
One of the causes of this difference between
observers and targets is that most people aim to have
a positive view of themselves (the self-enhancement
motive), and when they are ingratiated, this bolsters
their self-esteem. This makes them feel good, even if
they might not entirely trust the ingratiator’s motives.
Importantly, there is a difference between cognitive
and affective responses to ingratiation. Cognitively,
you may suspect someone’s motives, especially if the
person flatters you on qualities that you really do not
have in your own view. Affectively, however, it feels
good when someone is interested in you, likes you,
supports you, and compliments you. Many people say
that they do not care for this, but unconsciously all
people like to feel good about themselves, and they
feel good most of all when they feel valued by others.
As a consequence, the effects of ingratiation are
generally as intended: The target likes the ingratiator
and is more willing to do favors for the ingratiator.
Thus, ingratiation can be a way to influence people. For
instance, people buy more from someone who flatters
them. So if you are fitting a shirt and the sales person
compliments you on your figure and your excellent
taste in clothes, you are more likely to buy the shirt, and
maybe a whole lot more! In part, this happens because
people like the person who ingratiates them. Also,
being ingratiated enhances their mood, which in turn
may affect their behavior in desired ways (e.g., spending
more money, thinking “what the heck”). Another
reason why ingratiation works is the reciprocity principle:
If someone does something good for you, you want
to do something in return.

482———Ingratiation
A strong motive for ingratiation, then, is simply that
a person can affect others’ behavior with it. But there
are other motives as well. For one thing, ingratiation is
the lubricating oil of social traffic. If a waiter asks you
how your meal was, or if a colleague inquires what you
think of her new hairdo, you will probably say something
nice even if you don’t entirely mean it. Saying
exactly what you think can make people feel awkward
and uncomfortable. A related motive for ingratiation is
that, if a person gets along well with people, they will
like the person and respond favorably to him or her,
which in turn is good for the person’s self-esteem. In
effect, then, ingratiation can be seen as a social skill.
As noted, targets of ingratiation typically like the
ingratiator, and this happens even if the flattery is quite
extreme. However, observers are in a different position,
and they give quite harsh judgments of ingratiators.
The strongest cue for detecting ingratiation is
dependence: When a person is likeable toward someone
with higher status or power, observers instantly
become suspicious of the person’s motives. At this
point, their judgments are not yet quite negative
because they cannot be certain: For all they know, the
person might simply be very likeable. But once they
notice that a person behaves less friendly toward those
with less power, they immediately identify the person
as a brownnoser and judge the person very negatively.
In fact, a person who is likeable toward superiors and
dislikable toward subordinates is judged just as negatively
as someone who is dislikeable toward everybody.
This effect is called the Slime effect because it
was first reported in the Netherlands, where people are
more wary of ingratiation than in the United States and
where the common word for ingratiation is slime.
Because likeable behavior toward more powerful
people can easily be caused by ulterior motives, it is
seen as utterly uninformative, so it does not carry any
weight in impression formation. Of course, in everyday
life, people with powerful positions typically do
not see how their subordinates behave toward others,
so the slimy subordinate may easily get away with it.
Leaders in organizations usually have multiple subordinates
whom they must pay attention to, so they cannot
be expected to keep track of how everybody
behaves toward everyone else. Also, they typically
have high self-esteem, so when they are flattered
excessively, this will simply confirm what they already
know, and they are not likely to question the ingratiator’s
motives. Moreover, people generally attach more
weight to how a person behaves toward them than
toward others (hedonic relevance); this is another
reason why flattery toward powerful people will usually
have the intended effect. As a result of all this,
powerful people rarely get to hear the truth and may
end up with a rather inflated and unrealistically favorable
image of themselves.
Power and status are cues that can alert observers to
the true motives of an ingratiator, but so can other cues
related to dependence. For instance, a man helping a
beautiful woman fix a flat tire may be suspected of
ulterior motives. This situation, too, reflects a form of
dependence. In dating settings, ingratiation is typically
used to make people interested. It is in fact a much
better idea to use ingratiation than other kinds of selfpresentational
strategies, such as self-promotion
(showing people how capable and successful you are).
The difference is that self-promotion is about oneself,
whereas ingratiation is about the other person. The
latter strategy is much more likely to get people interested
in you, especially in settings in which it is important
to be liked rather than admired. You can be
exposed as an ingratiator if you use the same lines with
different people. If a person discovers that you say the
exact same nice things to someone else, that would be
a sure way to instantly lose the credit you gained with
the flattery.
The examples used here are prototypical instances
of ingratiation, where the ingratiator is not sincere (e.g.,
buttering up the boss). It is important to realize that, in
everyday life, there is a large fuzzy area between not
saying exactly what you think (as in the example with
the waiter or the bad hairdo, or when someone is telling
you a story that is boring you to death) and blatantly
deceiving people to accomplish your goals (as in the
con man who pretends to be in love with the rich
widow). If you think that the world would be a better
place if people were totally honest with each other,
think again—and try to practice this for a while! You
will quickly realize the value of ingratiation in everyday
social interaction. Most people do not know the
truth as to what others really think of them, and they
may actually be a lot less happier if they did.
See also Ingratiator’s Dilemma; Self-Enhancement
Further Readings
Roos Vonk
Godfrey, D., Jones, E. E., & Lord, C. (1986). Self-promotion
is not ingratiating. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 50, 106–115.

Gordon, R. A. (1996). Impact of ingratiation on judgments
and evaluations: A meta-analytic investigation. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 54–70.
Jones, E. E. (1964). Ingratiation. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Jones, E. E., & Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general
theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.),
Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 1,
pp. 231–262). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Vonk, R. (1998). The Slime effect: Suspicion and dislike of
likeable superiors. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 849–864.
Vonk, R. (2001). Aversive self-presentations. In
R. M. Kowalski (Ed.), Behaving badly: Aversive
interpersonal behaviors (pp. 79–155). Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.
Vonk, R. (2002). Self-serving interpretations of flattery: Why
ingratiation works. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 82, 515–525.
INGRATIATOR’S DILEMMA
Ingratiation and ulterior motives underlying friendly
behavior are most easily detected when the ingratiator
in some way is dependent upon the target. This can
occur, for instance, when the ingratiator is a single
man out to find a date, and the target is beautiful
woman; or when the target is the ingratiator’s teacher
in school or supervisor at work, or is generally a powerful
person in a company or in politics. Because such
asymmetry in power makes it more likely that friendly
behavior by the low-status person is seen as ingratiating,
this presents the ingratiator with a dilemma:
When it matters most, that is, when you depend very
strongly on someone, ingratiation is most likely to
backfire because people will easily see through your
hidden agenda, and you lose your credibility.
Conversely, it is relatively easy for powerful people
to ingratiate lower-status persons without being suspected
of insincere motives. However, the incentives
for doing so are also smaller, because high-status persons
usually do not need favors from those with less
power This dependence is probably underestimated
by lower-status persons. Because ingratiation is less
easily noticed in these cases, ingratiation by powerful
people may actually go on a lot more than we think.
Ingratiators in low-status positions use several
strategies to resolve the ingratiator’s dilemma, that is,
to make their efforts more credible when flattering
someone they depend on. These have been described
by Edward Jones in his seminal book on ingratiation,
which appeared in 1964, and it seems the world has
hardly changed since then. The first strategy is to
build a power bank, by starting the flattery long before
you need a favor from someone. By ingratiating yourself
for a longer period, you build up credit, which you
can later withdraw. Obviously, this is a lot more effective
than walking up to your boss and saying, “Wow,
you are such a great supervisor, and by the way, can I
have the day off tomorrow?”
A second strategy around the ingratiator’s dilemma
is to find a setting where the power imbalance is less
salient. For instance, people take their boss out to the
pub or invite them to their house for dinner, thus creating
a setting where it is not that obvious who is in
charge and who is not.
Third, people sometimes obscure their behavior,
for instance, by disagreeing with their supervisor on
trivial matters. This way, they won’t look as though
they blindly follow and support their supervisor, and
they convey the impression that they are independent.
Finally, it is a good idea to flatter someone via
somebody else. For instance, it could be very strategic
to tell the boss’ secretary that you have never had a
better supervisor than this one, and that you are happy
to work very hard for this boss because he or she is
inspiring the best of you. With a little luck, the secretary
will tell your boss you said this, and your flattery
will have a great deal of impact because you are not
suspected of ulterior motives at all.
See also Impression Management; Ingratiation; Power
Further Readings
Ingroup–Outgroup Bias———483
Roos Vonk
Jones, E. (1964). Ingratiation, a social psychological
analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Vonk, R. (2002). Self-serving interpretations of flattery: Why
ingratiation works. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 82, 515–526.
INGROUP–OUTGROUP BIAS
Evidence of conflict and discrimination between
groups is all around, which is not to say that this is
inevitable, as many groups coexist peacefully most of

484———Ingroup–Outgroup Bias
the time. Ingroup bias refers to a form of favoritism
toward one’s own group or derogation of another group.
Many theories of intergroup relations in social psychology
try to explain this phenomenon. Ingroups are
groups to which a person belongs, and outgroups are
groups to which a person does not belong (and which
could therefore become target for ingroup bias). There
is an almost infinite number of groups to which a person
belongs, depending on how he or she categorizes
the social world. Gender, ethnicity, occupation, economic
and social position are all meaningful dimensions
by which a person can define him- or herself and
others in terms of ingroups and outgroups; this is a
process of social (and self) categorization. Ingroup bias
can take many forms and on many dimensions, both
evaluative and behavioral. Evaluative ingroup bias
refers to the rating of one’s own group as better (more
positive, less negative) on dimensions of judgment, and
as such, it is closely related to the concept of prejudice.
In behavioral terms, ingroup bias refers to the tendency
to favor the ingroup over the outgroup in some way, for
example, in terms of the allocation of resources or
rewards: a form of discrimination. Outgroup bias—the
tendency to favor the outgroup over the ingroup—is
much less common than ingroup bias but by no means
absent in intergroup relations.
One of the key objectives of research in intergroup
relations has been to understand and explain evidence
of ingroup bias in it various forms, as a necessary step
to reduce and resolve intergroup discrimination. One
obvious and recurring explanatory factor is selfinterest:
People may favor their own groups, and derogate
outgroups, because it benefits them through resources
or rewards. This is the basic idea behind the realistic
group conflict theory, which explains such bias in
terms of real conflicts of interests between groups that
are competing with each other for scarce resources
(e.g., land, jobs, status). This provides a straightforward
and compelling explanation for many of the
intergroup conflicts seen around the world, especially
where resources are at stake.
However, research has also shown that conflicts of
interests and self-interest motives may not even be
necessary for ingroup bias to occur. The so-called
minimal group studies show that people tend to favor
their own group in terms of reward allocations even
when they are categorized on a trivial basis (e.g., preference
for painters, by a coin toss), such that they do
not even know who is in the ingroup or the outgroup,
and even when they do not meet them. This is true
even when they do not allocate rewards to the group
as a whole (where they could benefit personally) but
only individual members of the ingroup. One feature
of these experiments was the development of reward
matrices designed to measure different reward strategies.
It was possible to distinguish between strategies
that simply favored the ingroup (maximizing ingroup
profit) from a form of discrimination that maximizes
the difference in rewards given to ingroup and outgroup
(i.e., even potentially at the cost of the absolute
reward to the ingroup), which could be seen as genuinely
more discriminatory. These experiments found
evidence of this maximizing difference strategy.
These findings led to the development of social identity
theory, which aimed to explain why people might
discriminate in favor of their group for more symbolic
psychological reasons than because of mere self-interest.
The explanation proposed for this was that such
discrimination provides the group with a positive distinctiveness
that can enhance the social identity and
self-esteem of ingroup members.
However, the explanations for discrimination in
minimal groups remain hotly contested. Some have
argued that ingroup bias can be explained by selfinterest
after all, if it is assumed that there is an expectation
of reciprocity of mutual reward among ingroup
members. This still leaves open the question of why
the ingroup should feel this ingroup reciprocity.
Evolutionary arguments have been advanced, proposing
that people may have good reasons to trust and
reward those within their ingroup, who may in turn
help them in the future. This may explain ingroup
favoritism but may less easily explain evidence of
maximum differentiation or outgroup derogation. More
recently social identity theory has been extended by
emotion theory to explain the more malicious forms
of prejudice and discrimination toward outgroups and
the different forms this may take, depending on the
specific relations between the groups (e.g., depending
on power, status relations). Clearly ingroup bias is not
just a matter of rational self-interests but may also
include more symbolic and emotional benefits to the
group.
One weakness of the realistic conflict approach is
that it seems to imply that ingroup bias should occur
when there are conflicts of interest, and this is clearly
not always the case. Although intergroup conflict is
newsworthy, intergroup stability is more common
despite pervasive differences in wealth status and other
resources. Sometimes groups seem to accept their
disadvantaged status and even show examples of outgroup
bias. A good example of this is the classic doll

studies in which African American children presented
with a Black or White doll to play with chose the
White doll (at least in the early demonstrations), an
apparent outgroup preference. Social identity theory is
able to explain this because it only predicts conflict
and social competition when the group relations are
unstable and perceived as illegitimate (and thus insecure).
After the civil rights movement, the doll studies
no longer showed outgroup bias, indicating that
African Americans no longer accepted their lower status
as legitimate.
Russell Spears
See also Intergroup Relations; Realistic Group Conflict
Theory; Social Identity Theory
Further Readings
Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willis, H. (2002). Intergroup
bias. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 575–604.
Tajfel, H., & Turner J. C. (1986). The social identity theory
of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin
(Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 7–24).
Chicago: Nelson Hall.
INOCULATION THEORY
Definition
Inoculation theory was devised by William McGuire
in the early 1960s as a strategy to protect attitudes from
change—to confer resistance to counterattitudinal
influences, whether such influences take the form of
direct attacks or sustained pressures.
Nature of Inoculation
Inoculation theory consists of two elements: threat and
refutational preemption. The threat component of an
inoculation treatment raises the possibility that a person
may encounter persuasive challenges to existing
attitudes. It is designed to get people to acknowledge
the vulnerability of existing attitudes to potential
change. Threat functions as the motivational catalyst
to resistance. Once a person accepts that attitudes are
vulnerable to change, they will expend the effort to
strengthen attitudes. The refutational preemption component
of an inoculation treatment raises—and then
refutes—specific arguments contrary to attitudes. It is
Inoculation Theory———485
designed to provide the specific content that people
can use to defend attitudes and to provide people with
a model or script for how to defend attitudes.
Studies by McGuire in the 1960s proved, convincingly,
that inoculation works. Subsequent studies by
Michael Pfau indicated that inoculation works, in part,
through the theorized mechanisms of threat and counterarguing,
but also by eliciting anger, making attitudes
more certain, rendering attitudes more accessible, and
altering the structure of associative networks.
Evidence of threat’s motivational role in resistance
is found in the consistency of findings by McGuire and
Pfau that inoculation-same and inoculation-different
treatments are equally effective in conferring resistance
to attacks. Refutational-same inoculation treatments
cover the same counterarguments raised in later
attacks, whereas different treatments employ counterarguments
that are completely different than those raised
in subsequent attacks. Because inoculation-different
treatments feature unique content, effectiveness can
not be attributed to the refutational-preemption component
of the treatment; instead, it can only be explained
by the threat component, which motivates people to
bolster their attitudes. The power of inoculation stems
from the fact that treatments spread a broad umbrella
of protection—not just against specific counterarguments
raised in subsequent treatments, but against all
potential counterarguments.
Applications of Inoculation
Inoculation is an interesting and useful theory.
Research during the past 20 years has revealed numerous
real-world applications of inoculation theory. For
example, studies indicate that it is possible to inoculate,
for example, political supporters of a candidate in a
campaign against the influence of an opponent’s attack
ads; citizens against the corrosive influence of softmoney-sponsored
political attack ads on democratic
values; citizens of fledgling democracies against the
spiral of silence which can thwart the expression of
minority views; commercial brands against the influence
of competitors’ comparative ads; corporations
against the damage to credibility and image that can
occur in crisis settings; and young adolescents against
influences of peer pressure, which can lead to smoking,
underage drinking, and other harmful behaviors.
Michael Pfau
See also Applied Social Psychology; Attitude Change;
Persuasion; Resisting Persuasion

486———Integrative Complexity
Further Readings
Compton, J. A., & Pfau, M. (2005). Inoculation theory of
resistance to influence at maturity: Recent progress in
theory development and application and suggestions for
future research. In P. J. Kalbfleisch (Ed.), Communication
yearbook (Vol. 29, pp. 97–145). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
McGuire, W. J. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion.
Some contemporary approaches. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 1,
pp. 191–229). New York: Academic Press.
Szabo, E. A., & Pfau, M. (2002). Nuances in inoculation:
Theory and applications. In J. P. Dillard & M. Pfau (Eds.),
The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and
practice (pp. 233–258). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
INTEGRATIVE COMPLEXITY
Definition
Integrative complexity deals with how people process
information. Some people may view things in simple
terms (e.g., John is always introverted), and some may
view them in more complex ways (e.g., whether John
is introverted depends on how well he knows the
people in the situation). More formally, level of complexity
depends on two underlying variables:
1. the capacity and willingness to accept that there is
more than one way to look at an issue and to acknowledge
that these differing perspectives are all legitimate
(differentiation), and
2. the ability to form conceptual links among these perspectives
and to integrate them into a coherent overall
judgment (integration).
Low differentiation implies lack of awareness or
acceptance of alternative ways of looking at an issue.
For example, a person who thinks of abortion as coldblooded
murder and thinks that those who believe
it is a woman’s right to choose are completely wrong
would be considered cognitively simple. Only one way
of looking at an issue is accepted as reasonable. Other
alternatives are dismissed and viewed as illegitimate. It
suggests a reliance on rigid decision rules for interpreting
events and making choices. A more differentiated
statement would recognize the legitimacy of
looking at the same issue in different ways or along
different dimensions. For example, if a person was to
accept that some people view abortion as an act of
murder while others view it as a civil liberties issue
concerning a woman’s right to choose, he or she would
be considered more complex. And yet, even though
each point of view is considered valid, each is considered
in isolation. No connections or links are made
between the different perspectives. This response,
therefore, indicates differentiation but not integration.
Indeed, differentiation is a necessary but not sufficient
prerequisite for integration. That is, without
acknowledging that there is more than one legitimate
way to think about an issue, no connection between
perspectives can be created. The complexity of integration
depends on whether the person perceives the
differentiated characteristics as existing in isolation
(low integration), in simple interactions (moderate
integration), or in multiple, contingent patterns (high
integration). For example, statements reflecting moderate
integration might specify why two contradictory
views are both legitimate (e.g., whether abortion is
viewed as murder or as a civil rights issue depends on
one’s view about when the developing organism within
the mother becomes a human being). Importantly,
complexity focuses on how people think and process
information. It is concerned with cognitive structure.
The content of people’s thoughts is irrelevant.
Background and History
Originally, integrative complexity was viewed as a
relatively stable personality trait. It was used to capture
individual differences in styles of social thinking.
Cognitively simple individuals were viewed as people
who dislike ambiguity and dissonance and seek rapid
cognitive closure in judging others and in making
decisions. They form dichotomous (good vs. bad)
impressions of people, events, and issues. In contrast,
cognitively complex individuals adopt a more flexible,
open-minded, and multidimensional view of the
social world. They recognize that life has many inconsistencies
and contradictions and realize that there is
more then one side to every story when forming their
impressions.
Empirical research focused on how to measure complexity
and on how level of complexity affects behavior
in various situations. Early efforts to measure complexity
relied on the Paragraph Completion Test. This test
presented participants with several sentence stems
(i.e., topic sentences) that focused on issues such as

interpersonal conflict and relations to authority. Participants
were asked to complete each stem and write at
least one additional sentence. Two trained coders then
assessed the responses on a 7-point complexity scale
ranging from complete lack of differentiation to highorder
integration. In the mid-1970s, researchers adapted
this methodology to content-analyze archival data and
free-response protocols that were not necessarily written
for the purpose of complexity coding. As result, the
range of research applications has expanded enormously.
Researchers were able to analyze materials as varied as
the diaries of historical figures, diplomatic communications,
and Supreme Court decisions.
Early research on individual differences in integrative
complexity proved fruitful. For example, studies
found that integratively complex individuals tend to
construct more accurate and balanced perceptions of
other people, notice more aspects of the environment,
use more information when making decisions, be
more open to disconfirming information, and hold less
extreme views than do cognitively simple individuals.
They also tend to be less susceptible to information
overload and prejudice, better able to resolve conflicts
cooperatively, and more creative.
And yet, viewing complexity as a stable personality
trait proved too confining. Researchers began to realize
that level of complexity may not be as stable as
once thought. Rather, it can also be affected by a variety
of situational and environmental factors. Two lines
of research emerged. One area of work focused on the
impact of environmental stressors on the complexity of
thinking. Some stressors, such as time pressure, information
overload, and threat, were found to reduce level
of complexity, whereas other stressors, such as moderately
negative life events, were found to elevate
complexity. A second line of research focused on the
effects of value conflict, accountability demands, and
audience characteristics on complexity. For example,
it was shown that when confronted with a conflict
between two values (e.g., social equality vs. economic
efficiency), individuals who viewed both values as
equally important resolved the conflict in more complex
ways than did individuals who believed more
strongly in one value than the other. This work also
found that individuals could think in complex ways on
certain topics but think in simple ways on others. By
treating integrative complexity as a domain-specific
and situation-specific construct, research was able to
shed light on the conditions under which people can be
motivated to think complexly as well as increase their
Integrative Complexity———487
understanding of when complexity is likely to prove
adaptive.
Is Complexity Good or Bad?
The most widely held view of integrative complexity
appears to be “the more the better.” Indeed, complex
individuals have been found to be resistant to a number
of judgmental biases. For example, they are more
willing to change their initial impressions in the face
of contradictory evidence, they are more likely to take
into account situational constraints on individuals’
behavior, and they are less likely to become overconfident
in the correctness of their judgments and
predictions. However, for each bias reduced due to
complexity of thought, there is a different bias that
may be exasperated. For example, complex individuals
tend to get bogged down in insignificant details,
rendering them less capable of making a decision and
less willing to take risks. They are also more likely to
choose a middle-of-the-road option not because it is
truly preferable but simply because it is easier to justify
and defend. Finally, they are also more likely to
procrastinate, pass responsibility to others, or both, in
the face of difficult decisions. Therefore, a more realistic
view of complexity is that the situation will determine
when it should be considered an asset and when
a hindrance. It is also possible that individuals might
be able to avoid the potential pitfalls of higher levels
of integrative complexity if they cultivate an overarching
capacity to switch between more complex and
simpler ways of reasoning depending on what is more
appropriate for a given situation.
Implications
The study of integrative complexity has increased
researchers’ understanding of a wide variety of issues
in social psychology. Experimental research has concentrated
on the effects of different information
processing styles on social perception, attitude and
attitude change, attribution, work performance, crosscultural
communication, and acculturation. Archival
research has focused on issues such as the effects of
social and political roles, predicting international crisis,
and even the expected success and duration of
leader careers.
Carmit T. Tadmor
Philip E. Tetlock

488———Interdependence Theory
See also Accountability; Need for Closure; Value Pluralism
Model
Further Readings
Streufert, S., & Nogami, G. Y. (1989). Cognitive style
and complexity: Implications for I/O psychology.
In C. L. Cooper & I. Robertson (Eds.), International
review of industrial and organizational psychology
(pp. 93–143). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
Suedfeld, P., Tetlock, P.E., & Streufert, S. (1992).
Conceptual/integrative complexity. In C. P. Smith (Ed.),
Motivation and personality: Handbook of thematic
content analysis (pp. 393–400). Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Tetlock, P. E., Peterson, R. S., & Berry, J. M. (1993).
Flattering and unflattering personality portraits of
integratively simple and complex managers. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 64(3), 500–511.
INTERDEPENDENCE THEORY
Definition
Interdependence theory describes the structural properties
that characterize interactions and the implications
of such structure for human psychology. Whereas
most psychological theories focus on the individual,
suggesting that people behave as they do because of
their unique experiences or cognitions or personalities,
interdependence theory regards the relationships
between people as important as the people themselves.
Thus, the theory represents a much-needed model of
the nature and implications of interdependence; it is a
truly social psychological theory.
Background and History
Harold Kelley and John Thibaut developed interdependence
theory over the course of 4 decades, beginning
in the 1950s. Its initial formulation was contemporaneous
with early social exchange and game theories,
with which it shares some postulates. The theory analyzes
interdependence structure, identifying crucial
properties of interactions and relationships, as well as
interdependence processes, explaining how structure
influences motivation and behavior.
Interdependence Structure
Interdependence theory presents a formal analysis of
the abstract properties of social situations. Rather than
examining concrete social elements such as “professor
teaches student” or “man seduces woman,” the
theory identifies abstract elements such as “dependence
is mutual” or “partners’ interests conflict.” Why
emphasize abstract properties? Although two situations
may differ in concrete ways, they may share
abstract properties that cause people to think, feel, and
behave in predictable ways.
The basic unit of experience is an interaction: Each
of two or more people can enact any of two or more
behaviors. As a result, each person experiences good
versus poor outcomes, consequences that are more
versus less satisfying or pleasurable. All social situations
can be described in terms of six structural
dimensions. Given that most situations are defined by
their properties with respect to two or more structural
properties, these dimensions are the building blocks of
interdependence structure.
Level of dependence describes the degree to which
an individual’s outcomes are influenced by another’s
actions. John is more dependent on Mary to the extent
that through her actions, Mary can cause John to experience
good versus poor outcomes. He is independent
when her actions do not influence his well-being.
Thus, John’s dependence on Mary is the converse of
her power over him—when John is more dependent,
Mary is more powerful.
Mutuality of dependence describes the degree to
which people are equally dependent. Mutual dependence
exists when Mary is as dependent on John as he
is on her. Unilateral dependence involves vulnerability
on the part of one person, in that the less dependent
person may behave as he or she wishes without concern
for the other’s well-being. Mutuality constitutes
balance of power, yielding fewer opportunities for
exploitation and more congenial interaction.
Basis of dependence describes whether dependence
rests on partner control, where John’s outcomes
are governed by Mary’s unilateral actions, versus joint
control, where John’s outcomes are governed by
John’s and Mary’s joint actions. Partner control is
absolute and externally controlled, in that John’s outcomes
are entirely governed by Mary’s behavior. Joint
control is contingent, in that John’s outcomes rest
on coordination with Mary (e.g., if he can predict her

actions, he can modify his behavior and achieve good
outcomes).
Covariation of interests describes the degree to
which partners’ outcomes correspond, whether events
that benefit John are similarly beneficial for Mary.
Covariation ranges from correspondent situations
(what is good for John is good for Mary) through
mixed motive situations to situations with conflicting
interests (zero sum situations; i.e., what is good for
John is bad for Mary). Interaction is simple when
interests correspond: John can simply pursue his interests,
knowing that this will also yield good outcomes
for Mary. And interaction is simple when interests
conflict: One person must lose if the other is to gain,
so each person simply tries to win. Mixed motive situations
are more complex, in that they involve a blend
of cooperative and competitive motives, combining
desire to benefit the other with temptation to exploit.
Temporal structure describes the fact that interactions
are dynamic and evolve over time. Interaction
must be understood not only in terms of the immediate
outcomes produced by partners’ choices, but also
in terms of the future behaviors and outcomes that are
made available (or eliminated) as a result of interaction.
For example, John and Mary may make an
extended series of investments to develop a committed
relationship. Or by behaving in a particular manner
today, they may create desirable future opportunities
for themselves or proceed down a path where only
poor outcomes are available.
Availability of information is the sixth structural
dimension. John and Mary may possess adequate versus
inadequate information about their own or the
other’s outcomes for various combinations of behavior
(“How does Mary feel about marriage?”); a partner’s
motives (“Will Mary use her power benevolently?”);
or future interaction possibilities (“If we do this today,
where will it take us?”). Inadequate information gives
rise to ambiguity and misunderstanding, challenging
the flow of interaction.
Interdependence Processes
Affordance describes what a situation makes possible
or may activate in interaction partners. Specific situations
present people with specific problems and opportunities
and therefore logically imply the relevance of
specific motives and permit the expression of those
Interdependence Theory———489
motives. For example, situations with conflicting interests
afford the expression of self-centeredness versus
concern with another’s well-being: John can behave in
such a manner as to yield good outcomes for him or
for Mary, but not for both. Therefore, conflicting interests
inspire predictable sorts of cognition (greed, fear)
and invite predictable forms of attribution and selfpresentation
(“Does Mary care about me?” “Trust me!”).
People do not always react to situations in ways
that maximize their immediate outcomes. Transformation
is the psychological process whereby people set
aside their immediate, gut-level desires and instead
react to a situation on the basis of broader considerations,
including the well-being of others, long-term
goals, or stable personal values. The transformation
process may rest on systematic thought or automatic
habits. It is through the transformation process that
people reveal their social selves—motives deriving
from the fact that people sometimes have a past and a
future with interaction partners.
Through attribution processes, people attempt to
uncover the implications of another’s actions; for example,
Mary may try to discern whether John’s behavior
is attributable to the situation (desire for good immediate
outcomes) or to John’s transformation of the
situation (intent to sacrifice his interests so as to give
her good outcomes). In like manner, through selfpresentation,
people attempt to communicate the implications
of their own actions; for example, John may
try to communicate that in a given situation it is in his
interest to behave selfishly, yet he has sacrificed so
as to benefit Mary. People cannot communicate or
discern all motives in all situations, in that specific
motives are relevant to specific types of situations. For
example, in situations with perfectly corresponding
interests, John cannot display trustworthiness; if he
behaves in ways that benefit Mary, he is likewise benefited,
such that it is impossible to determine whether
he is driven by self-interest or prosocial motives.
Where do the motives that guide the transformation
process come from? People initially react to situations
as unique problems. In a novel situation, John may carefully
analyze circumstances or react impulsively. Either
way, he acquires experience: If his reaction yields poor
outcomes, he will behave differently in future situations
with parallel structure; if his reaction yields good outcomes,
he will react similarly in future, parallel situations.
Repeated experience in situations with similar
structure gives rise to stable transformation tendencies

490———Interdependent Self-Construals
that on average yield good outcomes. Stable adaptations
may reside within persons, relationships, or groups.
Interpersonal dispositions are actor-specific inclinations
to respond to specific situations in a specific
manner across numerous partners. Over the course of
development, different people undergo different experiences
with family members and confront different
opportunities with peers. As a result, people acquire
dispositions to perceive situations in specific ways, to
anticipate specific motives from others, and to transform
situations in predictable ways. For example, a
child who encounters unresponsive caregiving may
develop fearful expectations about dependence and
therefore avoid situations in which she must rely on
others. Thus, the interpersonal self is the sum of one’s
adaptations to previous interdependence problems.
Relationship-specific motives are inclinations to
respond to specific situations in a specific manner
with a specific partner. For example, trust reflects an
individual’s confidence in a partner’s benevolence.
Mary develops trust when John behaves prosocially
by departing from his immediate interests to enhance
her outcomes. His actions communicate responsiveness
to her needs, thereby promoting Mary’s trust in
his motives, increasing her comfort with dependence,
strengthening her commitment, and enhancing the
odds of reciprocal benevolence.
Social norms are rule-based, socially transmitted
inclinations to respond to particular situations in a
specific manner. For example, societies develop rules
regarding the expression of anger; such rules help
groups avoid the chaos that would ensue if people
were to freely express hostility. Likewise, rules of etiquette
represent efficient solutions to interdependence
dilemmas, regulating behavior in such a manner as to
yield harmonious interaction. Sometimes behavior is
influenced by societal-level norms; dyads may also
develop relationship-specific norms.
Caryl E. Rusbult
See also Altruism; Close Relationships; Cooperation;
Discontinuity Effect; Prosocial Behavior; Reciprocity
Norm; Social Dilemmas; Social Exchange Theory; Social
Power; Social Value Orientation; Trust
Further Readings
Kelley, H. H., Holmes, J. G., Kerr, N. L., Reis, H. T.,
Rusbult, C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003). An atlas of
interpersonal situations. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Kelley, H. H., & Thibaut, J. W. (1978). Interpersonal
relations: A theory of interdependence. New York: Wiley.
Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology
of groups. New York: Wiley.
INTERDEPENDENT SELF-CONSTRUALS
Definition
Self-construal refers to the way in which a person
thinks about and defines the self. Importantly, selfconstrual
is not only a way of viewing oneself but also
a way of understanding one’s relationship to the larger
social world. When people are construing or thinking
about themselves in an interdependent way, they are
likely to think first and foremost about their roles in
relationships (e.g., “I’m Nancy’s best friend” or “I’m
the youngest son in my family”) and their important
group memberships (e.g., “I’m a sorority sister” or
“I’m an Asian American”). An interdependent selfconstrual,
because of its emphasis on relationships
and groups, is thus one in which the self is seen as
fundamentally embedded in the larger social world.
Interestingly, thinking of the self in this relatively
social way has been shown to influence a wide range
of values, emotions, and social behavior.
Background
Interdependent self-construals were first explored primarily
in terms of cultural differences, because it was
found that members of East Asian and Latin American
cultures were much more likely to think of the self in
an interdependent way than were North Americans, and
it was thought that this social way of construing the self
could potentially explain some well-known cultural differences.
For example, an interdependent self-construal
is very common in Japanese, Korean, and Indian cultures,
and it was thought that this might explain why
members of these cultures place a higher value on
belonging, emphasize social obligations, and are more
likely to view the causes of other people’s behavior as
rooted in the social situations they faced rather than in
terms of being driven by their individual personalities.
Of course, to say that interdependent self-construal
is a causal factor in these cultural differences, one
would need to be able to look at the effects of selfconstrual
apart from culture. Fortunately, the capacity
to construe the self as interdependent is not limited by

one’s cultural upbringing. Everyone, regardless of cultural
background, sometimes construes the self interdependently.
Indeed, anytime one views the self as part
of a “we” instead of only a “me,” this represents an
interdependent construal. For example, when individuals
are playing a team sport or spending time with their
family, they are more likely to construe the self as
interdependent. From this, researchers found that
there were ways to study the effects of self-construal
directly, by encouraging people to construe the self in
a more or less interdependent fashion before they
engaged in other tasks. Because the effects of experimentally
manipulated self-construal were often found
to be very similar to cultural differences, researchers
who study self-construal can now do so in a variety of
ways: Some look at members of East Asian cultures,
who maintain relatively interdependent self-construals;
some experimentally prime or activate interdependent
self-construal; and some use personality scales to look
at individual differences in interdependent self-construal.
The effects of interdependent self-construal that
are reviewed in this entry have been discovered using
all of these methods.
Values, Emotions, and Social Behavior
When people construe the self as interdependent, it
increases the importance of social connections and
maintaining harmony with others. Values like belonging,
friendship, family safety, and national security
take precedence, and interdependent people become
significantly less tolerant of others who break social
norms or fail to live up to social obligations.
Certain emotions are also more likely to be experienced
by those with an interdependent self-construal.
Because of the increased importance of social obligations,
people with a more interdependent selfconstrual
judge the self through others’ eyes; thus, some
negative emotions that are experienced when one disappoints
another person or fails to live up to social
standards (e.g., anxiety, guilt, and shame) are experienced
more frequently and intensely for those with
interdependent construals. However, interdependence
has emotional benefits as well as costs. For example,
more ego-focused emotions, such as anger, are less
likely to be experienced. Finally, when people view
the self as interdependent, they take greater pleasure
and pride in the accomplishments of close others and
groups, and so in some ways, they have more opportunities
for happiness than if limited to taking pleasure
in individual accomplishments alone.
Interdependent Self-Construals———491
In terms of social behavior, maintaining a more
interdependent self-construal appears to benefit society
at large. People are more cooperative than competitive,
work harder at group endeavors, and are better at
resolving social dilemmas when they are construing the
self as interdependent. They are also more likely to put
the good of a relationship partner or social group above
their own desires; thus, in many ways it appears that
interdependent construal leads to less selfish behavior.
However, the benefits of interdependence only extend
to those relationships and groups that are incorporated
as part of the self; interdependence has also been associated
with greater prejudice toward outgroups. Thus,
the prosocial behaviors that are seen in interdependent
people may actually be equally selfish; the self has simply
been broadened to encompass one’s own relationships
and groups.
Gender Differences
A powerful stereotype in American society is that
women are more social than men. It is thus perhaps
not surprising that psychologists originally expected
women to be more likely to construe the self in a
social fashion as well. However, research has revealed
that men and women are equally likely to maintain an
interdependent self-construal. Gender differences do
exist, but it is in the type of interdependence, rather
than in the extent of interdependence. Recall that
interdependence may be based on both roles in close
relationships and memberships in social groups.
Women appear to place greater emphasis on the relational
aspects of interdependence, whereas men place
greater emphasis on the collective or group-based
aspects of interdependence. In other words, women
define the self with more close relationships, experience
more emotional intensity in close relationships,
and are more willing to sacrifice for a close other
when compared to men. Conversely, men define the
self with more group memberships, experience more
emotional intensity in group contexts, and are more
willing to sacrifice for their groups when compared
to women. However, despite these minor differences
in emphasizing one type of social connection over
another, interdependent self-construals appear to be
equally prevalent and powerful for both sexes, understandable
when one considers the profound importance
of social connections for all humans.
Wendi L. Gardner
Kristy K. Dean

492———Intergroup Anxiety
See also Collectivistic Cultures; Independent Self-Construals;
Self
Further Readings
Gabriel, S., & Gardner, W. L. (1999). Are there “his” and
“her” types of interdependence? The implications of
gender differences in collective and relational
interdependence for affect, behavior, and cognition.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75,
642–655.
Gardner, W. L., Gabriel, S., & Lee, A. Y. (1999). “I” value
freedom but “we” value relationships: Self-construal
priming mirrors cultural differences in judgment.
Psychological Science, 10, 321–326.
Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self:
Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.
Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
Wong, R. Y.-M., & Hong, Y. (2005). Dynamic influences of
culture on cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Psychological Science, 16, 429–434.
INTERGROUP ANXIETY
Definition
People often feel uncomfortable when interacting
with others who belong to a different social group
than they do. Intergroup anxiety is the term used to
describe this discomfort. When interacting with members
of a different social group (called an outgroup),
people often anticipate a variety of negative outcomes,
such as being taken advantage of or rejected. In
extreme cases, they may be concerned that outgroup
members will physically harm them. They may also
worry that members of their own group (called the
ingroup) will disapprove of interactions with outgroup
members. Intergroup anxiety can arise in relations
between almost any two groups, from racial and ethnic
groups to different political parties.
Origins
Research on intergroup anxiety indicates that it has
its origins in the past relations between the groups. If
the past relations have been characterized by conflict,
people will naturally be anxious about interacting with
members of the outgroup. If there are substantial
differences in status between the two groups, this disparity
can also arouse anxiety. Members of low-status
groups have reason to fear being rejected and exploited
by members of high-status groups. Members of highstatus
groups may also feel anxious, either because
they are concerned about the resentment that might be
directed at them or because they feel guilty about the
ways their own group has treated the other group in the
past. Another factor that has been found to increase
intergroup anxiety is strong identification with one’s
ingroup. People who strongly identify with their ingroup
typically consider outgroups to be inferior, an attitude
that is sometimes referred to as ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism
leads to anxiety concerning interaction with
outgroup members because of the disdain ingroup
members have for them. In addition, being ignorant of
the outgroup and its norms, beliefs, and behaviors can
also lead to intergroup anxiety. For example, when
people interact with individuals from another culture,
about which their knowledge is limited, they commonly
feel anxious. Although a simple lack of personal
contact with an outgroup can cause intergroup
anxiety, past negative personal contact is an even more
potent cause of intergroup anxiety.
Effects
Intergroup anxiety can lead to a number of negative
consequences. The most frequently studied effects of
intergroup anxiety are prejudice toward the outgroup
and an unwillingness to interact with outgroup members.
These effects have been found for attitudes between
a wide variety of groups including Blacks and Whites,
Mexicans and Americans, Europeans and immigrants
to Europe, Native Canadians and Canadians of English
origin, heterosexuals and gays, people with HIV/AIDS
or cancer and those who do not have these diseases,
and women and men, among others. Put simply,
people do not like others who make them feel anxious.
Moreover, the negative evaluations of outgroups created
by intergroup anxiety can extend to social policies
that are perceived to favor outgroups, such as affirmative
action. When intergroup anxiety escalates to feeling
threatened by an outgroup, people experience fear
and anger, which have further detrimental effects on
intergroup relations. This type of anxiety also causes
people to rely on established patterns of thought, such
as stereotypes. Stereotypes consist of the predominantly

negative characteristics attributed to particular outgroups.
Intergroup anxiety may also cause people to
perceive outgroups to be homogeneous; that is, the
members of these groups are all thought to be the
same. In addition, intergroup anxiety may interfere
with the ability to perform complex cognitive reasoning
tasks. One of the most intriguing effects of intergroup
anxiety is that it can lead to exaggerated behaviors
toward outgroup members. In most cases, this means
people respond to outgroup members more negatively
than ingroup members, but intergroup anxiety can also
lead to exaggerated positive behaviors if people are
concerned that acting in negative ways may lead others
to perceive them as being prejudiced.
Because intergroup anxiety has such negative
effects on intergroup relations, it is important to take
steps to reduce it. Intergroup anxiety can be reduced
when people feel empathy toward members of the outgroup.
Also, certain types of intergroup contact can
reduce intergroup anxiety. To reduce this anxiety, the
contact should be among people equal in status, it
should be focused on the individuals involved rather
than their group memberships, it should involve cooperation,
and it should have the support of relevant
authority figures. Programs that have been created
specifically to improve intergroup relations, such as
those emphasizing cooperative learning and structured
intergroup dialogues, can be effective as a means of
reducing intergroup anxiety. In instances where there
has been long-standing conflict, such as between
racial, national, or cultural groups, the mass media
can also play a positive role by providing information
about outgroups that reduces ignorance and emphasizes
the common humanity and common goals shared
by the groups. And, of course, individuals who are
aware that others may be subject to feeling intergroup
anxiety can take steps to put outgroup members at
ease during intergroup interactions.
See also Ethnocentrism; Ingroup–Outgroup Bias
Further Readings
Walter G. Stephan
Cookie White Stephan
Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. (1985). Intergroup anxiety.
Journal of Social Issues, 41, 157–176.
INTERGROUP EMOTIONS
Intergroup Emotions———493
Definition
Intergroup emotions refer to the specific emotional
reactions that people feel toward a social group and its
members. Intergroup emotions are closely related to the
concept of prejudice. Both intergroup emotions and
prejudice involve individuals’ feelings about social
groups to which they do not belong; however, these two
terms differ in the level of detail used to characterize
people’s feelings toward groups. Prejudice generally
refers to one’s overall general feeling (e.g., favorable
vs. unfavorable) toward a social group, whereas intergroup
emotions generally refer to one’s specific feelings
(e.g., respect, anger, guilt) toward a social group.
Compared to general prejudice, then, a focus on intergroup
emotions often reveals a more complex and differentiated
picture of how individuals feel about social
groups.
Variations in Intergroup Emotions
Intergroup emotions take many forms, varying in both
the nature of the specific emotional reaction and the
kind of social group that evokes the emotional reaction.
First, people can experience qualitatively different
types of specific feelings toward a social group.
For example, when contemplating a particular group,
an individual may feel specific emotions that are
mainly positive, such as respect, gratitude, or joy.
Alternatively, when thinking about the same group,
this individual may feel specific emotions that are
mainly negative, such as fear, anger, or guilt. And very
often, an individual experiences both positive and
negative specific emotions toward the members of a
particular group.
In addition, people can experience these specific
feelings toward the members of qualitatively different
types of social groups. That is, people may feel intergroup
emotions toward individuals belonging to social
groups defined by a wide range of characteristics, such
as ethnicity (e.g., Asian Americans), nationality (e.g.,
Germans), age (e.g., elderly people), religion (e.g.,
Muslims), sexual orientation (e.g., gay men), personal
values and beliefs (e.g., members of the National Rifle
Association), and profession (e.g., lawyers).

494———Intergroup Relations
Antecedents and Consequences
of Intergroup Emotions
Fundamentally, intergroup emotions emerge from the
psychological distinctions people tend to make
between their own groups and other groups. That is, to
feel specific emotions toward a group, an individual
must see oneself as a member of a particular social
group (e.g., Americans) and see others as members of
a different social group (e.g., Japanese). Once these
lines are drawn, intergroup emotions can then arise
from subjective assessments of the relationship between
one’s own group and this other group. For example, if
a man believes he and his fellow group members are
competing for jobs with the members of another
group, then he may experience anger or envy toward
the members of this other social group.
These assessments and the resultant intergroup
emotions often play important roles in the social interactions
between individuals belonging to different
groups. More precisely, different specific emotional
reactions should prompt different behavioral reactions.
For example, anger toward members of a social
group may stimulate an individual to behave aggressively
toward members of this group, whereas respect
toward members of a social group may stimulate an
individual to pursue mutually beneficial interactions
with members of this group.
Catherine A. Cottrell
See also Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Intergroup Anxiety;
Prejudice
Further Readings
Mackie, D. M., & Smith, E. R. (Eds.). (2002). From
prejudice to intergroup emotions: Differentiated reactions
to social groups. New York: Psychology Press.
INTERGROUP RELATIONS
Social psychological research on intergroup relations
concerns the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors
humans express when they think of themselves and
others as members of social groups. All humans
belong to many different types of social groups, ranging
from smaller groupings of people (such as one’s
circles of friends) to larger social categories (such as
gender and race). When people think and act as group
members, they tend to accentuate similarities between
themselves and members of their own groups, and
exaggerate differences between members of their own
group and other groups (social categorization). People
also tend to evaluate people differently depending
on whether they are members of one’s own groups
(ingroup members) or members of other groups (outgroup
members); specifically, people typically show a
preference for members of their own groups, such that
they evaluate them more positively and make more
positive attributions for their behaviors, as compared
to how they evaluate outgroup members (this tendency
is called ingroup favoritism).
Many factors can affect whether people will be
inclined to think of themselves and others as individuals
or as members of social groups. Some of these
factors involve features of the social situation, the
broader social context, or both. For example, longstanding
histories of tension and conflict between
groups, whether based in competition over resources
or contrasting beliefs, can compel people to view
themselves and others in terms of group membership.
Even in the absence of such conflicts, merely perceiving
that certain people are more similar to each other
than others can lead people to categorize themselves
and other people as members of distinct groups; these
perceptions can be enhanced further depending on
how strongly people appear to represent the characteristics
that define their groups (prototypicality), how
similar members of each group appear to be to each
other (homogeneity), and how many members of each
group are present in the immediate social situation
(numerical representation). In addition, other factors
that lead people to think of themselves and others as
group members involve the characteristics and accumulated
social experiences people bring to new social
situations and contexts. For example, people who
identify strongly with their groups, or who are often
stigmatized or rejected because of their group membership,
might be especially likely to perceive their
interactions with others in terms of their identities as
group members.
People often try to discern whether other people
perceive them as individuals or as group members, so
that they know what to expect in interactions with
them. Generally, when people think they are being
viewed as group members, they expect that outgroup
members will evaluate them negatively and think of

them in terms of the negative stereotypes associated
with their groups. Still, sometimes social situations
can be ambiguous, such that people feel unsure about
how they are being seen by outgroup members and
whether the outgroup members’ evaluations of them
reflect who they are as individuals or as group members
(attributional ambiguity).
Whether because of the anticipation of negative
evaluations or uncertainty about how they will be perceived,
people often feel anxious about interactions
with outgroup members. In part, anxieties about
cross-group interactions can motivate people to avoid
them, thereby making interactions between groups
less likely to occur. Still, when these interactions do
occur, anxieties can have a negative impact on how
members of different groups interact with each other,
which curbs the potential for achieving positive relations
between their groups. For example, when people
feel anxious in cross-group interactions, they tend to
act in less spontaneous and relaxed ways; not only
may such negative behaviors make cross-group interactions
unpleasant, but they may also be interpreted as
signs of prejudice by members of the other group. In
addition, feeling anxious can make it harder for
people to attend to personalized information about
outgroup members, thereby leading them to rely more
heavily on stereotypes as they interact with members
of other groups.
Given these tendencies, a great deal of research on
intergroup relations has sought to identify strategies
that can be used to improve relations between groups.
Much of this work has focused on how to structure
conditions of the social situation so that contact
between groups will lead to positive intergroup outcomes,
such as establishing equal status between groups,
showing that their interactions are supported by institutional
authorities, and having them work together
cooperatively toward common goals. Researchers
have also debated about the extent to which group differences
should be emphasized when members of different
groups interact with each other. Integrating
distinct approaches, recent theorizing suggests that
people should initially de-emphasize group differences
when members of different groups interact—by
focusing on either personal characteristics or group
memberships they share in common—so that they can
develop relationships beyond the confines of their distinct
group memberships. Once these relationships are
established, group distinctions should then be emphasized
so that any positive effects of their relationships
would be likely to translate into more positive attitudes
toward all members of their groups. Developing
close relationships across group boundaries can also
be effective in reducing anxiety about future crossgroup
interactions and encouraging people to look
beyond their own interests and express more concern
for the welfare of members of other groups.
Linda Tropp
See also Attributional Ambiguity; Ingroup–Outgroup Bias
Further Readings
Brewer, M. B., & Miller, N. (1996). Intergroup relations.
Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Brown, R., & Hewstone, M. (2005). An integrative theory of
intergroup contact. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (pp. 255–343). San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. L., Kawakami, K., & Hodson, G.
(2002). Why can’t we just get along? Interpersonal biases
and interracial distrust. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic
Minority Psychology, 8, 88–102.
Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test
of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 90, 751–783.
Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2001). Improving
intergroup relations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION
PROCESSES
See ATTRACTION
Interpersonal Cognition———495
INTERPERSONAL COGNITION
Definition
Interpersonal cognition is the set of mental processes
by which people think about their interactions and
relationships with others. Research in the area of interpersonal
cognition aims to understand how people perceive
the many layers of information present in social
interactions and how they process this information and

496———Interpersonal Cognition
store it in memory. A major goal of this research is to
understand how people’s thoughts, feelings, and
behavior in social interactions are influenced by
expectations based on past interactions. In particular,
researchers often consider the idea that how people
think about themselves is influenced by the relationships
that they have with others.
Background and History
Interpersonal cognition research grew rapidly in the
1990s, as researchers expanded their view of social
cognition beyond looking at social objects in isolation
and acknowledged the importance of considering
interpersonal experiences. That is, whereas the
broader area of social cognition looks at how social
information about self and about others is dealt with,
interpersonal cognition research considers that complex
patterns of interaction between self and others
are also perceived, processed, stored, and recalled.
A person might come to believe that trusting others
makes that person likely to be taken advantage of, for
example, or that treating others with respect leads
them to respond warmly in return. This expectancy
might influence the kinds of information the person
pays attention to in new interactions, the kinds of
inferences he or she draws about other people’s
behavior, and the kinds of memories the person stores
to draw on in the future.
Thought processes about interpersonal interaction
are strongly linked with motivation and emotion. It
has been argued, for example, that through evolution
humans have developed a powerful need to belong.
Thus, people are motivated to assess, process, and
encode their interpersonal encounters in terms of
whether they are being rejected or accepted. Perceptions
of rejection can trigger powerful negative
emotions, such as shame, anxiety, and sadness. Other
motives, including desires to be respected, admired, or
feared, can trigger other emotions as well.
Measuring Interpersonal Cognition
Assessing interpersonal cognition is done in two primary
ways: explicitly and implicitly. An explicit measure
of interpersonal cognition relies on a person
reporting how he or she feels about his or her social
interactions. For example, measures of attachment ask
people about how they feel in a romantic relationship
(e.g., “When romantic partners disapprove of me, I
feel really bad about myself”). On the other hand,
implicitly measuring variables associated with interpersonal
cognition allows researchers to tap into
thoughts and feelings that a person might not be aware
of. For example, a lexical decision task can measure
people’s automatic cognitive associations between
failure and rejection, and success and acceptance. In
this task, participants classify letter-strings that appear
on a computer screen as either a word or not a word.
If a person is faster to identify a rejection-related word
(e.g., disliked) right after seeing a failure-related word
(e.g., mistake), this can be taken as evidence that the
person holds a cognitive association between failure
and rejection. Studies have shown that associations of
this kind give rise to an interpersonal script, which
usually takes the form of an “if-then” contingency.
For example, people with low self-esteem are most
likely to show the expectancy that “If I fail, then I will
be rejected (by others)” and also to show a general
sensitivity to social rejection.
Many researchers have explored the effect of
past interpersonal experiences on current interpersonal
expectancies. For example, a person may act or respond
differently depending on whether he or she is interacting
with a close friend versus a romantic partner
versus a person in authority, because the person has
learned specific expectancies and scripts about how
interactions will likely proceed. A common method
used to tap into this phenomenon is priming. Priming
research involves presenting a participant with a cue
that activates a construct in memory and subsequently
influences behavior. For example, having a person
visualize a person who “will accept you, no matter
what,” activates a sense of social acceptance and leads
to less critical thoughts following a difficult task.
Relational Selves and Attachment
In theoretical terms, the type of research described in
the previous section, common in the domain of interpersonal
cognition, explores the mental representation
of the self in relation to others (e.g., romantic partner,
friend), which gives rise to relational selves. The idea
here is that people do not have a single, unified selfconcept
but rather have a series of relational selves
in memory, each linked to specific significant others.
Furthermore, people tend to act the same way around
similar types of people. For example, meeting a person
who is reminiscent of one’s father is likely to activate
the relational self experienced with one’s father, leading
to expressions of behavior and expectations of how
the other person will act. Other research has found that

people often incorporate knowledge about an “other”
into knowledge about the self. This can be described as
a shared resources type of knowledge, where a person
relies on and draws from shared knowledge, perspectives,
and resources to determine whether or not a goal
can be achieved (e.g., “I can do this because my partner
will show me how”).
An important topic studied by interpersonal cognition
researchers is people’s general attitude toward
close relationships with others, in other words, their
attachment style. Repeated positive and supportive
interactions with significant others leads to more positive
appraisals of stressful situations, a stronger belief
that life’s problems are manageable, and more positive
beliefs in the good intentions of others. Furthermore,
positive social interactions with significant others
leads to a greater sense of one’s own self-worth, competence,
and mastery. Being valued, loved, and cared
for by a significant other leads to the belief that one is
a valuable, loveable, and special person.
Implications
Because interpersonal cognition is closely tied to
motivation and emotion, people’s thoughts are often
shaped by their wishes and fears. In the domain of
romantic relationships, research has found that people
tend to engage in positive illusions and biases to maintain
a committed relationship. Furthermore, a person’s
decision on how much to trust an intimate partner is
reflected in self-protective strategies (e.g., aggressing
against the partner in reaction to perceived rejection)
and is shaped by a person’s confidence about their
partner’s love and acceptance.
Social interactions are an integral component of
human life and have a large effect on people’s thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors. Interpersonal cognition defines
how these interactions are mentally processed and
encoded and explores how these representations influence
one’s expectations about, and behavior in, future
social interactions.
Jodene R. Baccus
Mark W. Baldwin
See also Attachment Styles; Priming; Social Cognition
Further Readings
Baldwin, M. W. (Ed.). (2005). Interpersonal cognition.
New York: Guilford Press.
INTIMACY
Definition
Intimacy———497
Per social psychologists, intimacy refers to a process
of interaction in which social partners, as a result of
sharing personal and private thoughts and feelings,
come to feel understood, appreciated, and cared for
by each other. This definition is deliberately narrower
than the many common language usages of this term.
In everyday language, intimate and intimacy are often
used as synonyms for closeness, sexual activity, love,
marriage, privacy, or relatively intense forms of physical
engagement (such as touching or standing very
close to another person). When intimacy exists, each
of these may or may not be involved. Consequently,
and to eliminate confusion, researchers prefer to rely
on the more precise definition.
Intimacy and Relationships
Intimacy is widely regarded as one of the key processes
governing close relationships. Extensive theory and
research indicate that the most gratifying close relationships
are those characterized by a mutual sense of
understanding, appreciation, and caring. Not coincidentally,
people whose social networks possess high levels
of intimacy tend to be happier and healthier, whereas
the absence of intimacy tends to be associated with
loneliness and other forms of emotional distress, and
may even lead to the deterioration of health. The association
between intimacy and emotional well-being is
so fundamental that many theorists describe the capacity
for participating in intimate relationships as a principle
feature of successful personality development and
maturity.
What characterizes the development of intimacy in a
close relationship? The process typically begins with
one person’s self-disclosure of self-relevant material,
which involves both words and the nonverbal cues
accompanying them. The potential for fostering intimacy
is greater when this material is personal, private
(in the sense that one is highly selective about revealing
it), and affective (concerned with feelings or capable
of creating a significant emotional response). Nonverbal
cues may contribute to intimacy by indicating the
sender’s affective state (e.g., a sad expression), by altering
the meaning of words (e.g., a sarcastic smirk paired
with a positive statement), or by regulating immediacy
(e.g., leaning closer to or away from one’s partner).

498———Intimate Partner Violence
Of comparable significance to the unfolding of the
intimacy process is the partner’s response. Supportive
responses encourage the growth of intimacy, whereas
disinterested or critical responses are likely to inhibit
its development. Partner responses provide signals
(again involving both verbal and nonverbal content)
that the self-discloser uses to infer whether the partner
has understood the personal meaning of whatever was
communicated, whether the partner values and appreciates
the self-discloser, and whether the partner can
be trusted to be caring. Of course, in the real-time ebb
and flow of conversation, these exchanges are rapid,
spontaneous, and complex, suggesting that there is
considerable subjectivity in how self-disclosures and
responses are interpreted. A large body of research has
established that both the objective properties of these
behaviors and the individual’s idiosyncratic interpretations
of the behaviors are influential.
Another important consideration is that the intimacy
process is both recursive and reciprocal. That is,
as each partner comes to trust the other’s response to
his or her self-revelations, each becomes increasingly
willing to disclose personal thoughts and feelings to
the partner. Typically, disclosers and responders swap
roles back and forth, often repeatedly in the same conversation.
An individual’s experience as responder
usually affects his or her subsequent willingness to be
open with his or her own thoughts and feelings; similarly,
each partner’s perception of the other’s responsiveness
is likely to affect his or her own willingness
to be responsive in turn to the partner. These principles
illustrate the fundamentally interactive and interdependent
nature of intimacy.
Individual Differences and Intimacy
Ever since Erik Erikson, one of the most influential
psychoanalytic psychologists of the 20th century,
described the successful attainment of a primary intimate
relationship as the fundamental life task of early
adulthood, researchers have been interested in identifying
factors that predispose some people to achieve
higher levels of intimacy in their close relationships
and others lower levels. This research demonstrates
that many factors contribute to an individual’s preferences
and capabilities with regard to intimacy.
No other variable has been studied as extensively
as has a person’s biological sex. A general conclusion
from these many studies is that women’s social lives
tend to exhibit higher levels of intimacy than men’s
do, and that this difference is greater in same-sex
friendships than in other types of relationships
(e.g., heterosexual romantic relationships, marriages).
Although some researchers see this difference as
mainly being the result of biological differences
between men and women, evidence for this position is
sparse and in fact contradicted by certain studies: For
example, studies showing that same-sex friendships in
non-Western cultures tend to find small, if any, sex
differences in intimacy. The best supported conclusion
appears to be the developmental one: that in
Western culture, men learn to be more reluctant about
the vulnerabilities inherent in intimate interaction.
Another important avenue for research has viewed
intimacy as a motive, emphasizing determinants from
personality (including both genetically determined
and learned qualities) and from past experiences in
close relationships. For example, self-esteem, openness,
comfort with closeness, empathic concern for
others, trust, extraversion, parental warmth, and prior
intimacy tend to be associated with higher levels of
intimacy and intimacy motivation, whereas social
anxiety, fears about exploitation, vulnerability, dependence,
social avoidance, conflict and distance with
parents, and prior dysfunctional relationships tend to
be associated with lower levels of intimacy and intimacy
motivation. Regardless of differences in motivation,
intimacy is known to be an essential component
of social life and, more broadly, human experience.
Harry T. Reis
See also Close Relationships; Emotion; Nonverbal Cues and
Communication; Self-Disclosure; Social Anxiety
Further Readings
Prager, K. (1995). The psychology of intimacy. New York:
Guilford Press.
Reis, H. T., & Patrick, B. C. (1996). Attachment and
intimacy: Component processes. In A. Kruglanski &
E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of
basic principles (pp. 523–563). New York: Guilford Press.
INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE
Definition
Intimate partner violence refers to the intentional use of
aggressive behaviors that are enacted with the immediate
goal of causing physical pain to an intimate partner.

If the pain is caused accidentally (e.g., by inadvertently
shutting a door on the partner’s fingers), it does not
qualify as intimate partner violence. This entry focuses
specifically on physical violence in romantic relationships;
it does not address psychological aggression.
Virtually all intimate partner violence is instrumental,
in that the partner’s pain is a means to an end
rather than an end in itself. Regardless of whether violence
is motivated by the desire to control the partner’s
behavior in the argument at hand, to gain justice
or retribution, or to defend one’s self-image, it typically
is not random or sadistic. As such, intimate partner
violence is best conceptualized as a (conscious or
nonconscious) goal-directed social influence tactic,
albeit an extreme one with deeply disturbing consequences
for victims.
Frequency
Physical violence is perpetrated against romantic partners
with alarming frequency. According to a nationally
representative survey conducted in 1985, for example,
16.1% of married couples in the United States experienced
an incident of violence during the previous year.
When the definition of violence is limited to include
only severe violence perpetration (e.g., kicking, beating
up, using a knife or gun), incidence remains high at
6.3%. Moreover, intimate partner violence is not limited
to married couples; evidence suggests that perpetration
rates might be even higher among unmarried
dating couples.
Two Types of Intimate Partner Violence
Until the mid-1990s, researchers investigating intimate
partner violence in heterosexual romantic relationships
found themselves embroiled in a heated
controversy over whether such behavior is best characterized
as (a) a phenomenon in which men batter
women in the interest of exerting control or dominance
or (b) a gender-neutral phenomenon in which
men or women sometimes become aggressive toward
their partner during heated conflict. Although this
controversy is far from resolved, researchers have
recently brought some coherence to the literature by
developing typologies to distinguish between qualitatively
distinct categories of intimate partner violence.
One prominent typology suggests that there are
two types of intimate partner violence in Western
countries: intimate terrorism and situational couple
violence. Intimate terrorism (or patriarchal terrorism)
Intimate Partner Violence———499
is argued to be a product of cultural traditions that
bequeath to men the right to control “their” women,
with violence serving to exert and maintain control.
In couples characterized by intimate terrorism, violence
tends to (a) be perpetrated predominantly by
men, (b) occur chronically, (c) increase in severity over
time, and (d) be unidirectional (i.e., the victim typically
does not fight back). In contrast, situational couple
violence (or common couple violence) is a
nonescalating and frequently bidirectional form of
physical violence that arises occasionally when conflictual
situations get out of hand. Unlike intimate terrorism,
there do not appear to be substantial gender
differences in the likelihood of perpetrating situational
couple violence. Nonetheless, female victims
are more likely to be injured or killed, in part because
of males’ greater physical strength.
The causal mechanisms underlying intimate terrorism
relate to psychopathology and patriarchal socialization
practices, topics that have been systematically
studied in disciplines (e.g., clinical psychology, sociology)
other than social psychology. After all, social
psychologists typically investigate social dynamics in
normal (nondeviant) populations. The causal mechanisms
underlying situational couple violence, in contrast,
relate to interpersonal conflict, impulsiveness,
and behavioral restraint, topics that fall squarely in the
domain of social psychology. The remainder of this
entry focuses on social psychological research relevant
to understanding the perpetration of situational
couple violence.
Conceptual Analysis of
Situational Couple Violence
Researchers must ask three general questions regarding
a given interaction between romantic partners to
determine whether situational couple violence is
likely to transpire. First, are the partners experiencing
conflict with one another? Second, does either partner
experience impulses toward intimate partner violence
as a result of this conflict? And third, does that person
exhibit weak behavioral restraint?
Many scholars have concluded that conflict is
inevitable in romantic relationships. Jacob may speak
disrespectfully toward Monica when he is trying to
quit smoking, or Monica might become jealous when
Jacob goes out for dinner with his ex-girlfriend, interrogating
him aggressively upon his return. Each of
these behaviors may cause the partner to become irritated
and may ultimately ignite relationship conflict.

500———Intrinsic Motivation
Although experiencing relationship conflict may be
inevitable in romantic relationships, intimate partner
violence as a tactic for dealing with this conflict is not.
Relationship conflict typically does not cause partners
to experience violent impulses. Such impulses,
however, are not unheard of, and certain risk factors
render them more likely. Factors that increase the likelihood
that the experience of conflict leads a given
partner to experience violent impulses include features
of the immediate situation (e.g., experiencing anger or
humiliation), the relationship (e.g., relationship commitment,
power/control dynamics), the potential perpetrator’s
personality (e.g., dispositional hostility or
narcissism), and the potential perpetrator’s background
characteristics (e.g., exposure to parental violence).
Even if partners experience violent impulses in
response to relationship conflict, they will only act on
these impulses if they exhibit weak behavioral
restraint (or if they believe that intimate partner violence
is acceptable, which is relatively rare in situational
couple violence). Factors that increase the
likelihood that experiencing violent impulses will lead
to violent behavior include features of the immediate
situation (e.g., impulsiveness, alcohol consumption,
experiencing life stressors) and of the potential perpetrator’s
personality (e.g., low self-control, belief that
violence is acceptable).
See also Aggression; Anger; Close Relationships;
Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis
Further Readings
Eli J. Finkel
Archer, J. (2000). Sex differences in aggression between
heterosexual partners: A meta-analytic review.
Psychological Bulletin, 126, 651–680.
Felson, R. B. (2002). Violence and gender reexamined.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Johnson, M. P. (1995). Patriarchal terrorism and common
couple violence: Two forms of violence against women.
Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57, 283–294.
Straus, M. A., & Gelles, R. J. (1986). Societal change and
change in family violence from 1975 to 1985 as revealed
by two national surveys. Journal of Marriage and the
Family, 48, 465–479.
INTIMIDATION
See SELF-PRESENTATION
INTRINSIC MOTIVATION
Definition
Intrinsic motivation is the desire to do something “just
to be doing it.” That is, the experience of the behavior
is reward enough, independent of any separable consequences
that may follow. Intrinsic motivation often
leads to or promotes flow, in which individuals become
completely absorbed in some challenging activity, such
as rock climbing or piano playing. Intrinsic motivation
is typically contrasted with extrinsic motivation, in
which behavior has no intrinsic appeal and occurs only
because of the rewards and reinforcements it brings.
Background and History
It took a long time for the concept of intrinsic motivation
to be accepted in psychology. This is because the
concept does not fit well with the behaviorist and
drive-theory models of human nature that dominated
in the early to mid-20th century. Behaviorist theories
say that behavior occurs because it has been rewarded
in the past, that is, because it has been positively reinforced
by rewards or consequences administered after
the behavior is over. Drive theories say that all behavior
is ultimately motivated by the necessity of dealing
with biological demands and needs, such as hunger,
thirst, and pain avoidance. Neither model can explain
spontaneous, playful, and exploratory behavior that is
unrelated to external rewards or to biological drives.
Such spontaneous behavior was observed many times
in the early part of the century, even in lower animals.
For example, rats will incur pain, and hungry monkeys
will pass up food, to get the opportunity to explore a
new area of their enclosure. Mechanistically oriented
psychologists at the time tried to reduce such behavior
to biological drives or external conditioning, but their
explanations were unpersuasive. It was not until the
cognitive revolution of the 1960s that an appropriate
paradigm emerged for viewing intrinsic motivation.
From a cognitive perspective, intrinsic motivation
expresses the desire to stimulate, exercise, and develop
the central nervous system. Given that complex online
information processing is central to human adaptation,
it makes sense that humans would have evolved an
inherent motivation to seek out challenges, develop
interests, and consolidate their knowledge of the
world. This assumption is also central to contemporary
cognitive-developmental theory, according to which

individuals’ active attempts at mastery provide the
basis for many types of cognitive growth and change.
Evidence and Outcomes
The early experimental research on intrinsic motivation
focused on the intrinsic motivation undermining
effect. This was the counterintuitive finding that
people are often less interested in doing something
after they have received a reward for doing it, a finding
that radically contradicts the assumptions and predictions
of operant behaviorism. In a typical experiment,
participants would first play with an interesting puzzle.
Some participants would be asked simply to try it out,
and others would be given rewards (i.e., money, food,
certificates) for doing, or for solving, the puzzle. In a
later free-choice period, rewarded participants were
less likely to spontaneously play with the puzzle, as
observed through a one-way mirror; apparently, their
intrinsic motivation had been undermined. This finding
and the findings of other early intrinsic motivation
researchers were controversial at the time and remain
controversial today, primarily among behaviorally oriented
psychologists.
Still, intrinsic motivation has been shown to be
hugely important in many domains, including education,
medicine, sports, work behavior, and personal
goal pursuit. Intrinsically motivated individuals report
better mood, enjoyment, and satisfaction than extrinsically
motivated individuals. They also perform
better—processing information more deeply, solving
problems more flexibly, and functioning more effectively
and creatively in general. As one example
research program, Teresa M. Amabile’s pioneering
studies showed that individual creativity in artistic pursuits
(e.g., collage making, haiku writing, drawing), as
consensually agreed upon by multiple judges, is often
undermined by external contingencies including not
only positive external rewards and prizes (i.e., a sticker
for “best collage”) but also negative external pressures,
such as deadlines, threats, surveillance, and evaluation.
When do rewards undermine intrinsic motivation?
A recent and comprehensive meta-analysis summarized
more than 100 experimental studies, showing
that free-choice motivation is most undermined when
the rewards are expected (rather than unexpected) and
are contingent (rather than noncontingent) upon either
task engagement, task completion, or positive task
performance. In other words, if a person gets what he
or she expects, as a reward for starting, finishing, or
doing well at a task, then that person tends to lose
Intrinsic Motivation———501
interest in the task. Notably, this meta-analysis also
showed that verbal praise rewards are not necessarily
undermining and can even enhance intrinsic motivation,
as evidenced by greater subsequent free-choice
play following praise.
Theories of Intrinsic Motivation
What causes the intrinsic motivation undermining
effect? Edward Deci, and his later colleague Richard
Ryan, developed cognitive evaluation theory to
explain it. In this model, human beings have innate
psychological needs for both competence and autonomy.
Individuals tend to lose their intrinsic motivation
for activities that thwart these needs. Incompetent
performance is thus an obvious potential detractor
from intrinsic motivation, and indeed, in Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory, a nonoptimal match
between one’s skills and the task demands is defined
as a major impediment to flow. Deci and Ryan’s novel
proposal was that rewards can thwart autonomy needs
when people perceive that the rewards are being used
in a controlling way. In this case, the individual may
shift from an internal perceived locus of causality
(“I am the origin of my behavior”) to an external perceived
locus of causality (“I am a pawn to my circumstances”).
Central to the model is the individual’s
cognitive evaluation of the reward. Does it seem to
represent an authority’s attempt to dictate or force his
or her behavior? According to cognitive evaluation
theory, even verbal praise can undermine intrinsic
motivation if the recipient evaluates the praise as an
attempt to coerce him or her. The results of the metaanalysis
described in the previous section suggest that
on average, tangible rewards tend to carry such connotations,
although verbal praise does not.
In contemporary psychology, Deci and Ryan’s selfdetermination
theory uses the concept of intrinsic
motivation as the foundation for a comprehensive theory
of human motivation, agency, self-regulation, and
thriving. The theory takes an organismic, humanistic,
and somewhat liberal perspective on human nature,
hoping to illuminate how societies should be constituted
to maximize peoples’ self-actualization and psychological
well-being. This theory focuses on the
connections between social and cultural contexts
(i.e., autonomy-supportive vs. controlling), contextual
motivation (i.e., intrinsic vs. extrinsic), and resultant
outcomes (i.e., need satisfaction, mood, performance,
creativity, and future motivation). In keeping with
cognitive evaluation theory, the theory also focuses on

502———Introspection
personality traits and styles as determinants of contextual
motivation; some people are more prone to
interpret rewards as controls and constraints (control
orientation), whereas others are able to interpret
rewards merely as informational and noncontrolling
(autonomy orientation).
Research suggests that intrinsic motivation is a
highly desirable quality, to be fostered within individual
personalities as well as within social contexts such
as classrooms, workplaces, ball fields, and interpersonal
relationships. Indeed, intrinsic motivation may be
essential to the achievement of optimal human being.
Kennon M. Sheldon
See also Extrinsic Motivation; Self-Determination Theory
Further Readings
Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity in context. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A metaanalytic
review of experiments examining the effects of
extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological
Bulletin, 125, 627–668.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and
self-determination in human behavior. New York:
Plenum.
INTROSPECTION
Definition
The term introspection is generally used by psychologists
to refer to people’s observation and contemplation
of their own thoughts, feelings, and sensations. In
early psychology, trained introspection was viewed as
a useful tool for acquiring data about the nature of such
cognitions, though the methodology fell into disfavor
and was largely abandoned during the past century.
However, introspective self-reports are still employed
in social psychology to assess such constructs as attitudes,
leading to continuing debate over the proper role
of introspection in scientific psychology.
History
The controversial nature of introspection stems from
its use as a methodological tool by the structuralists,
who sought to create modern, empirical psychology
toward the end of the 19th century. Wilhelm Wundt
and others trained research subjects to examine and
describe their own thoughts in an attempt to create
a table of mental elements analogous to chemistry’s
periodic table of elements. This method of trained
introspectionism was described by Edward Titchener
as requiring impartiality, attention, comfort, and freshness.
After 40 years of research, structuralists cataloged
50,000 constructs, representing three major classes of
elements—sensations, images, and affection—each of
which was viewed as possessing four attributes—
quality, intensity, duration, and clearness.
The method of trained introspectionism ultimately
became bogged down with reliability and validity
issues, especially because training inherently colored
the reports of introspecting subjects. The approach
was criticized by Gestalt theorists, who argued that
the overall organization of thoughts is more important
than individual elements, and by behaviorists, who
argued that behavior, not thought, is the proper focus
of scientific psychology. Over the next 50 years, these
two approaches dominated Europe and the United
States, respectively, and the method of trained introspection
was abandoned.
Validity of Introspective
Self-Reports
The behaviorist critique calls into question any
research method that relies on people’s introspective
self-reports of their perceptions, thoughts, or feelings.
Yet, such self-report measures are commonly used in
social psychology, especially to assess moods, emotions,
beliefs, and attitudes, often to good effect. True,
concerns are raised periodically that people may distort
their self-reports, especially if the attitudes they
hold are socially undesirable. And recently researchers
have demonstrated that people sometimes hold implicit
attitudes of which they are not even aware and which,
therefore, cannot be assessed with common self-report
measures. One view is that such attitudes reflect an
elaborate adaptive subconscious that inherently colors
all perceptions, communications, and actions. An alternative
view is that implicit attitudes may be relatively
rare and frequently overridden by conscious ones.
Critics also argue that introspection necessarily
changes the cognitions that people contemplate and
report. One program of research suggests that simply
thinking about one’s attitudes causes them to become

more extreme. Another indicates that thinking about
the reasons for one’s attitudes can fundamentally
change those attitudes in important ways. For example,
in one study, subjects introspected about why they
preferred one of two posters before deciding which to
take home; others made their choice without introspecting.
When contacted weeks later, those who had
introspected before choosing were generally less
happy with their selection than those who had not. The
researchers suggest that introspecting focused subjects
on easy-to-communicate justifications for their
choice that did not reflect their actual feelings, leading
to choices they ultimately found unsatisfying.
One common view is that people are ordinarily better
at discerning their own attitudes than they are at
introspecting the reasons for, or processes underlying,
those attitudes. In one study, shoppers felt several
nightgowns, reported which they preferred, and then
described the reasons for their preference. In actuality,
all the gowns were the same, though people tended to
prefer the one on the right, due to a common serial
position effect. However, no one correctly reported
that their preference was determined by serial position;
instead, people made up justifications for their
preferences. People’s tendency to introduce theories
about their thoughts and preferences, rather than to
report such thoughts objectively, underlies many criticisms
of introspective methods.
Nonetheless, some psychologists argue that introspection
ought to be treated like any other scientific
methodology, including modern brain-imaging tasks
that may seem more scientific. In other words,
researchers need to develop sophisticated theories of
the cognitive processes involved in introspection, the
factors that affect such processes, and thus the circumstances
under which introspection can or cannot provide
useful data. In general, introspection is expected to
yield more valuable data about the way that stimuli and
events are experienced than about the mechanisms or
causes of those experiences. And, in general, converging
results from several different methods will be more
definitive than the results of any one method alone.
Consider, for example, introspective reports of
pain. Doctors generally assume that self-reports of the
nature, severity, and location of pain are highly informative,
even if not totally accurate. When a patient
says, “It hurts when I raise my right arm,” this is a
key piece of evidence in framing the problem to be
addressed and in diagnosing the ailment. Other kinds
of data, such as x-rays or brain imaging may also
provide useful data, especially when combined with
those self-reports. But doctors are much more skeptical
of a patient’s speculations about the causes of
reported pain, such as “It feels like I tore the bursa.”
This is where other methodologies may be more useful.
Even so, when the patient has the appropriate
knowledge (e.g., she is a doctor herself), even introspections
about causation may be valuable. Some writers
therefore suggest that refinement of introspective
methods may ultimately require that subjects receive
special training, a controversial proposal given past
criticisms of the method of trained introspection.
Donal E. Carlston
Lynda Mae
See also Adaptive Unconscious; Attitudes; Beliefs;
Consciousness; Implicit Attitudes; Social Desirability Bias
Further Readings
Jack, A. I., & Roepstorff, A. (Eds.). (2003). Trusting the
subject: The use of introspective evidence in cognitive
science (2 vols.). Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.
Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we
can know: Verbal reports on mental processes.
Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.
INTROVERSION
Definition
Introversion———503
Introversion is a stable and heritable personality
dimension characterized by a preference for quiet settings
and for being alone. This does not mean that
introverts are unfriendly, lethargic, or cold; instead,
they are better described as reserved and even-paced,
more likely to be involved in low, rather than high,
stimulation tasks. Introversion is considered to be the
opposite of extraversion. It is different from shyness
in that anxiety and fear of social situations that describe
shyness is absent in introversion.
The term was invented by the psychoanalyst Carl
Jung. He used it to refer to people who followed their
own inner promptings and beliefs, rather than just
going along with the crowd. This original meaning has
somewhat been lost in the emphasis on being sociable
and outgoing, but some people still use it in that way.

504———Ironic Processes
Measurement
Two most common ways of measuring introversion
are the NEO (Neuroticism-Extroversion-Openness)
Personality Inventory and the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator. The former, which emphasizes the new concept
as being outgoing, is most commonly used in
research and academic settings, while the latter, which
is based on Jung’s theories, is most widely used in
business and industrial settings. Both measure introversion
as the opposing pole of extraversion. The
Social Introversion scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic
Personality Inventory–2 is a third commonly used
measure of introversion.
Life-Span Development
and Demographics
Introversion is generally stable across the life span,
although estimates of the amount of stability vary
widely, from .3 to .8. One of the reasons for the relative
stability across the life span may be that introversion
is, in part, biologically based and genetically
inherited, although estimates on the amount of heritability
also vary widely. One theory of biological
basis for introversion proposes a neural mechanism
that renders extraverts underaroused and make introverts
more sensitive to stimulation. Consequently,
introverts avoid loud, exciting social situations in an
effort to avoid excessive stimulation, contradicting
assumptions that introverts avoid such situations
because they are unfriendly, shy, or experience social
anxiety. A second theory emphasizes the differences
in impulsivity, such that introverts are low on their
reactivity to stimuli and high on their inhibitory systems,
therefore rendering them to inhibit their behaviors
and curtail impulsivity.
Demographics of Introverts
In the United States, the population is about evenly
split between extraverts and introverts. Although
extraverted behavior is often encouraged by American
culture, introverted preferences, such as engaging in
self-reflection, are generally accepted as normal. In
recent years, the Internet has provided a unique opportunity
for introverts to socialize in a way that appeals
to their personality. One factor that may lead to this
comfort level is the ability to easily regulate one’s
level of interaction with others.
Furthermore, while happiness is often associated
with extraverts, a substantial portion of introverts do
lead very satisfying and happy lives. This may be
because happiness has a strong link to both fulfillment
and emotional stability. Introverts can lead very fulfilling
lives by focusing on what pleases them—
usually this includes solitary pursuits and building
intimate relationships with a select group of friends,
as well as some of the activities also enjoyed by
extraverts.
Mallory Dimler
Lizabeth Goldstein
Brittany Kohlberger
Chu Kim-Prieto
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Extraversion; Personality
and Social Behavior; Positive Affect; Shyness; Traits
Further Readings
John, O. P., & Srivastava, S. (1999). The Big Five trait
taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical
perspectives. In L. A. Pervin & O. P. John (Eds.),
Handbook of personality (pp. 102–138). New York:
Guilford Press.
IRONIC PROCESSES
Definition
In almost all English dictionaries, one meaning of
irony (i.e., that which is ironic) refers to an unexpected
outcome or a surprising consequence. Social
psychologists, however, reference ironic processes
predicated upon the inner workings of the mind. Thus,
ironic processes are mental processes. What is ironic
is the nature of a person’s mental processing, such as
an unexpected change in thoughts, internal images,
feelings, attitudes, and so forth. A good way to understand
the social psychological meaning of ironic
processes is by a demonstration. The following example
is similar to the one used in the initial studies of
the ironic processes that occur during mental control,
particularly during thought suppression.
While reading the rest of this brief description
about ironic processes, simply follow this basic
instruction: Try not to think of a white bear. It is worth

noting that the instruction not to think of a white bear
is an instruction to suppress a thought. To comprehend
the instruction, the reader brings to mind an image or
memory of a white bear, maybe one that he or she saw
at a zoo, read in National Geographic, or saw on the
Discovery channel. For some, the image of a white
bear appears effortlessly (i.e., pops into mind); others
consciously scan memory until a white bear surfaces.
Yet, the instruction was not to think about the white
bear. Try it: Do not think of a white bear. This discussion
will return to the white bear later.
Background and History
Research on ironic processes by Daniel M. Wegner
and his colleagues has yielded fundamental and
important conclusions. The explanation of ironic
processes during thought suppression is that a person’s
mind simultaneously engages in two distinct
processes. Each process is involved with a specific
mental task. This is the ironic process theory.
In theory, one of the processes occurs when a person
deliberately tries to suppress an image or memory
from his or her mind. To suppress a thought successfully,
a person may repeatedly attempt to decrease
a thought’s occurrence, ideally, until the thought
appears in the mind’s eye no more. To do this takes
mental effort: This is the operating process. During
ironic processing, another process works in tandem
with the operating process.
The second process is the monitoring process. The
monitoring process is a less effortful mental process.
In theory, during thought suppression, a person makes
a mental note to wait and then see if an uninvited
thought recurs. The monitoring process checks for
instances of the thought to be suppressed. When the
monitoring process detects an unwanted thought (e.g.,
while on a diet, you notice the recurrent mental image
of your favorite dessert food), the operating process
attempts to replace the unwanted thought with something
else (e.g., you try to distract yourself by reading
the newspaper). If both processes operated harmoniously
all of the time, people would be quite proficient
at suppressing undesired thoughts. So far, there
is nothing ironic about the ironic process theory.
In laboratory studies, when a person became sufficiently
occupied with other tasks besides trying to suppress
an unwanted thought, fewer mental resources
were available for the person to attend to his or her
operating process. In these studies, participants knew
Ironic Processes———505
that their goal was to suppress a thought. However,
when their attention and mental focus shifted from
thought suppression to other new mental activities, the
conscious pursuit of suppressing a thought decreased
or stopped, but the monitoring process continued.
The results of this research suggest that it is easy
for most people to continue monitoring the occurrence
of unwanted thoughts. However, when new tasks and
activities occupy the body and mind, the operating
process slows down or stops, which is the other
process needed to suppress unwanted thought.
Simply, part of the mind continues to notice the
unwanted thought, but another part of the mind does
not do anything to get rid of the unwanted thought,
because the person is busy processing new information.
A consequence of this interplay between each
process is ironic processing.
An important research finding occurred when participants
were asked to do other mental work besides
just suppress a thought. The object they wished to
suppress became increasingly and unexpectedly (ironically)
accessible from memory: The thought to be
suppressed appeared more often in their minds, as
they were burdened with more than one mental task to
do. It seemed that if enough activity occupied the
mind, the simple goal to suppress a thought actually
became a difficult goal. While processing ironically,
people become preoccupied with the very thoughts
they try to suppress, even though voluntary control is
exerted in an effort to suppress unwanted thoughts.
Psychologists do not yet understand exactly why and
how this occurs.
Recall that earlier you tried not to think of a white
bear. You probably had no trouble initially remembering
a white bear, but you may have had some trouble
with suppressing the image of one as you continued
reading. When you first retrieved a memory of a white
bear—say, a mental picture of one—the white bear
was just as accessible as any other memory (e.g., a
boat, a doughnut). However, after you were given the
instruction to ignore the image of a white bear, you
also focused your attention on reading these words
and sentences. The extra mental activity needed to
read may have been enough to deter you from using
all of your operating processes toward getting rid of
the image of a white bear. As you continued to read,
you might have noticed the returning image of a white
bear. Because it has taken you mental work to read
and comprehend this summary about ironic processes,
your operating process worked less efficiently than if

506———Ironic Processes
you had stopped reading and just focused on suppressing
the thought of the white bear.
In theory, by recalling a white bear earlier, information
associated with a white bear became active in your
memory. Recall that while the operating process temporarily
helps block out the image of a white bear, the
monitoring process continues scanning the mind for
occurrences of the white bear as you kept reading.
Some of the activated information becomes a distraction
during the attempts to suppress thought. The ironic
processes that occur during thought suppression are
obviously limited to certain kinds of circumstances,
such as those where a person must do other things
besides constantly attend to suppressing thoughts.
Importance and Consequences
Real life is not too different from the laboratory tasks
used to study ironic processes. Life is full of surprises
and needs constant attention. People are rarely, if ever,
left to themselves to put their undivided attention and
energy toward getting rid of unwanted thoughts.
While people are awake, there is plenty of information
to attend to and to think about.
The initial research that helped formulate the ironic
process theory began with something relatively simple,
a white bear. However, researchers also study
dieting and the ironic processes that occur while
people try to suppress their cravings. Researchers also
examined the ironic processes that occur during the
suppression of sexist thoughts and remarks. Social
psychologists and psychoneuroimmunologists have
also begun researching the relationship between ironic
processes during thought suppression and immune
cell response in the body. Thus, there is some evidence
linking ironic processes with physical health
and illness.
In Wegner’s theoretical review, he suggested several
logical directions that research on ironic processes
could go. Indeed, by now researchers and practitioners
have begun to study ironic processes and their effects
from his suggested starting points. For example, one
research direction involves identifying personality
characteristics related to the susceptibility of ironic
processing. Who is most (and least) susceptible to
ironic processes and their unwanted effects? Another
research direction involves identifying the ways people
build up a resistance or psychological immunity to
ironic processes. How do people inhibit or block the
undesired aspects of ironic effects during thought suppression?
Research on ironic processes is also applicable
to clinical psychology. The ironic process theory is
useful to clinical psychologists interested in the maladaptive
ironic processes, such as those that tend to
occur in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder
and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Researchers in the fields of social cognition and
social psychology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries
helped uncover a pattern that human thoughts
routinely engage in, ironic processing. Researchers
have only recently begun to invent testable theories
and scientific methods that help psychologists understand
why and how ironic processes are adaptive (and
sometimes maladaptive) mechanisms of human thinking.
The research on ironic processing described here
extends well beyond social psychology. Recent research
on this topic is interdisciplinary, with insights from
clinical and cognitive psychology, immunology, and
neuroscience. The current research conclusions about
ironic processes also lend themselves well to interdisciplinary
work between social and developmental, evolutionary,
and industrial-organizational psychology.
See also Accessibility; Mental Control
Further Readings
Timothy D. Ritchie
Page, A. C., Locke, V., & Trio, M. (2005). An online measure
of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 88, 421–431.
Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control.
Psychological Review, 101, 34–52.
Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Zanakos, S. (1993). Ironic
processes in the mental control of mood and mood-related
thought. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
65, 1093–1104.

SENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ocial
Psychology

SENCYCLOPEDIA OF
ocial
Psychology
Roy F. Baumeister
Florida State University
Kathleen D. Vohs
University of Minnesota
EDITORS
2

JEALOUSY
Definition
Jealousy is an unpleasant emotion that arises when
one perceives that some important aspect of one’s
relationship with another, or the relationship itself, is
being threatened by someone else (a rival). For example,
a person is likely to experience jealousy if his or
her romantic partner appears to be emotionally or sexually
interested in someone else. The term jealousy also
applies to feelings that arise in other types of interpersonal
relationships, such as when children exhibit distress
over parents showering attention on a new sibling
or when a person feels upset over being excluded by
friends who are socializing together. Thus, jealousy
requires the involvement of three individuals (the self,
the partner, and the rival), which is sometimes referred
to as a love triangle.
The proposed function of jealousy is to motivate
behaviors that will reestablish the relationship
between the self and the partner and break up the
threatening liaison between the partner and rival.
Because close personal relationships provide individuals
with many physical and psychological benefits, it
is important to have psychological predispositions
toward maintaining them. In evolutionary terms, it is
likely that people who established and protected their
relationships typically produced more offspring.
Thus, the psychological traits that helped maintain
relationships would have been selected for and passed
down to us through our genes. One possibility is that
jealousy may have originally evolved as a response to
J
507
competition of siblings who are rivals for a parent’s
time, attention, resources, and so forth, and was later
usurped for the purpose of keeping friendships and
romantic relationships together.
Background
Although few would doubt that jealousy involves negative
feelings, there is no unanimous consensus on the
exact nature of the distress. The feelings we call jealousy
may be a blend of other more basic feelings, particularly
of anger, fear, and sadness. One possibility is
an individual may experience all of these emotions
simultaneously during a jealous episode. Another possibility
is, rather than experiencing several different
emotions at once, a person experiences a series of different
emotions over the course of a single jealousy
episode. Which emotion is experienced would depend
on what one focused or ruminated on. For example,
thinking about the loss of the relationship might elicit
sadness, while thinking about the partner’s betrayal
might elicit anger. A final possibility is that jealousy is
its own distinct emotional state that elicits feelings
and behaviors that are different from other emotions
such as fear and anger.
Importance and
Consequences of Jealousy
Jealousy can have powerful personal and social consequences.
While it sometimes can lead to positive
outcomes by redirecting a loved one’s attention to the
self and reestablishing bonds, it also can have serious

508———Jealousy
negative costs. For example, jealousy is frequently
implicated as a factor in spousal abuse and often ranks
as the third or fourth most common motive in nonaccidental
homicides across cultures.
The first signs of jealousy appear to occur early
in life. Some research suggests that a parent merely
directing attention to another child is, in and of itself,
sufficient to elicit jealousy in infants as young as
6 months. These infants displayed more negative emotion
when their mothers interacted with a life-like
baby doll, relative to when their mothers behaved the
same way toward a nonsocial toy (e.g., a book). This
suggests that complex cognitions are not needed to
elicit at least some primitive form of jealousy in
infants. However, with development, social and cognitive
factors become increasingly important. Even by
preschool age, the specifics of a social triangle influence
whether jealousy arises. For example, 4-yearolds
demonstrated more jealousy when their mothers
interacted with a similar-aged peer than when she
interacted with an infant, whereas younger infants’
jealousy was not affected by the rival’s age. Thus, one
of the changes that occurs with development is that
a person’s appraisal or assessment of the exact nature
and meaning of the loved one and rival’s interactions
become increasingly important in whether jealousy is
experienced.
Research on the social-cognitive aspects of jealousy
has emphasized two factors that make a loved one’s
involvement with another particularly threatening:
(1) when it challenges some aspect of a person’s selfconcept,
self-regard, or other self-representations, and
(2) when it decreases the quality of the primary relationship.
In other words, people ask themselves questions
about the meaning of their loved one’s
relationship to the rival: “What does this say about me?
Am I unlovable, unattractive, boring, et cetera?” and
“Will this rival relationship impact the important
things I get from my relationship with my partner such
as attention, affection, and support?” The answers to
these questions will affect the intensity of jealousy
over potential rival relationships.
Individual Differences
Many have wondered whether men or women are
more jealous. While studies occasionally find men to
be more jealous, others find women to be more jealous.
Overall, there seems to be no major consistent
differences in men’s and women’s jealousy. It was
once believed that in men jealousy was a stronger
motive for murder than in women. However, careful
analyses of murder motives, taking into account men’s
overall greater propensity for violence, show that a
woman who commits murder is as likely to be motivated
by jealousy as a man who commits murder.
One theory that has received a great deal of recent
attention predicts that gender differences should exist
in jealousy over a romantic partner’s infidelity: Men
should feel more jealous over sexual betrayal and
women over emotional betrayal. This view claims that
in our evolutionary past, different threats impacted the
number of children that any given man or woman
could have. (The basic tenet of modern evolutionary
theory is that we inherited our psychological and/or
physical traits from the ancestral people who reproduced
the most.) Since fertilization occurs internally
within women, men can never know with 100% certainty
that an offspring is indeed their own. Thus,
ancestral man faced the threat of spending resources
(food, time) on children that might not be his own.
This would decrease the number of biological children
that he had and increase those of someone else, which
would help pass the other man’s genes on instead of
his own. Hence, the theory suggests, men who were
particularly vigilant to sexual infidelity could prevent
this from happening. Thus, modern men should be particularly
jealous of sexual infidelity. Women, however,
cannot be tricked into bringing up someone else’s offspring,
so they should not be particularly jealous of
sexual infidelity per se. Instead, ancestral woman had
to be concerned that her mate might give his resources
to other women and their children, which would
decrease the chances of the woman’s own children surviving
and reproducing. Thus, present-day women
should be particularly jealous over emotional infidelity.
Inherent in this is the assumption that a man’s
emotional involvement is a proxy for his spending
resources on another. This hypothesis drew apparent
support from early work that found when people were
forced to predict whether a partner’s sexual or emotional
infidelity would be more upsetting, more men
than women picked sexual infidelity. However, recent
research with other measures and with people who
have actually experienced a loved one’s infidelity have
not found consistent gender differences in jealousy
over sexual and emotional infidelity.
Why might evolution have failed to produce gender
differences? One possibility is that a more general
jealousy reaction may have benefited both genders.

Infidelity rarely occurs abruptly; now, and presumably
in the ancestral past, those people who would stray
engage in flirting behaviors (e.g., increased eye contact
and smiling) well before they have sex. These
same behaviors can signal the beginnings of emotional
interest, sexual interest, or both. Thus, there
may be no need for men and women to have evolved
jealous reactions tuned to different events. Instead,
both sexes might best prevent either form of infidelity
by being alert to the common early warning signs of
either. This hypothesis is consistent with the emerging
evidence that men and women show similar reactions
to sexual and emotional infidelity.
Gender differences, however, are found in one type
of jealousy, namely, clinical cases of pathological
jealousy (also called morbid jealousy). Patients suffering
form this disorder show a usually delusional conviction
that their romantic partner is cheating on them.
Before making this diagnosis, clinicians must think
that the patient has weak and implausible evidence of
betrayal or has an exaggerated reaction. Patients with
pathological jealousy experience intense negative
feelings and strong urges to check up on and spy on
their partner and sometimes behave aggressively. Men
make up approximately 64% and women 36% of
pathological jealousy cases. Recent research suggests
that, in some cases, pathological jealousy is a form of
obsessive-compulsive disorder, which sometimes can
be successfully treated with the antidepressant medication,
fluoxetine.
Christine R. Harris
See also Attachment Theory; Emotion; Need to Belong
Further Readings
Harris, C. R. (2004). The evolution of jealousy. American
Scientist, 92, 62–71.
Salovey, P. (Ed.). (1991). The psychology of jealousy and
envy. New York: Guilford Press.
JIGSAW CLASSROOM
Social psychologist Elliot Aronson introduced the
jigsaw classroom in 1971, while a professor at the
University of Texas at Austin. It was first used as a
teaching/learning strategy to help defuse a potentially
Jigsaw Classroom———509
explosive situation in Austin—its racially segregated
schools were slowly desegregating. The primary purpose
of the technique was to help teachers eliminate
desegregated social patterns that emerged in racially
diverse classrooms; likewise, it was applied by teachers
for defusing violence in desegregated schools, as
well as easing social problems among diverse students.
It is frequently used in elementary and secondary
classrooms and, although less a fixture in college
classrooms, it is nonetheless applicable. The name jigsaw
is derived from its method of having each student
become an informational puzzle piece; that is, students
assemble in small groups in which each member
becomes an expert at his or her subject or learning task.
Each individual shares his or her information with the
other members and then presents it to the entire class.
Aronson believed the learning environment in traditional
classrooms was full of competition, which created
an atmosphere of turmoil and hostility. He believed that
traditional classrooms often have the tendency to favor
the “good” or more advanced students, ignoring those
that are less advanced with different learning styles
or needs.
The concept’s original purpose was to reduce racial
conflict and promote minority students’ learning motivation
and learning outcome. Another rationale for the
jigsaw method underscored the idea that each individual
learner was unique, and his or her role as a team
member emphasized his or her contribution to the team
through the learning process. Specifically, the method
utilized cooperative learning, similar to a jigsaw puzzle,
with each piece presenting each student’s part in
helping other students understand the entire project.
Each student is essential because each is responsible
for a segment of the project that the teacher assigns to
that particular group. In other words, students of jigsaw
classrooms have to cooperate and work with each
other. Otherwise, their assignments cannot be completed.
This cooperation is thought to be a valuable
tool in preventing tragic events, such as the Columbine
shootings in 1999. Jigsaw classrooms allow students to
appreciate each team member’s contribution and presence.
As a result, hostility and anger diminish when
students work together cooperatively.
In jigsaw classrooms, teachers can follow 10 steps
to implement the jigsaw techniques:
1. Teachers divide the entire class into small groups,
with each group consisting of five to six students;
the exact number of team members and teams

510———Justice Motive
depends on both the number of students in that
class and the complexity level of the project. Most
important, each team should be as diverse as possible,
highlighting differences like gender, ethnicity,
cultural background, and ability.
2. Teachers assign a student as the discussion leader
for each session on a rotating basis. The team
leader’s duty is to call on other team members in a
fair manner to make sure that each member participates
evenly.
3. Teachers divide that particular school day’s learning
task into several segments, making sure they
match the number of students.
4. Teachers assign each student on every team the
responsibility for one segment.
5. Teachers allow each student enough time to read
over his or her segment in order to become familiar
with it.
6. Each student on each jigsaw team is responsible for
a specific segment. The group gets together as
“expert groups,” discussing and exchanging their
research results. After that, they rehearse the presentation
they will make to their individual jigsaw
team.
7. Teachers request students to return to their jigsaw
team.
8. Students present their segment findings to their
team, while other teams’ members are encouraged
to ask questions for clarification.
9. Teachers visit each jigsaw team, observing the
process and helping team members successfully
complete the learning task. In addition, if any team
member attempts to dominate or disrupt the team,
the teacher should implement an appropriate intervention.
However, it is recommended that the team
leader handle the entire learning task, instead of
involving the teacher. The teacher can train team
members how to intervene when faced with difficult
members.
10. This step centers on assessment. Teachers should
administer a quiz based on the group’s particular
learning task, which helps students understand
cooperative learning.
Jigsaw classrooms have several advantages compared
to traditional teaching methods. From a teacher’s
perspective, (a) it is easy to implement within the
classroom, (b) it can be easily combined with other
teaching strategies, (c) there is no time limitation or
requirement when using the strategy, and (d) it
increases both retention and achievement of minority
students. For students, benefits include that it (a) is an
efficacious method of learning; (b) disperses personality
conflicts and/or tension in diverse classroom, while
creating a more amicable learning environment;
(c) encourages students’ listening to their peers;
(d) succeeds in fostering friendships while creating
mutual respect among students, regardless of their
individual differences; (e) promotes students’ learning
motivation and engagement in their tasks more
actively; (f) builds up less advanced learners’ selfconfidence;
(g) promotes team building skills; and
(h) improves students’ research ability, such as gathering
information, organizing their resources, and so on.
A teacher might experience several difficulties when
implementing a jigsaw classroom strategy. First, teachers
have to ensure that students have ample research
resources to complete their project. Second, teachers
need to spend more time helping less advanced students
so they do not produce inferior work within their respective
jigsaw group. Third, when dominant students try to
control the group, teachers need to be able to effectively
deal with the situation. Fourth, teachers need to encourage
bright students to develop the mind-set that helping
their team members is an excellent method to prevent
boredom.
Cary Stacy Smith
Li-Ching Hung
See also Group Performance and Productivity; Prejudice;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Aronson, E. (2000). The jigsaw classroom. Retrieved
December 10, 2006, from http://www.jigsaw.org
Aronson, E., & Patnoe, S. (1997). Jigsaw classroom.
New York: Longman.
JUSTICE MOTIVE
Definition
The justice motive is the idea that people have a basic
motive for justice; that is, people have a need to
believe that people get what they deserve. Research
on the justice motive emphasizes the importance of

justice to people as a goal unto itself. Its origins lie in
a basic understanding people develop early in life
about the kind of world they must be able to assume
if they are to get what they deserve. Evidence for
people’s need for justice has been derived from research
that examines people’s reactions to injustice. There is
also reason to believe that sometimes when people are
concerned about justice, it is the result of another need
or concern they have, and in this case, justice motivation
derives from other motives.
Justice and Psychology
A useful place to start a discussion of justice motivation
is the concept of justice itself. Psychology
researchers approach the topic of justice differently
than lawyers and legal philosophers do, and often differently
from how it appears in people’s everyday
lives, where justice is commonly associated with the
law, police, and the courts.
For psychologists, justice is about the thoughts and
feelings people have about the relation between the
value of people and their outcomes. Psychological
research on justice builds on the observation that
people are good at evaluating other people, on one
hand, and evaluating their experiences (e.g., winning
a lottery, finding love, becoming ill) and resources
(e.g., wealth and material possessions) on the other.
Psychologists refer to experiences and resources combined
as a person’s outcomes.
People can rapidly decide whether someone they
meet for the first time is a good or bad person; indeed,
it is one of the first things people want to know. Of
course, each person also has an evaluative sense of
him- or herself as a good or not-so-good person,
referred to in psychology as self-esteem. People are
also good at evaluating outcomes. Getting sick for
most people is bad, and getting an increase in salary is
good.
When considering justice, the question is how
does a person’s evaluations of people (including
themselves) line up with his or her evaluations of
their outcomes? When a good person (like you good
reader) experiences a good outcome, such as a goodsized
salary increase, others view the situation as just,
because there is correspondence in their evaluation of
the person and the person’s outcome: good with
good. However, when the same good person experiences
a bad outcome, such as being laid off from his
or her job, others will be inclined to view the situation
as unjust, because the evaluations are inconsistent:
good with bad. People are similarly sensitive to the
outcomes of bad people. When a bad person such as
a criminal has good outcomes such as a life of comfort,
people view the situation as unjust, but when the
same bad person has a bad experience, say, losing all
his or her money, the situation is just.
There are of course many intriguing variations and
complexities in how people think and feel about justice,
including the relative nature of justice judgments; what
one person considers just and fair is often different
from what others see as just. As you might imagine, this
relativity has all sorts of interesting implications, but this
entry will set these aspects of justice aside and turn to
its primary focus: motivation for justice.
Justice Motivation
Justice Motive———511
Why do people care about justice? Psychologists
interested in answering this question often approach it
in terms of motivation. When a person demonstrates
a need or desire to reach a goal, others say he or she
is motivated. In motivational terms, people care about
justice because of a need they have to experience justice
in their own lives and in their social world. Where
does the need for justice come from? Interestingly,
psychological research has suggested a number of
possible origins that fall into two categories depending
on the goal involved.
Some scholars argue that justice is an ultimate goal
people can have, an end unto itself. In this case, the
need for justice is understood to be a distinct motive
that cannot be reduced to other motives, such as selfinterest.
This is important because it raises the possibility
that people may sometimes be motivated to
achieve justice at the expense of self-interest. The ultimate
goal approach to justice motivation is the one
that argues that it is psychologically meaningful to
talk about a distinct justice motive.
The second approach to justice motivation assumes
that when people demonstrate a need for justice, they
do so as a means to arriving at another goal. In other
words, justice is an instrumental rather than ultimate
goal. This would be the case, for instance, if people
believe that complying with justice rules will help
maximize their outcomes: “If everybody plays by the
rules, we’ll all get what we want.” The instrumental
goal perspective on justice motivation means that
when people appear to have a need for justice, that
need is derivative of another need or concern. The list

512———Justice Motive
of needs people have that can give rise to a secondary
concern with justice continues to grow, with selfinterest
arguably at the top of the list. A number of psychological
justice theories assume that self-interest is a
central goal that people are trying to achieve; the theories
differ on whether self-interest motivation is pursued
for self-gains in the short term or the long term.
The short-term view is that people will behave justly
when it is in their self-interest to do so and unjustly
when it is not. The longer-term view points out that
self-interest needs must be met in the context of ongoing
relations with others, which gives rise to a social
exchange view of justice and self-interest. If people
enter into relations with others motivated to gain
resources over time, it is in their self-interest to commit
to social exchange (justice) rules that govern how
resources will be distributed and what processes will
be used to make decisions.
Other, less-resource-oriented theories suggest that
people’s need for justice arises from other concerns,
such as a desire to be regarded positively by others,
the need for control, concerns associated with uncertainty,
and a basic concern with morality. Examination
of these various perspectives is beyond the scope of
this entry, but their number and diversity highlights
the complexity of justice motivation. Thus, when someone
expresses a concern about justice, it is useful to
remember that his or her concern may reflect a basic
need for justice or derive from another concern, such
as increasing the chances of getting what he or she
wants or getting respectful treatment from others in
order to feel valued.
The Justice Motive
The idea that people have a basic motive for justice
has been characterized as the need to believe that
people get what they deserve. Because people in this
context refer to both oneself and others, the need
essentially means that people need to believe in a just
world where they not only experience justice in their
lives but where it is also important that others experience
justice as well.
People’s concern about justice in the world helps
explain why people can be upset by injustices that
happen to other people they do not know and who
may live far away and in very different circumstances
than their own. Not surprisingly, given this description,
the most extensive theoretical account of the
justice motive comes from the just-world theory,
a theory developed and researched for many years by
the social psychologist Melvin Lerner.
Origins
According to Melvin Lerner, the justice motive originates
in the realization people develop in childhood
that to have the things they want in life, they have to
engage in activities in the present that they assume will
result in payoffs in the future. In other words, people
come to understand delay of gratification. Many of the
rewards they value most, such as a rewarding career,
require them to work toward a future goal. Put in justice
terms, people assume that as good people working
toward a future reward, the reward will in fact be forthcoming
when the future point arrives, because by that
point, they deserve it.
The assumption this reasoning is based on is the
foundation for the justice motive. For people to
believe they will get the rewards they deserve in the
future, they must also believe they live in a world
where people do in fact get what they deserve. Indeed,
to sustain people’s efforts to achieve their goals in the
future, they must believe in such a world because if
they cannot assume people get what they deserve,
what is the point of working toward future goals?
Lerner argues accordingly that when people reach the
point in their childhood (around age 4) when they
come to understand delay of gratification, they make
a personal contract with the world. This contract says
that for them to be able to believe in that they will get
what they deserve, they must at the same time believe
that the world is a just place. This is also what makes
the fates of other people important. One’s sense of the
world as a just place is based not only on one’s own
experience, but also on the experiences of others and
if others experience injustice, that is threatening to
one’s need to believe in a just world.
Evidence
The most compelling evidence for the justice motive
comes from research examining people’s reactions to
injustice. The reasoning is as follows: If people have a
need for justice, they should be motivated in the face
of injustice to respond in ways that are consistent with
achieving justice. A common research strategy is to
expose people to scenarios involving the suffering of

an innocent victim. This can be done by having
research participants read a story or watch a video
where they learn about something bad happening to a
good person through no fault of that person. Such
experiences create temporary distress, as a result of
the injustice associated with the victim’s suffering, in
much the same way one feels a sense of unfairness
and upset when one learns about the suffering of innocents
in the news. Evidence of other people’s unjust
suffering is upsetting because it threatens one’s belief
in a just world.
If people are motivated to achieve the goal of justice
in their lives, they should respond in such situations
in ways that are consistent with achieving that
goal. The research suggests this is in fact the case, but
there are some intriguingly different ways people do
this, some with undesirable consequences. The most
straightforward thing people can do is engage in justice-restoring
behavior. For instance, they might try to
compensate an innocent victim or find justice in punishing
the person responsible for the injustice. Such
behavioral reactions can be very effective in helping
people maintain their just-world beliefs, and it is
likely many altruistic deeds one observes in life are
based in a desire for justice.
However, people are not always able to address
injustice through their own actions, for any number of
reasons: The size of the injustice is too large or too far
away, they do not have the means to address the injustice,
or they may assume their efforts will be ineffective.
Does this mean they abandon their need to believe
in a just world when they cannot fix injustice themselves?
The answer from psychological research is
“no.” In lieu of action, people make psychological
adjustments in how they think about events that allow
them to sustain the belief. One of the intriguing but
troubling ways people do this is to blame the victim.
Through selective consideration of the facts, people
can convince themselves that a victim or victims are
somehow responsible for their suffering and hence
deserve their fate. If one can convince oneself that others
deserve their suffering, then one removes any threat
to one’s ability to believe that the world is a just place.
Unfortunately, victim blaming is a common phenomenon.
Justice motive research helps researchers understand
why this is so, given the importance of people’s
need to believe in a just world. There are other psychological
adjustments people can make in the service of
the justice motive, but the important point is that there
is extensive evidence that people are motivated
to address injustice either behaviorally or psychologically,
and the reliability with which they do so provides
compelling evidence of the justice motive.
John H. Ellard
See also Blaming the Victim; Just-World Hypothesis; Social
Exchange Theory
Further Readings
Just-World Hypothesis———513
Hafer, C. L., & Bègue, L. (2005). Experimental research on
just-world theory: Problems, developments, and future
challenges. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 128–167.
Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A
fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.
JUST-WORLD HYPOTHESIS
Definition
The just-world hypothesis is the belief that, in general,
the social environment is fair, such that people get
what they deserve. The concept was developed in part
to help explain observations that to preserve a belief
that the world is a just place, people will sometimes
devalue a victim. A just world is defined as a world
in which people do get what they deserve. The justworld
hypothesis is important because it suggests that
people may treat certain victims badly, oddly enough,
out of a desire to sustain their belief in justice. It also
suggests that people may go to great lengths to maintain
a sense that the world is just, giving evidence that
the human motivation for justice is very strong.
Background and History
The seminal experiment illustrating this phenomenon
was conducted by Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons
in the 1960s. In this experiment, people watched on a
television monitor a woman who appeared to be receiving
painful electric shocks from a researcher. In actuality,
the footage was prerecorded and the events were
only simulated by actors. As the woman did nothing to
deserve the shocks she was receiving, she can be seen

514———Just-World Hypothesis
as suffering unjustly. People who watched this unjust
suffering described the victim’s character quite negatively
if they could not compensate her (or at least
were not sure they could compensate her) and if they
thought that they would continue to see her suffer.
People described the victim’s character most negatively
when they also believed that she was behaving
altruistically; that is, she chose to suffer for their sake.
The findings were explained by suggesting that
people have a strong need to believe that the world is
a just place in which individuals get what they
deserve. Victims who continue to suffer through no
fault of their own (and especially very good people,
like the altruistic woman in the early experiment)
threaten this belief in a just world. As a way of dealing
with that threat and maintaining a belief in a just
world, people may try to restore justice by helping or
compensating victims. When it is not possible to help
or compensate victims, people may reinterpret the situation
by, for example, claiming that a particular victim
is a bad or otherwise unworthy person. By
devaluing or derogating the victim in this way, his or
her fate seems more deserved and people’s sense of
justice is maintained.
There was much controversy about how to interpret
the results of the original experiment. For example,
some researchers suggested that people devalued the
victim to reduce their own feelings of guilt at letting
her continue to suffer. However, further experiments
showed that people sometimes devalue a victim of
injustice even when they could not have played any
role in the victim’s situation. This and other proposed
alternatives were, for the most part, dealt with through
further study and argumentation, leading to a general
acceptance of the notion that people will sometimes
devalue a victim of injustice because they need to
believe in a just world.
More Recent Research
Since the early period of experimentation in the 1960s
and 1970s, social psychologists have continued to conduct
research on the just-world hypothesis. There have
been two main traditions in this later research. First,
researchers have continued to conduct experiments to
study how people respond when they see, read about,
or are otherwise exposed to victims who presumably
threaten the need to believe in a just world. This
research has tended to focus on victims of HIV/AIDS,
rape, and cancer. Although some researchers have
claimed that a number of these experiments have flaws
that make it difficult to interpret the results, there is
agreement that several of the investigations generally
support the just-world hypothesis.
Another tradition in the later research on the justworld
hypothesis has involved using a questionnaire
to measure the extent to which people actually believe
that the world is a just place. Researchers then test
whether people who believe more strongly in a just
world, according to the questionnaire, hold certain
attitudes. These studies have shown, for example, that
the more people claim that they believe the world is
just, the more negative attitudes they have toward the
poor, groups of people who are discriminated against
in society, and other people who might be seen as victims
of injustice. These findings are consistent with
the just-world hypothesis.
Implications
The just-world hypothesis has several important
implications for reactions to victims of injustice. For
example, the research suggests that if people feel they
cannot help or compensate victims of injustice who
continue to suffer, they may react defensively. They
may reason that the victims deserved their fate either
because of the kind of people they are or because of
the way they behaved. If people respond in this way,
they may be less likely to react in a more positive
manner, like working toward minimizing injustice or
offering emotional support.
It is important to note that the just-world hypothesis
is actually part of a broader theory called justice
motive theory or just-world theory. The theory
includes propositions about how and why a belief in a
just world develops in children, the different forms
that a belief in a just world might take, the many
strategies (aside from blaming and derogating victims
of injustice) that people use to maintain a belief in a
just world, and the various ways in which justice is
defined for different kinds of social relationships.
Carolyn L. Hafer
See also Blaming the Victim; Discrimination; Justice
Motive

Further Readings
Hafer, C. L., & Bègue, L. (2005). Experimental research on
just-world theory: Problems, developments, and future
challenges. Psychological Bulletin, 131, 128–167.
Just-World Hypothesis———515
Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world: A
fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.
Lerner, M. J., & Miller, D. T. (1978). Just-world research and
the attribution process: Looking back and ahead.
Psychological Bulletin, 85, 1030–1051.

KELLEY’S COVARIATION MODEL
Definition
Harold Kelley’s covariation principle is a central
model within attribution theory, an area of social psychology
that is concerned with the scientific analysis
of the psychology of everyday people. Attribution
theory was originally introduced by Fritz Heider in
1958 and assumes that we all want to understand and
explain events. For instance, we ask why we succeeded
at a task or why our friend liked a movie. The answers
to such “why questions” (e.g., “I am smart” or “The
movie was good”) are called causal attributions.
Kelley’s model explains how laypersons arrive at such
attributions; hence, it is a scientific theory about naive
theories.
Analysis
For both scientists and laypersons, explanations consist
of effects to be explained (e.g., success at a task or
liking a movie) and causes that are used as explanations
(e.g., high ability or the quality of the movie).
Kelley’s model applies to all types of psychological
effects that laypersons explain, ranging from achievement
outcomes to emotional states, and it can be
applied to self-perception (e.g., “Why did I fail?”) as
well as to other perception (“Why did you fail?”).
Kelley distinguishes attributions to causes that
reside within the person, the entity, and the circumstances.
Person attributions (e.g., “She is a movie
fanatic” or “She is smart”) rely on stable factors residing
K
517
within the person to explain, for example, that
person’s enjoyment of a movie or his or her success.
Entity attributions imply tracing back the effect to stable
properties of the object the person interacts with
(e.g., we explain the enjoyment with the quality of the
movie, or success with task ease). Finally, circumstance
attributions are made when explaining an effect
with transient and unstable causes (e.g., when enjoyment
is traced back to a happy mood or success is
attributed to luck).
But how do we come to explain a specific effect
with one of such causes?
Kelley postulates that laypersons use methods akin to
those used by scientists, most importantly, experiments.
In such experiments, independent and dependent variables
are differentiated. For instance, a researcher investigating
the influence of color on mood will manipulate
color as the independent variable (e.g., putting half of the
participants in a blue room and the other half in a red
room). Subsequently, she assesses, as the dependent variable,
participants’ mood in both rooms. In such experiments,
the independent variables are often conceived of
as causes or determinants of the dependent variables
(e.g., color might be conceived of as a determinant of
mood), and the dependent variables are the effects.
From this point of view, events to be explained by
lay scientists (e.g., success or liking a movie) are the
dependent variable, and the possible causes of the
event are independent variables. For instance, when
I succeed at a task and I ask myself, “Why did I
succeed?” success is the dependent variable (i.e., the
effect) and the possible causes—the task (entity), my
ability (person), or luck (circumstances)—are independent
variables.

518———Kelley’s Covariation Model
Whether an effect is attributed to the person, the
entity, or the circumstances depends on which of the
causes (independent variables) the effect (dependent
variable) covaries with. Covariation refers to the cooccurrence
of the effect and a cause. To decide whether
the entity is the cause, one has to assess whether
the effect covaries (co-occurs) with the entity—more
specifically, whether there is variation of the effect
across objects (entities). Covariation with the entity is
given when the effect is present if the entity is present
and when the effect is absent when the entity is absent.
For instance, when a person succeeds at Task 1 but
fails at Tasks 2, 3 and 4, the effect (i.e., success) is present
when Task 1 (i.e., the entity) is present, and it is
absent when Task 1 is absent (i.e., when Tasks 2, 3, and
4 are present). In this example, the effect covaries with
the task (entity): The manipulation of this independent
variable results in an effect of the dependent variable;
that is, the task “makes a difference.” If, however, the
individual succeeds at all tasks in addition to Task 1,
the effect (success) does not vary with tasks (there is
no covariation between the effect and the entity), or
the manipulation of the independent variable (task)
does not result in a change of the dependent variable
(outcome).
Kelley labels information about the covariation
between entities and effects distinctiveness. Distinctiveness
is considered high when the effect covaries
with the entity (e.g., the person succeeds only at Task 1).
Low distinctiveness indicates a lack of covariation
between the entity and the effect (i.e., the individual
succeeds at all tasks; the task “does not make a
difference”).
Information about the covariation of an effect
with persons is called consensus. If the effect covaries
with the person (only Person 1 succeeds at Task 1, and
Persons 2, 3, and 4 fail), there is low consensus (the
manipulation of the independent variable “person”
results in a change of the dependent variable). If
covariation with this independent variable (i.e., the
person) is lacking, there is high consensus (i.e., everybody
succeeds at Task 1). Finally, high consistency
reflects that an effect is always present whenever a
certain cause (i.e., the person or the entity) is present.
By contrast, low consistency is indicative of the fact
that an effect is sometimes present when the cause is
absent and sometimes absent when the cause is present.
Kelley suggests that there are three combinations
of consistency, consensus, and distinctiveness information
which give rise to unambiguous person, entity,
and circumstance attributions. We make person attributions
when the effect covaries with the person and
not with the remaining two causes (entity and circumstances).
This data pattern characterizes, for instance, a
situation in which a person succeeds at a task at which
nobody else succeeds (low consensus), if he or she also
succeeds at this task at different points of time (high
consistency) and performs other tasks just as well (low
distinctiveness). In this situation, we should attribute
success to the person (e.g., his or her ability).
Attributions to the entity should be made when the
effect covaries with the entity (the person succeeds
only at this but not at other tasks; high distinctiveness)
and not with the person (everybody succeeds at this
task; high consensus) or the point of time (the person
always succeeds at this task; high consistency). This
pattern is again characterized by the fact that the effect
(e.g., success) covaries with one cause (i.e., the entity)
but not with the remaining two causes (i.e., the person
or points in time).
Finally, attributions to the circumstances should be
made when there is low consensus, high distinctiveness,
and low consistency—for example, when a
person who usually fails at Task 1 succeeds at it at a
specific point of time (low consistency), other persons
fail at Task 1 (low consensus), and the individual fails
most other tasks (high distinctiveness). This covariation
pattern differs from the cases that lead to person
and entity attributions, as the effect covaries with all
of the three possible causes and not (as was the case
for the ideal patterns for person and entity attributions)
with only one cause.
Kelley’s prediction that people make unambiguous
attributions to the person, entity, and circumstances in
these three patterns of information is empirically well
established. The model has sparked numerous theoretical
developments and empirical investigations in the
field of attribution and causal induction and continues
to be influential into the present. It has been used as a
normative model to assess errors and biases, and it
served as a conceptual tool for the analyses of a wide
range of social psychological phenomena ranging from
attribution in close interpersonal relations to attributions
of changes in one’s heart rate. Current refinements
and extensions of Kelley’s model focus on whether
it specifies all attributionally relevant information
and on the cognitive processes involved in making
attributions.
Friedrich Försterling

See also Attributions; Attribution Theory; Fundamental
Attribution Error; Person Perception
Further Readings
Försterling, F. (2001). Attribution: An introduction to theory,
research and applications. East Sussex, UK: Psychology
Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution.
American Psychologist, 28, 107–128.
KIN SELECTION
Definition
Otherwise known as inclusive fitness theory, kin
selection refers to the theory that people have evolved
to favor others who are genetically related to them.
The logic of the theory is that a gene can propagate
itself through two routes. The first is by increasing the
likelihood that the body in which it resides (the self)
will survive and reproduce (e.g., by leading to the
selection of nutritious foods and fertile mates). The
second is by increasing the reproduction of close relatives
(kin) who also possess copies of the same gene
(e.g., by leading the self to help kin in ways that
increase the chances that they will reproduce and the
gene will be passed on). Some of your kin are more
closely related to you than others and therefore are
more likely to carry your genes. Thus, because you
share 50% of your genes with your siblings, but only
12.5% with your cousins, you should be much more
likely to help siblings than cousins. According to the
theory of inclusive fitness, parental care for offspring
is a special case of kin selection, as it is yet another
case of people (or animals) providing care for closely
related kin who carry shared genetic material.
History and Modern Usage
The theory of kin selection is widely regarded as the
most important theoretical development in evolutionary
thinking since Charles Darwin, as it proposes a
mechanism that explains why individuals would
altruistically help others (i.e., why they would provide
resources to someone else at a cost to themselves).
The idea of altruism seems counterintuitive from a
Darwinian perspective, as any behavior that increases
the likelihood that another individual will survive or
reproduce at a cost to one’s own survival or reproduction
should be selected against. But if this altruistic
behavior enhances the survival or reproduction of a
related individual to a greater degree than it diminishes
one’s own chances, then, according to the theory,
such behavior would be selected for. To give
a concrete example, I may be willing to endanger
myself by alerting my siblings when there is a predator
afoot, even if my own shouting makes the predator
more likely to see me. Although this behavior puts me
at risk, it has the potential to result in greater replication
of the genes that I carry than if I kept quiet and
one or more of my siblings were killed.
William von Hippel
Martie G. Haselton
See also Altruism; Evolutionary Psychology; Reciprocal
Altruism
Further Readings
Kin Selection———519
Buss, D. M. (2004). Evolutionary psychology: The new
science of the mind (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Daly, M., Salmon, C., & Wilson, M. (1997). Kinship: The
conceptual hole in psychological studies of social
cognition and close relationships. In J. Simpson &
D. T. Kenrick (Eds.), Evolutionary social psychology
(pp. 265–296). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

LAW OF SMALL NUMBERS
Definition
The law of small numbers refers to the incorrect belief
held by experts and laypeople alike that small samples
ought to resemble the population from which they are
drawn. Although this is true of large samples, it isn’t
for small ones. So the “law” of small numbers isn’t
really a law at all, but a fallacy. And as such, it is a law
you should feel free to break.
Analysis
To provide an example, suppose you have an urn containing
marbles—half of them red and half of them
blue (statisticians love urns ...especially ones with
marbles in them). Suppose further that without looking,
you draw 100 of them. What are the odds that
about half of them will be blue? Although it is
unlikely that exactly half will be blue (i.e., you probably
won’t draw exactly 50 blue marbles), the odds are
good that it will be close with a sample of 100. With
1,000, the odds are even better—and they keep getting
better until your sample reaches infinity (a fact known
as the law of large numbers).
But suppose instead you draw a smaller sample,
say, only two marbles. There, the odds of half of them
being blue is much lower ...only 50%, to be exact.
And with a sample of only one, the odds drop to zero.
So whereas large samples tend to resemble the population
from which they are drawn, smaller samples
do not.
L
521
The problem is that for most of us, this fact is counterintuitive.
People tend to expect small samples to
behave just like large ones, a fallacy that leads to
all sorts of errors in everyday judgment and decision
making.
For instance, when people are asked to mentally
generate a sequence of “random” coin tosses, their
sequences tend to be anything but. That is, people
expect there to be many more alternations than would
be expected by chance. In other words, they expect
not only the entire sequence to contain approximately
50% heads, but each portion of the sequence
to contain approximately 50% heads as well.
The same is true in the world of sports. When
people observe a basketball player make several
baskets in a row, they assume it must because he or
she is “hot.” They forget that because the sample size
is small, such coincidences are not only unsurprising,
they are inevitable. In fact, when a group of scientists
examined the shooting pattern of professional players,
they found something remarkable—there is no such
thing as the “hot hand” in basketball. That is, players
are no more likely to make a shot after making the
previous shot (or shots) than after missing the previous
shot (or shots). Despite this fact, people continue
to believe in the hot hand, one of several by-products
of the mistaken belief in the law of small numbers.
Jeremy Burrus
Justin Kruger
See also Decision Making; Gambler’s Fallacy; Hot Hand
Effect; Research Methods

522———Lay Epistemics
Further Readings
Gilovich, T. (1991). How we know what isn’t so: The
fallibility of human reason in everyday life. New York:
Free Press.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of
small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76, 105–110.
LAY EPISTEMICS
The concept of lay epistemics concerns the process
through which individuals (lay persons and scientists
alike) attain their subjective knowledge. A theory of
lay epistemics has been outlined in two volumes by
Arie W. Kruglanski published 15 years apart, and the
relevant empirical research has been presented in
numerous theoretical and research articles in the scientific
literature in personality and social psychology.
The theory of lay epistemics describes the cognitive
and motivational factors that determine the formation
and alteration of human knowledge on all topics.
Knowledge is defined in terms of propositions (or
bodies of propositions) in which individuals have a
given degree of confidence. This conception requires
that the contents of knowledge be considered by the
individual, implying a phase of hypothesis generation,
and that they be assessed as to their validity
(their warrant of confidence), implying a phase of
hypothesis testing.
According to the lay epistemic theory, hypotheses
are tested via relevant evidence. Relevance, in turn, is
determined by preexisting inference rules that in an
individual’s mind tie the evidence to the conclusion in
an if-then fashion. This theory assumes that all inferences
or judgments are rule based, including such
automatic and unconscious judgments as involved in
people’s perceptions of objects in their environment,
the (erroneous) inferences they may draw from
momentary mood states to their general levels of lifesatisfaction
and so on. By assuming the inevitability
of rules in the mediation of judgments, the lay
epistemic theory affords a unimodel that integrates
numerous dual process models proposed in different
domains of social cognition.
In principle, the individual may continue generating
further and further rule-like hypotheses linking the
same category of evidence to different conclusions.
For instance, one might link one’s good mood at a
given moment to one’s general level of happiness and
success, but also consider the alternative possibility
that the good mood was caused by a drink one had just
imbibed, by the fact that one’s country won a soccer
match, and so on. Given such a plethora of alternative
possibilities, the individual may feel confused and
uncertain. To attain certainty, therefore, one’s generation
of alternative possibilities must come to a halt.
The theory of lay epistemics identifies two categories
of conditions affecting the cessation (or conversely, the
initiation) of hypothesis generation: long-term capability
and epistemic motivation. Long-term capability
relates to the availability of constructs in memory
pertinent to a given issue or question, and short-term
capability relates to their momentary accessibility.
Epistemic motivations are conceptualized as the cognitive
state the knower wants to attain. Two issues are
critical here:
1. Whether the knower desires to achieve or desires to
avoid the state of cognitive closure, defined as a firm
judgment on a topic and contrasted with confusion
and ambiguity
2. Whether such desired or undesired judgment has
specific (appealing or unappealing) contents (e.g., a
desirable content might be that one is healthy, and an
undesirable one that one is not) or is nonspecific—its
desired or undesired nature stemming from its constituting
a judgment (closure) or an absence of judgment
(a lack of closure)
This analysis yields a typology of four motivational
orientations, referred to as needs for the following:
1. Specific closure
2. Avoidance of specific closure
3. Nonspecific closure
4. Avoidance of nonspecific closure
Each motivational orientation is assumed to
depend on the perceived benefits of attaining or costs
of failing to attain the correspondent epistemic state
(e.g., 1 through 4 in the previous list). Such costs and
benefits can differ across situations (e.g., under time
pressure, uncertainty may be more unpleasant than in
the absence of pressure) as well as be based on stable
individual characteristics. For instance, some individuals
more than others may desire nonspecific closure
(e.g., be intolerant of uncertainty or ambiguity), some
individuals more than others may desire to avoid a
specific closure (e.g., being labeled as a failure), and

so forth. The epistemic motivations have been shown
to exert important influence on individual judgment
and decision-making processes (by initiating or halting
such processes), and on such interindividual
phenomena as persuasion, communication, empathy,
and bargaining. The need for nonspecific closure in
particular has been shown to lead to a behavioral syndrome
referred to as group-centrism that includes
pressures toward opinion uniformity, endorsement of
autocratic leadership, ingroup favoritism and outgroup
derogation, the rejection of opinion deviates, and an
intolerance of diversity.
Contributions of the
Lay Epistemic Theory
The lay epistemic theory has contributed to the understanding
of social psychological phenomena in two
distinct ways:
1. By generating novel testable predictions explored in
empirical research
2. By affording a conceptual integration of numerous,
heretofore separate, topics in social cognition
Such predictions concerned individuals’ cognitive
and social interaction styles, their political preferences,
and their reactions to events around them
(e.g., to organizational change taking place in their
work place). The predictions also concerned the
conditions under which the information given
would affect the individuals’ judgments and those
under which it would not, despite its obviousness to
external observers. These issues have considerable
real-world relevance relating as they do to (1) circumstances
in which individuals fail to “see it coming”
in military, political, or technological realms
fostering immense debacles (e.g., the Pearl Harbor
surprise attack, or the breakdowns of the Challenger
and Columbia space shuttles), (2) conditions affording
or forestalling intercultural communication, and
so on.
Its broad, content free nature allowed the lay epistemic
theory to integrate numerous specific domains of
social psychological inquiry including the synthesis
of attribution with cognitive consistency theories and
an integration of the plethora of dual process models
under a common set of principles.
Arie W. Kruglanski
See also Cognitive Consistency; Dual Process Theories;
Motivated Cognition
Further Readings
Chaiken, S., & Trope, Y. (1999). Dual process theories in
social psychology. New York: Guilford Press.
Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). Lay epistemics and human
knowledge: Cognitive and motivational bases. New York:
Plenum.
Kruglanski, A. W. (2004). The psychology of closed
mindedness. New York: Psychology Press.
Kruglanski, A. W., Erb, H. P., Pierro, A., Mannetti, L., &
Chun. W. Y. (2006). On parametric continuities in the
world of binary either ors. Psychological Inquiry,
17(3), 153–163.
Kruglanski, A. W., Pierro, A., Mannetti, L., & DeGrada, E.
(2006). Groups as epistemic providers: Need for closure
and the unfolding of group centrism. Psychological
Review, 113(1), 84–100.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Thompson, E. P. (1999). The illusory
second mode, or the cue is the message. Psychological
Inquiry, 10(2), 182–193.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Thompson, E. P. (1999). Persuasion by
a single route: A view from the unimodel. Psychological
Inquiry, 10(2), 83–110.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated
closing of the mind: “seizing” and “freezing.”
Psychological Review, 103(2), 263–283.
LEADERSHIP
People are obsessed with leaders. People gossip about
the boss; airport bookshops bulge with leadership
books; current affairs analyzes the actions of leaders;
and much of organizational science is about leadership.
This is not surprising. Leaders have enormous
influence over their followers—leaders make decisions
for their followers and shape the course of their
lives and even the type of people they are, and so followers
are focused on how effective their leaders are;
how they are elected, appointed, and deposed; and
whether they lead for good or for evil.
Definition
Leadership———523
Leadership is a process whereby an individual, or
clique, is able to influence others to internalize a collective
vision and mobilize them toward attaining that
vision. Effective leadership transforms people’s goals
and ambitions, even their identities, and replaces

524———Leadership
self-oriented behavior with group-oriented behavior.
The exercise of power over people to force them,
through rewards and punishments, to comply with
commands and bend to one’s will is not leadership.
Personality Attributes
of Great Leaders
Although leadership is a group process (leaders require
followers), leadership research has a long history of
focusing on attributes of leaders alone that make them
effective—great leaders. The 19th-century belief that
leaders are born rather than made is no longer in
vogue—research has failed to find “great leader”
genes. However, the idea that some people have personalities,
however acquired, that predispose them to
lead effectively in all situations, whereas others do not,
has attracted enormous research attention. A definitive
review published in 2002 concluded that three of the
Big Five personality dimensions are associated with
effective leadership: Extraversion, Openness to Experience,
and Conscientiousness. Overall, however, personality
does not allow people to differentiate between
effective and ineffective leaders very reliably.
What Do Effective Leaders Do?
Maybe some leadership behaviors are more effective.
One reliable distinction that has emerged is between a
leadership style that pays more attention to the group
task and getting things done (task-oriented leadership)
and one that pays attention to relationships among
group members (socioemotional leadership). Most
groups require both types of leadership and people
who are capable of being both task-focused and socioemotionally
focused tend to be the most effective.
Interactionist Perspectives
However, different situations and different group
activities call for different emphases on the task or on
relationships—in which case, the relative effectiveness
of task-oriented and relationship-oriented leaders
may be contingent on properties of the leadership situation.
This idea is reflected in Fred Fiedler’s contingency
theory of leadership, very popular in the 1970s;
one strength of this theory was that Fielder had a
novel way to measure both leadership styles (the leastpreferred
coworker scale) and classify how well structured
situations were. Generally, relationship-oriented
leadership was most effective unless the group task
was very poorly structured or very well structured.
Another interactionist perspective is normative
decision theory. Leaders can choose to make decisions
autocratically (subordinate input is not sought), consultatively
(subordinate input is sought, but the leader
retains authority to make the final decision), or as a
genuine group decision (leader and subordinates are
equal partners in shared decision making). The relative
efficacy of these strategies is contingent on the
quality of leader-subordinate relationships and on task
clarity and structure. Autocratic leadership is fast and
effective if leader-subordinate relationships are good
and the task is well structured. When the task is less
clear, consultative leadership is best, and when leadersubordinate
relations are poor, group decision making
is best.
A third interactionist theory is path-goal theory,
which assumes that a leader’s main function is to motivate
followers by clarifying the paths that will help
them attain their goals. Leaders do this by directing
task-related activities (structuring) or by addressing
followers’ personal and emotional needs (consideration).
Structuring is most effective when followers are
unclear about their goals and how to reach them, and
consideration is most effective when the task is boring
or uncomfortable.
Transactional Leadership
Another way to look at leadership is as a transaction
between leaders and followers—the leader does
something benefiting followers, and followers in turn
allow the leader to lead. Eric Hollander coined the
term idiosyncrasy credit to describe a transaction in
which leaders who initially conform to group norms
and therefore serve the group well are subsequently
rewarded by the group by being allowed to be idiosyncratic
and innovative—key features of effective
leadership.
One key transactional leadership theory is leadermember
exchange (LMX) theory. Because leaders
have to relate to many subordinates, they differentiate
among them and develop different LMX relationships
with different subordinates—the quality of these relationships
range from those based on mutual trust,
respect, and obligation (high-quality LMX relationships),
to those mechanically based on the formal
employment contract between leader and subordinate
(low-quality relationships). Effective leadership rests

on the development of high-quality LMX relationships
with as many subordinates as possible—these
relationships motivate followers and bind them to
the group.
Transformational Leadership
and Charisma
Leaders typically are innovative and able to mobilize
followers to buy and implement their new vision
for the group—they are transformational. Transformational
leadership is characterized by (a) careful
attention to followers’ needs, abilities, and aspirations,
(b) challenging followers’ basic thinking, assumptions,
and practices, and (c) exercise of charisma and inspiration.
Charisma is central for transformational leadership
(there is much talk about charismatic or visionary
leaders and leadership), which has engaged a debate
among scholars (a) about whether this is a return
to older personality perspectives on leadership, and
(b) about how one can distinguish between charisma in
the service of evil (Slobodan Miloševic′) and charisma
in the service of good (Nelson Mandela).
Stereotypes of Leadership
According to leader categorization theory, people
have stereotypical expectations (schemas) about the
attributes an effective leader should have in general, or
in specific leadership situations. Once a person categorizes
someone as a leader, the person automatically
engages the relevant leadership schema—the better
the match is between the leader’s actual characteristics
and the leadership schema, the more favorable are
the person’s evaluations of the leader and his or her
leadership.
Stereotypical expectations might affect leadership
in two other ways. According to status characteristics
theory, in a task-oriented group, a person’s evaluations
of effective leadership rest on whether he or she
believes the leader has the attributes to perform the
group task, called specific status characteristics, and
whether the leader is a member of a high-status group
in society and therefore possesses attributes that are
valued in society, called diffuse status characteristics.
Role congruity theory focuses on gender and leadership.
The argument is that stereotypes of women
typically do not match well with schemas of effective
leadership, and thus in many leadership situations,
women find it difficult to be endorsed as effective
leaders. There is an incongruity between the attributes
of the leadership role and the stereotypical attributes
of women.
Social Identity and Leadership
According to the social identity theory of leadership, a
key function of leadership is to forge, transform, and
consolidate one’s identity as a group member—one’s
social identity. The implication of this is that if membership
in a group is important to a person, particularly
to his or her sense of self, the person is more likely to
be influenced by a leader who matches his or her
understanding of what the group stands for (a leader
who is prototypical of the group) than by one who does
not. Effective leadership in such groups rests significantly
on being perceived by one’s followers as being
prototypical, even to the extent that general attributes
of good leadership decline in importance. One reason
why leaders who are prototypical members of subjectively
important groups can be effective is that followers
believe that because their identity and that of the
group are closely matched, the leaders treat members
fairly and must be acting in the best interest of the
group, so they are therefore trusted and allowed to be
innovative.
Michael A. Hogg
See also Attributions; Schemas; Social Identity Theory
Further Readings
Goethals, G. R., Sorenson, G. J., & Burns, J. M. (Eds.). (2004).
Encyclopedia of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hogg, M. A. (2007). Social psychology of leadership. In
A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social
psychology: A handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.).
New York: Guilford Press.
Yukl, G. (2002). Leadership in organizations (5th ed.). Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
Learned Helplessness———525
What happens when people encounter obstacles in
solving problems and are unable to avoid negative outcomes
(e.g., academic failure, interpersonal rejection)?
Will they persevere in trying to control the course of

526———Learned Helplessness
events and invest more efforts in improving their
performance or give up and withdraw from the frustrating
situation? What are the consequences of this
painful experience for a person’s emotional state and
psychological functioning? Dealing with these questions,
hundreds of experimental studies, conducted during
the 1970s and 1980s, have exposed people to
inescapable failures in a wide variety of tasks and have
found that participants apparently give up trying, passively
succumb to the failure, and show performance
deficits in a subsequent task. These responses, which
reflect the emotional and behavioral interference produced
by the inability to control undesirable life events,
have been labeled “learned helplessness.”
Research
The first study of learned helplessness was conducted
with dogs by Martin E. P. Seligman and Steven F.
Maier in 1967. In this study, dogs were randomly
divided into three groups. One group (the neutral
group) received no electric shock. A second group (the
escape group) received 64 electric shocks, which dogs
could escape by pressing a panel located on either side
of their heads. In the third group (the helplessness
group), each dog received the same number and duration
of shocks to those received by a dog in the escape
group. However, whereas dogs in the escape group
ended the shock by their own responses, dogs in the
helplessness group could not control shock termination
(which came only when the dog from the escape
group delivered the required response).
Twenty-four hours later, all the dogs performed a
new learning task (jump over a barrier to avoid electric
shocks). Dogs in the helplessness group showed worse
performance in the new task than dogs in both the
escape and neutral groups. Specifically, dogs in the
helplessness group seemed to accept the shock without
any resistance and were unlikely to cross the barrier to
escape from it. In addition, they were slow to learn to
avoid the shock even when they discovered the contingency
between barrier jumping and shock termination.
Although they jumped over the barrier occasionally
and in so doing stopped the shocks, they rarely jumped
again on the next trial. Importantly, although dogs in
the escape group were also exposed to aversive shocks,
they showed no performance deficits in the new task.
On this basis, Seligman and Maier concluded that lack
of control rather than the mere exposure to aversive
events produced the performance deficits observed in
the helplessness group.
In 1975, Donald Hiroto and Seligman extended
the study of learned helplessness to humans. In their
experiment, undergraduates performed a series of
concept formation tasks. In each trial of these tasks,
two different geometrical patterns, each composed of
five attributes (e.g., shape, color), appeared on each
side of a card. Participants were asked to try to figure
out which of five attributes (e.g., a star-shape figure)
the experimenter had arbitrarily designated as the
target attribute. In each of the trials, participants
indicated whether the target attribute appeared on the
right or left side of the card, and the experimenter told
them whether their choice was correct or not. After the
10th card, participants indicated what they thought the
target attribute was and were told whether they succeeded
or not to learn the concept.
During these tasks, participants were randomly
divided into three groups. In the neutral group, participants
performed no task and simply waited for the
second part of the experiment. In the solvable group,
participants received veridical feedback on each trial
and at the end of the task. On this basis, participants
could learn the target attribute and control the experimenter’s
feedback by their own responses. Participants
in the third group, the unsolvable group, were exposed
to uncontrollable feedback. For them, the experimenter
did not select any attribute, instead providing a predetermined,
random schedule of “correct” and “incorrect”
responses during the trials. After the 10th trial,
participants in this group were uniformly told that they
failed to learn the target attribute.
Following the concept formation task, all the
participants performed a new task in which they were
asked to learn how to escape from an aversive noise.
Findings revealed that participants in the unsolvable
group were less likely to learn to escape from the noise
than were participants in the solvable and neutral
groups. According to Hiroto and Seligman, the exposure
to unsolvable problems might have led people
to develop expectancies that they have no available
response or strategy for controlling outcomes and
altering negative course of events. This expectation can
be generalized to the subsequent task, thereby reducing
motivation to undertake the new activity (“Why
invest efforts in trying to solve a problem if I have no
suitable response for solving it?”) and interfering with
task performance.

Depression and Learned
Helplessness
These initial findings were replicated in hundreds
of subsequent studies and extended to a wide variety of
tasks. The theoretical and empirical interest in the performance
effects of unsolvable problems dramatically
increased when Seligman claimed in 1975 that learned
helplessness is a precursor of depression. That is,
exposure to uncontrollable adverse circumstances and
the resulting expectancy of lack of control can result
in depression. According to Seligman, both people
exposed to uncontrollable events and those suffering
from depression show lowered response initiation, lack
of assertiveness and aggression, loss of appetite, feelings
of sadness and hopelessness, and extreme passivity.
Moreover, several researchers have found similar
performance deficits among nondepressed people
exposed to unsolvable problems and depressed people
exposed to solvable or no problems.
Originally, Seligman argued that the expectation of
lack of control is the main psychological mechanism
that explains performance deficits and depression following
exposure to uncontrollable events. However,
with the progress of research and theory, Lyn
Abramson, Seligman, and John Teasdale claimed in
1978 that the attributions a person makes about the
causes of the failure to control negative events can
also explain why and when expectancies of lack of
control result in generalized performance deficits and
depression. If a person decides that failure is due to
stable and global factors that can persist in the future
and recur in other situations (e.g., intelligence), the
expectancy of control tends to be generalized to new
and different tasks and to result in global performance
deficits. By contrast, if failure is explained by unstable
and specific factors (e.g., tiredness), neither the
expectation of uncontrollability nor performance
deficits tend to be recorded in new situations.
Moreover, if a person believes that failure is due to
internal causes that reflect on his or her abilities and
personality, expectancy of lack of control can result
in depression (e.g., “I’m a failure”). In contrast, attribution
of the failure to external causes (a difficult task,
others’ bad intentions) can result in anger and aggression
rather than depression.
Beyond expectancies of control and causal attributions,
subsequent studies have revealed the importance
of other psychological mechanisms that can explain
the emergence of performance deficits and depression
following exposure to uncontrollable events. For
example, the perceived importance of the failure for
one’s goals and aspirations can moderate these effects,
with higher personal relevance of the failure amplifying
performance deficits and depression. The direction
of attention toward one’s feelings, thoughts, and inner
states (self-focus) also amplifies the performance and
emotional deficits produced by uncontrollable events.
In addition, exposure to unsolvable problems elicits
anxiety, worries, and doubts about one’s personal
value, which divert attention away from task-relevant
activities and can impair task performance. Moreover,
people may withdraw effort from the new task as a
means to protect their personal value from further
damage. Although this self-defeating decision results
in performance deficits, people have a good excuse for
the failure—poor performance was caused by lack of
effort rather than lack of ability.
Implications
In the 30 years since the work of Seligman and his
colleagues, learned helplessness has become a thriving
area of research and has been applied to understanding
problems in school achievement; post-traumatic stress
symptoms; the detrimental effects of the death of a
beloved, chronic illnesses, and aging; and maladaptive
reactions of battered women who decide to remain
close to their abusive partners. In all these cases, the
painful recognition that one has no control over the
course and outcome of personal and interpersonal
events can result in passivity, resignation, hopelessness,
and loss of vigor to effectively cope with ongoing
demands for adjustment and to restore one’s
emotional well-being.
Mario Mikulincer
See also Depression; Locus of Control; Self-Defeating
Behavior
Further Readings
Learned Helplessness———527
Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978).
Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49–74.
Mikulincer, M. (1989). Cognitive interference and learned
helplessness: The effects of off-task cognitions on

528———Learning Theory
performance following unsolvable problems. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 129–135.
Mikulincer, M. (1994). Human learned helplessness: A
coping perspective. New York: Plenum.
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1984). Causal
explanations as a risk factor for depression: Theory and
evidence. Psychological Review, 91, 347–374.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression,
development and death. San Francisco: Freeman.
LEARNING THEORY
Definition
The meaning of this term seems simple: Learning
theory is the theory about how learning is achieved.
Unfortunately, things are not that simple. A fundamental
problem is that the term learning theory seems
to suggest that there is a single, true theory of learning.
Although one cannot exclude the possibility that
such a theory might be developed, at present, nothing
even comes close to the overarching learning theory.
It is unlikely that such a theory will ever be formulated,
if only because there are so many different types
of learning. The next paragraphs will discuss two general
types of learning: non-associative and associative
learning. Afterward, this entry will focus on theories
about associative learning because people often have
these theories in mind when they use the term learning
theory.
Context and Importance
Different types of learning can be characterized on
the basis of a number of criteria. One of those criteria
is whether the change in behavior is caused by the
mere repeated presentation of a single stimulus or
event or because one stimulus or event is paired with
another stimulus or event. These types of learning are
called non-associative and associative learning,
respectively. Non-associative learning is a fundamental
type of learning that can be seen even in very simple
organisms. But the mere fact of being exposed to
a stimulus or event also has an important impact on
human behavior. For instance, when you enter a room
for the first time, you might pay attention to the ticking
of the clock that is present in the room. But it is
likely that you will no longer notice the ticking of the
clock after a while. So one possible effect of repeated
presentation of a stimulus or event is that one habituates
to it: One’s initial reaction to the stimulus or event
decreases in intensity because of the repeated presentation.
But stimulus presentations can have a whole
range of other effects. For instance, the first time that
you hear a new song on the radio, you often don’t like
it as much as after you have heard it a few times. This
shows that repeated stimulus presentation can change
one’s liking for the presented stimulus.
Associative learning can be defined as changes in
behavior that are due to the repeated pairing of different
stimuli or events. The term conditioning is basically
a synonym for associative learning. There are
two basic types of conditioning. First, Pavlovian or
classical conditioning refers to a change in the reaction
to a stimulus that is caused by this stimulus being
paired with another stimulus. For instance, a dog
might initially not react to the sound of a bell, but
might start to salivate upon hearing the bell (i.e.,
change in behavior) when the ringing of the bell is
paired repeatedly with the delivery of food (i.e., pairing
two stimuli). Second, operant or instrumental conditioning
refers to changes in behavior that are the
result of a behavior being paired with a certain stimulus.
For instance, rats will press a lever more frequently
(i.e., change in behavior) if that behavior is
followed by the delivery of food (i.e., pairing of the
behavior and a stimulus). The main difference between
the two forms of conditioning is that the animal or
person does not have any control over the events in
Pavlovian conditioning (e.g., the bell and food are
paired no matter what the dog does) but does have an
impact on the events in operant conditioning (e.g., the
food is presented only if the rat presses the lever).
For most of the 20th century, behaviorist theories
dominated research on conditioning. These theories
postulated that conditioning occurs in an automatic,
unconscious way and does not involve any cognitive
processes. This long-standing dominance of behaviorist
theories has led to a tendency to use the term learning
theory to refer to these theories. But use of the
term learning theory is problematic. First, the behaviorist
theories focused mainly on associative forms of
learning and not on other forms. Hence, none of these
theories provides a theory of all forms of learning.
Second, behaviorist theories cannot account for a
wide variety of findings in research on conditioning.

Since the end of the 1960s, it is clear that cognitive
processes do play an important role in conditioning.
For instance, ample evidence indicates that conditioning
in humans depends heavily on whether the person
is aware of the link between the associated events
(e.g., the fact that the bell always precedes food). In
fact, there is little evidence for automatic, unconscious
conditioning in humans.
Implications
Some have concluded, on the basis of these results,
that conditioning does not occur in humans and that
learning theory does not apply to humans. But conditioning
does occur in humans because the behavior of
people changes as the result of pairing two stimuli or
a behavior and a stimulus. For instance, people do
stop at railway crossings because they have learned
that the flickering of the lights will be followed by the
arrival of a train. Likewise, they will often start to dislike
a certain food when eating that food was followed
by nausea. It remains useful to see these associatively
induced changes in behavior as forms of conditioning
because this provides a framework for studying and
understanding these behaviors. Which processes (i.e.,
automatic or controlled) are involved in conditioning
is an important question. Probably several types of
processes can play a role under certain conditions. But
this question needs to be answered by research rather
than by claiming that conditioning is only conditioning
if it is the result of certain (i.e., automatic and
unconscious) processes. Because of these potential
dangers, it seems best to avoid using the term learning
theory unless one specifies which specific theory one
has in mind.
Jan De Houwer
See also Attention; Controlled Processes; Mere Exposure
Effect
Further Readings
Domjan, M. (2005). The essentials of conditioning and
learning (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson
Learning.
Schwartz, B., Wasserman, E. A., & Robbins, S. J. (2002).
Psychology of learning and behavior (5th ed.). New York:
W. W. Norton.
LISREL
Definition
LISREL———529
LISREL (LInear Structural RELations modeling)
was one of the first statistical computer packages used
for structural equation modeling. Created by Karl
Jöreskog and Dag Sörbom, it remains one of the most
popular programs for such analyses, although numerous
other programs exist, including EQS, Proc Calis
within SAS, and Amos. As with all structural modeling
programs, LISREL provides an extremely powerful
and flexible way to analyze complex data.
LISREL essentially assesses the extent to which
theorized relations between variables are consistent
with observed relations between those variables. The
researcher begins by theorizing how a set of variables
should be related to each other. For example, he or she
might theorize that many measured variables (e.g.,
a verbal test, math test, reaction time test) all relate to
a single underlying construct of generalized intelligence
(IQ). This is an example of a “latent variable
model.” IQ is not measured directly; rather, its existence
is inferred because a variety of measured or
“observed” variables (the various tests) are themselves
highly related to each other. If the researcher
collects the data and the measured tests are not all
highly related to each other, a model that assumes a
single latent variable may not “fit” the observed data.
LISREL provides the researcher with specific, quantitative
estimates of the extent to which the theorized
model fits the observed data.
Popular uses of LISREL include tests for the
presence of a single latent variable, multiple latent
variables, and even latent variables that are nested
hierarchically. A model that tests only for the presence
of latent variables is often referred to as a “confirmatory
factor model.” Other common uses of LISREL
include tests of models in which the researcher theorizes
a chain of direct and indirect influences among
variables. The variables included in such a “path”
model can be either observed or latent variables or a
mixture of the two. They may all be measured at a single
point in time or involve multiple time-points.
Indeed, structural modeling programs like LISREL
are often used to analyze longitudinal data.
When analyzing data using LISREL, the researcher
is provided a variety of statistics that are useful in

530———Locus of Control
determining how well or poorly the model fits the
observed data. These include statistics for individually
theorized associations among variables as well as
statistics that assess the model as a whole. In addition,
the researcher is provided statistics that pinpoint
sources of ill fit. Armed with these statistics, the
researcher is often tempted to modify the originally
theorized model in an attempt to provide a better fitting
model. Although such modifications will improve
fit, they run the risk of capitalizing on chance fluctuations
in the data and should be replicated in a separate
sample before they are trusted.
LISREL and other structural equation modeling
programs provide powerful tools for testing complex
models of psychological phenomena. At the same
time, they require a fair amount of mathematical ability
and statistical sophistication to use properly.
See also Structural Equation Modeling
Further Readings
Jay Hull
Byrne, B. (1998). Structural equation modeling with LISREL,
PRELIS, and SIMPLIS: Basic concepts, applications, and
programming. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Byrne, B. (2006). Structural equation modeling with EQS:
Basic concepts, applications, and programming. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
du Toit, M., & du Toit, S. (2001). Interactive LISREL: User’s
Guide. Lincolnwood, IL: Scientific Software.
Kline, R. B. (2004). Principles and practice of structural
equation modeling (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
LOCUS OF CONTROL
Who determines one’s fate? Is it the person or outside
forces beyond the person’s control? This question lies
at the root of the concept of locus of control. People
who believe they are in control of their destinies have
an internal locus of control (internals). Those who
believe that luck and powerful others determine their
fate have an external locus of control (externals).
Measurements
Locus of control is usually measured by questionnaires,
just as personality traits are; however, locus of
control is more an attitude than a trait—it measures
how one thinks the world works. Some researchers
have called locus of control a generalized expectancy—
in other words, a person’s usual expectation about
how things work.
One of the first locus of control measures was
Julian Rotter’s Internal-External Locus of Control
Scale, first published in 1966 and used in thousands of
articles. Rotter’s measure consists of 23 forced-choice
pairs; the respondent must choose one of the two
statements, one internally oriented and the other
externally oriented. For example, one of the pairs is
“People’s misfortunes result from the mistakes they
make” (internal) versus “Many of the unhappy things
in people’s lives are partly due to bad luck” (external).
Most items are general, though a few deal with specific
circumstances such as school (“In the case of the
well-prepared student there is rarely if ever such a
thing as an unfair test”) or world affairs (“By taking
an active part in political and social affairs, the people
can control world events”). These are both internal
items.
The most popular measure of locus of control in
children is the Children’s Nowicki-Strickland Internal-
External Control Scale. Other scales measure more
specialized aspects of control; there has been an especially
large amount of research on health locus of control.
Several scales (of both general and health locus
of control) are multidimensional, as many researchers
agree that external control should be divided into control
by fate or chance and control by powerful others.
Research
Research has consistently shown that externality is
related to negative outcomes. Externals report lower
subjective well-being, are more likely to be depressed,
display more anxiety, and cope poorly with stress.
Externals have weakened self-control and a lessened
ability to delay gratification (meaning that they have a
difficult time choosing long-term gains over shortterm
pleasures, something necessary for many life
situations, particularly college!)
Externals also consistently achieve less in school,
as shown in two meta-analyses and numerous individual
studies. A widely publicized report by James
Coleman and his colleagues concluded that internal
locus of control was a better predictor of school
achievement in minority children than any other variable.
Children with an internal locus of control see

more reason to study and try hard because they believe
it will make a difference; externals believe that it won’t
matter, compromising their performance.
Several studies have also linked externality to
increased juvenile delinquency. Externality may also
lead to a victim mentality, in which people blame others
for their problems. Some authors have argued that
the victim mentality encourages self-loathing and the
expectation of low functioning and achievement.
Externality on health locus of control also leads to
negative outcomes such as decreased success in stopping
smoking or losing weight. People who are external
in locus of control are also less likely to make and
keep dentist and doctor appointments; they are also
less likely to use birth control consistently. People
who truly believe that fate controls everything are less
likely to take control of their health.
Differences
Locus of control differs along many dimensions. Men
tend to be more internal than women, Whites more
internal than minorities, middle-class people more internal
than lower-class people, and older people more
internal than younger people. These four results suggest
that people with more power are more internal.
Locus of control also differs by generation: More
recent generations are more external and thus more
likely to believe that outside forces determine their
fates. This generational shift is so large that the average
college student in the 2000s would score at the
80th percentile on the original 1960 distribution
(where, of course, the average 1960s college student
would score at the 50th percentile). This increase in
externality may be at the root of some current trends,
such as blaming others for problems. For example,
civil lawsuits are more common, and there is anecdotal
evidence that students (and their parents) are now
more likely to argue with teachers and professors.
Externality may also help explain the high rates of
anxiety and depression observed in recent years.
Many young people are also disinclined to get
involved in political action or even vote; voter participation
has steadily declined over this period, especially
for voters ages 18 to 24.
There are also cultural differences in locus of control.
Members of more interdependent and traditional
cultures often have a more external locus of control.
Stricter adherence to social and religious rules may
encourage externality. There has been debate about
whether externality may be adaptive in some cases.
Many researchers believe that externality is a negative
characteristic because it is correlated with poor outcomes.
However, other researchers have pointed out
that in reality, control is sometimes an illusion and
there are some things that people must accept as being
out of their control.
Jean M. Twenge
See also Achievement Motivation; Blaming the Victim;
Control; Illusion of Control; Power; Self-Defeating
Behavior
Further Readings
Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal
versus external control of reinforcement [Whole issue].
Psychological Monographs, 80(1), 1–28.
Rotter, J. B. (1971). External control and internal control.
Psychology Today, 5, 37–59.
Twenge, J. M., Zhang, L., & Im, C. (2004). It’s beyond my
control: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of increasing
externality in locus of control, 1960–2002. Personality
and Social Psychology Review, 8, 308, 319.
LOGICAL POSITIVISM
Logical Positivism———531
Definition
Logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, was
an early 20th-century philosophical movement that
held that a statement was meaningful only if it could
be verified or confirmed through experience. Logical
positivism relied exclusively on observable events for
knowledge about the world, and therefore considered
non-observable events to be basically meaningless. In
other words, the only truth is what science can prove.
History, Problems, and
Modern Significance
A. E. Blumberg and Herbert Feigl coined the term
logical positivism in 1931 to describe the philosophical
principles of the Vienna Circle, a group of
European scholars. Logical positivists rejected philosophical
inquiries on the grounds that there was no
possible way of verifying them in experience. For
example, the statement “abortion is wrong” reflects

532———Loneliness
a person’s disapproval of abortion, or attempts to convince
others to also disapprove of abortion. In either
case, the statement itself does not convey any direct
information about the existence or nature of abortion,
and is therefore (according to logical positivism)
meaningless (e.g., what you think about abortion does
not really matter because it is just your opinion).
Logical positivists consequently proposed science
to be the source for all knowledge about the world
because science is grounded in concrete experience
and publicly observable events (unlike, for instance,
observations gained from introspection). If propositions
were inextricably tied to science, logical positivists
argued, they could not be too far from the truth.
Logical positivism collapsed in the 1940s, largely
because of the sharpness of its inevitably created yesor-no
dichotomies: Either a statement is verifiable or it
is not, either a statement is scientific or unscientific.
Ironically, this created severe problems because such
statements themselves cannot be conclusively verified.
Moreover, basing all conclusions on directly observable
data creates problems as well. For example, a person
with a headache might complain of pain, lie down,
or take aspirin. However, someone faking a headache
might objectively exhibit the same overt symptoms. A
pure reliance on the observable data would presumably
lead to the errant conclusion that both people have
headaches, when only one actually does.
Problems notwithstanding, logical positivism has
nonetheless left its mark on psychology. The behaviorists
in particular quite enthusiastically adopted
the premise that scientists should study behavior
rather than thought. Most importantly, logical positivism
helped endow psychology with the enduring
sentiment that one can transform complex propositions
about cognitive phenomena into scientifically
testable hypotheses about overt behavior and do so in
a way that other researchers—and ideally the general
public—can clearly understand the results.
See also Experimentation; Lay Epistemics
Further Readings
Scott J. Moeller
Brad J. Bushman
Passmore, J. (1967). Logical positivism. In P. Edwards (Ed.),
The encyclopedia of philosophy (Vol. 5, pp. 52–57).
New York: Macmillan.
LONELINESS
Definition
Loneliness is defined as the distressing experience
that occurs when one’s social relationships are perceived
to be less in quantity, and especially in quality,
than desired. Being alone and experiencing loneliness
are not the same thing. People can be alone without
feeling lonely and can feel lonely even when with
other people. Loneliness is associated with depressive
symptoms, poor social support, neuroticism, and
introversion, but loneliness is not synonymous with
these psychological characteristics. Loneliness is typically
thought of as a stable trait, with individual differences
in the set-point for feelings of loneliness
about which people fluctuate depending on the specific
circumstances in which they find themselves.
Loneliness changes very little during adulthood until
75 to 80 years of age when it increases somewhat.
Loneliness puts people at risk for mental and physical
disease and may contribute to a shortened life span.
History and Theory
Although loneliness has always been part of human
existence, it has a relatively short psychological history.
John Bowlby’s attachment theory emphasized the
importance of a good attachment bond between the
infant and caregiver, and this theory was a forerunner
to theories of loneliness. From this perspective, loneliness
is the result of insecure attachment patterns that
lead children to behave in ways that result in being
rejected by their peers. Rejection experiences hinder
the development of social skills and increase distrust of
other people, thereby fostering ongoing loneliness.
Attachment theory formed a foundation for an
influential psychological theory of loneliness developed
by Robert S. Weiss. Weiss identified six functions
or needs of social relationships that, if in short supply,
contribute to feelings of loneliness. These needs are
attachment, social integration, nurturance, reassurance
of worth, sense of reliable alliance, and guidance
in stressful situations. Weiss went on to distinguish
loneliness from social isolation (e.g., a lack of social
integration) and loneliness from emotional isolation
(e.g., the absence of a reliable attachment figure). As
would be predicted by attachment theory, Weiss
maintained that friendships complement but do not

substitute for a close, intimate relationship with a partner
in staving off loneliness. Widows who remarry
have been found to escape from loneliness, but those
who merely have other friends still feel somewhat
lonely about not having a husband.
Another theoretical perspective holds that loneliness
is characterized by personality traits that are
associated with, and possibly contribute to, harmful
interpersonal behavioral patterns. For instance, loneliness
is correlated with social anxiety, social inhibition
(shyness), sadness, hostility, distrust, and low selfesteem,
characteristics that hamper one’s ability to
interact in skillful and rewarding ways. Indeed, lonely
individuals have been shown to have difficulty forming
and maintaining meaningful relationships. They
are also less likely to self-disclose to peers, and this
helps to explain why they report a lack of intimacy
with close friends.
The cognitive approach to loneliness is based on
the fact that loneliness is characterized by distinct differences
in perceptions and attributions. Lonely individuals
tend to look at their world through dark-tinted
glasses: They are more negative than are nonlonely
individuals about the people, events, and circumstances
in their world, and they tend to blame themselves
for not being able to achieve satisfactory social
relationships. The “perceived discrepancy” definition
of loneliness provided previously represents the cognitive
perspective. In addition, the cognitive approach
largely takes account of the attachment and behavioral
perspectives by explaining how (a) failure to meet the
need for attachment, social integration, nurturance,
and other social needs, results in perceived relationship
discrepancies that are experienced as loneliness,
and (b) loneliness is perpetuated by way of a selffulfilling
prophecy in which poor social skills result in
unsatisfactory personal relationships that, in turn,
result in negative self-attributions that lead to further
social isolation and relationship dissatisfaction.
Theories of the self have contributed to theories of
loneliness by demonstrating the importance of individual,
relational, and collective selves. These selfidentities
correspond to aspects of the experience of
loneliness or conversely, the experience of connectedness.
For example, at the individual level, if a person’s
self-concept expands to include an intimate other
(e.g., a marital partner), the person is less likely to
experience a sense of isolation than if his or her selfconcept
fails to include his or her partner. Similarly, a
network of close friends and relatives protects against
Loneliness———533
relational loneliness, and group affiliations and memberships
protect against collective loneliness.
All these theories of loneliness fit under the
umbrella of an evolutionary account of loneliness.
According to the evolutionary model, hunter-gatherers
who, in times of famine, chose not to return to share
their food with mother and child (i.e., did not place a
high priority on maintaining social or family bonds)
may have survived themselves, but the same genes
that allowed them to ignore their family also made it
less likely their genes would survive past the child’s
generation. In contrast, hunter-gatherers inclined to
share food with their family may have lowered their
own chances of survival but increased the survival
odds of their offspring, thereby propagating their
genes. Of course, a hunter-gatherer who survives a
famine may then live to have another family another
day, suggesting that no single strategy is necessarily
best. Such an evolutionary scenario suggests that
humans might inherit differing tendencies to experience
loneliness. Adoption and twin studies among
children and adults have confirmed that loneliness has
a sizable heritable component.
Correlates and Consequences
Practically and ethically, loneliness cannot be easily
manipulated in an experimental setting. This has posed
a challenge to researchers attempting to distinguish
between the causes and consequences of loneliness.
One creative approach to this obstacle was a paradigm
that employed hypnotic suggestion. Using this strategy,
highly hypnotizable individuals were asked to
relive a time when they felt lonely, and after return
from this hypnotic state, to relive a time when they
felt highly socially connected. While in these states of
social disconnection and connection, participants
completed a set of psychosocial measures. The results
showed that the states and dispositions that differentiate
lonely and nonlonely individuals in everyday life
also varied with manipulated feelings of loneliness.
That is, when participants were induced to feel lonely,
compared with nonlonely, they scored higher, not only
on a measure of loneliness, but also in shyness, negative
mood, anger, anxiety, and fear of negative evaluation,
and lower on measures of social skills, optimism,
positive mood, social support, and self-esteem.
Conversely, when individuals were induced to feel that
their intimate, relational, and collective social needs
were being met, they became characterized by states

534———Looking-Glass Self
and dispositions that were generally more positive and
engaged. This experimental study suggests that loneliness
has features of a central trait—central in the sense
that loneliness influences how individuals construe
themselves and others, as well as how others view and
act toward these individuals.
One example of differential construals is that
lonely individuals form more negative social impressions
and interpret the behavior of others in a more
negative light than do nonlonely individuals. Negative
social expectations tend to elicit behaviors from
others that match these expectations. This reinforces
the lonely individual’s expectations and increases the
likelihood that the individual will behave in ways that
push away the very people who could satisfy his or
her social needs. This has been demonstrated in experimental
studies in which perceived social threats (e.g.,
competition, betrayal) cause lonely individuals to
respond more quickly and intensely with distrust, hostility,
and intolerance.
The negative, self-protective lens through which
lonely individuals view their social world also influences
how they interpret and cope with stressful
circumstances. Lonely individuals are more likely to
disengage or withdraw from stressors, whereas nonlonely
individuals are more likely to actively cope
(e.g., problem solve) and seek tangible and emotional
support from others. Passively coping or withdrawing
from stressful circumstances is reasonable in certain
instances, but when applied generally to everyday
hassles, it can lead to an accumulation of stress that
becomes increasingly taxing and oppressive. Increased
stress may be at least partially responsible for the risk
of mental and physical disease in lonely individuals.
For instance, loneliness has been associated with
elevated levels of stress hormones, poorer immune
functioning, and health-jeopardizing changes in cardiovascular
functioning.
Individual Differences
Individual differences in loneliness are typically
measured using paper-and-pencil questionnaires
developed for this purpose. The most frequently used
instrument is the UCLA Loneliness Scale, first developed
at the University of California at Los Angeles by
Daniel Russell and his colleagues. Responses to the
20 items on this scale provide an overall measure of
loneliness along a continuum from low to high levels
of loneliness. Other loneliness scales have been
designed to measure different dimensions of loneliness
(e.g., social and emotional loneliness). Some
individuals are reluctant or ashamed to report they are
lonely, so most loneliness scales avoid using the terms
lonely and loneliness.
Louise Hawkley
See also Attachment Theory; Need to Belong; Rejection; Self
Further Readings
Cacioppo, J. T., Hawkley, L. C., & Berntson, G. G. (2003).
The anatomy of loneliness. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 12, 71–74.
Ernst, J. M., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1999). Lonely hearts:
Psychological perspective on loneliness. Applied and
Preventive Psychology, 8, 1–22.
LOOKING-GLASS SELF
Definition
The looking-glass self is the process by which people
evaluate themselves based on how others see them.
According to this theory, people first imagine how
they appear to others. Second, they imagine how
others judge them based on that appearance. Third,
people have an emotional reaction to that imagined
judgment, such as pride or embarrassment. This selfevaluation
influences the person’s sense of self-worth
or self-esteem. In short, the looking-glass self theory
suggests that we come to know ourselves by reflecting
on how others see us.
History and Modern Usage
The looking-glass self was first proposed by Charles
Horton Cooley. According to Cooley, self-perceptions
are based on reflected appraisals of how others see us
(i.e., our impression of others’ impressions of us),
which are in turn based on how others actually see us.
The looking-glass self theory is controversial for
two reasons. First, this view supposes that people have
a good idea of how significant others see them.
Psychological research reveals that people’s beliefs

about how others see them are not very accurate.
Indeed, our reflected appraisals of how we think
others see us are much more closely related to how
we see ourselves than to how others see us. Some
researchers have argued that this evidence implies that
the looking-glass self theory is actually backward—it
could be that people simply assume others see them
the same way they see themselves.
The second reason why the looking-glass self
theory is controversial is that other theories of selfperception
provide alternative explanations for
how people form their self-views. For example, selfperception
theory claims that self-views are based on
direct observations of one’s own behavior, rather than
on how we imagine others see us. Nevertheless, our
impressions of what others think of us are extremely
important to us. People go to great lengths to obtain
feedback about how others see them, such as posting
their photographs on a Web site where others will rate
their attractiveness. Some researchers have even proposed
that the main purpose of self-esteem is to serve
as an internal “sociometer”—a gauge of our relative
popularity or worth among our peers.
Some evidence indicates that people’s reflected
appraisals of how others see them influence their selfviews
and their behavior, particularly in close relationships.
Research on romantic relationships suggests
that our reflected appraisals of how our partners see us
may be particularly important in this context. This is
especially true for people who have doubts about how
their partner feels about them. People with negative
impressions of how their partner sees them tend to
cause strain and dissatisfaction in their relationships.
See also Person Perception; Self; Self-Concept; Self-
Perception Theory; Symbolic Interactionism
Further Readings
Simine Vazire
O’Connor, B. P., & Dyce, J. (1993). Appraisals of musical
ability in bar bands: Identifying the weak link in the
looking-glass self chain. Basic and Applied Social
Psychology, 14, 69–86.
Shrauger, J. S., & Schoeneman, T. J. (1979). Symbolic
interactionist view of the self-concept: Through the
looking-glass darkly. Psychological Bulletin,
86, 549–573.
LOSS AVERSION
Definition
Loss Aversion———535
Loss aversion refers to people’s tendency to prefer
avoiding losses to acquiring gains of equal magnitude.
In other words, the value people place on avoiding a
certain loss is higher than the value of acquiring a gain
of equal size. Consider, for instance, the subjective
value of avoiding a loss of $10 compared with gaining
$10. Usually, people say that the former has a higher
value to them than the latter. Such a preference seems
striking, given that, objectively, $10 is $10, regardless
whether it is lost or gained. Nevertheless, the aversion
toward incurring losses is a strong and reliable effect,
and the value of avoiding a loss is usually twice as high
as the value of acquiring an equivalent gain.
Theoretical Explanation
Loss aversion can be explained by the way people
view the value of consequences. Specifically, the
value of a certain consequence is not seen in terms of
its absolute magnitude but in terms of changes compared
with a reference point. This reference point is
variable and can be, for example, the status quo.
Starting from this reference point, every increase in a
good is seen as a gain, and the value of this gain rises
with its size. Importantly, this rise does not follow a linear
trend but grows more slowly with ever-increasing
size. Contrarily, starting from the reference point,
every decrease is seen as a loss. Now, the value is negative
and decreases with the size of the loss. This
decrease also slows down with ever-decreasing size,
however, not as fast as on the gain side. Therefore, a
gain does not increase subjective value at the same
rate as a loss of the same size decreases subjective
value. Given that individuals are assumed to maximize
subjective value, they should express a preference
for avoiding the loss. Hence, as suggested in the
beginning, people usually prefer avoiding a loss of
$10 compared with ensuring a gain of equal size. In
general, this may be because bad events have a greater
power over people than good events.
Background and History
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were first to
fully recognize the importance of the loss aversion

536———Lost Letter Technique
phenomenon for a better understanding of human
decision making. They made loss aversion a central
part of their prospect theory, which explains human
decision making in situations when outcomes are
uncertain. Of importance, the idea of different values
for equivalent gains and losses strongly contradicted
the assumptions held so far in classic theories of decision
making; namely, that gains and losses of the same
size should have the same value for people. However,
as abundant empirical evidence in favor of the loss
aversion phenomenon demonstrated, the grief of losing
is stronger than the pleasure of gaining.
In subsequent research on the phenomenon of
loss aversion, the effect was demonstrated in many
domains, including, for example, economic, medical,
and social decision making. In addition, it was shown
that loss aversion is not limited to decisions under
uncertainty but also occurs in situations in which the
outcomes of alternatives are certain.
Implications
A prominent implication of loss aversion in decisions
with uncertain outcomes is a shift from risk-averse to
risk-seeking behavior depending on whether a situation
is framed as a gain or as a loss. Given that reference
points are not fixed but depend on the specific
situation, two alternatives that are equivalent from the
standpoint of rational decision making (receiving $10
versus not losing $10) can result in different choices if
one of the decisions is seen in the context of gains and
the other in the context of losses. Consider the socalled
Asian Disease Problem with which Kahneman
and Tversky confronted participants in an experiment.
In this problem, participants were told about a hypothetical
outbreak of an unusual Asian disease threatening
to kill 600 people in the United States. Participants
had to choose between two alternatives to counteract
this disease. One alternative was risky, saving all 600
people with a probability of one-third but otherwise all
600 people would be killed. In the other alternative,
200 people were saved and 400 were killed. If this
problem was presented in a gain frame by mentioning
how many lives in each alternative could be saved,
most participants avoided risk and opted for the certain
option. But if the problem was presented in a loss
frame by mentioning how many people could die in
each alternative, participants opted for the risky alternative.
This puzzling result can be explained by loss
aversion. The higher value of avoiding losses compared
with gains makes the one-third probability of
nobody getting killed much more attractive in the loss
frame than it is in the gain frame (framed as saving 600
lives). Consistent with the assumptions of the prospect
theory, people seem to avoid risk in gain frames while
seeking risk in loss frames.
Other implications of loss aversion occur for decisions
with certain outcomes. One of these implications
is the status quo bias. This is the tendency to
remain at the status quo because the disadvantages of
changing something loom larger than the advantages
of doing so. The mere ownership effect (also called
endowment effect) is a related phenomenon also
explained by the differences in the value of losses and
gains. Here, the mere possession of an object makes it
more valuable to a person relative to objects the person
does not own and to the value the person would
have assigned to the object before possessing it. This
is because giving the object away means a loss to the
person, and following the loss aversion phenomenon,
losses weigh more heavily than gains. The compensation
for giving up a good, therefore, is usually higher
than the price the person would pay for it to possess it
(which would mean to gain it). Both the status quo
bias and the endowment effect have strong implications
for economic and social situations.
Patrick A. Müller
Rainer Greifeneder
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Mere Ownership
Effect; Prospect Theory
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs,
K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of
General Psychology, 5, 323–370.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory:
An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica,
47, 263–291.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1991). Loss aversion in
riskless choice: A reference dependent model. Quarterly
Journal of Economics, 106, 1039–1061.
LOST LETTER TECHNIQUE
Definition
The lost letter technique is used to measure people’s
attitudes by dropping stamped letters addressed to various
organizations in public areas and then recording

how many of the letters are returned via the mail. It is
assumed that people will be more likely to return a letter
if it is addressed to an organization that they support
than if it is addressed to an organization they do
not support. For example, a Democrat who finds a lost
letter should be more likely to mail it when it is
addressed to a Democratic candidate’s headquarters
than to a Republican candidate’s headquarters.
History and Modern Usage
In one of the first studies to use the lost letter technique,
Stanley Milgram and his colleagues dropped
stamped letters in a variety of public locations. The
letters were addressed to one of four recipients:
“Medical Research Associates,” “Friends of the
Communist Party,” “Friends of the Nazi Party,” or a
private individual. People were less likely to return the
letters if they were addressed to the Communist Party
(25% returned) or the Nazi Party (25% returned) than
if they were addressed to the Medical group (72%
returned) or the private individual (71% returned).
These results suggest that people were less likely to
mail letters to organizations they did not support.
To verify that the response rates reflected people’s
attitudes, Milgram conducted additional studies. In one
study, the researchers were able to correctly predict
U.S. presidential election results in different election
wards using the lost letter technique. Letters addressed
to the Committee to (a) Elect (Barry) Goldwater,
(b) Defeat Goldwater, (c) Elect (Lyndon) Johnson,
and (d) Defeat Johnson were dropped in various election
wards. Election wards that supported Johnson in
the election were more likely to return the pro-
Johnson and anti-Goldwater letters than the pro-
Goldwater/anti-Johnson letters. The opposite results
were found in wards that ended up supporting
Goldwater in the election.
Later researchers have used the lost letter technique
to study helping behavior. By varying the characteristics
of the letters, researchers can identify the
factors that increase the chances that people will help
by mailing the letter. Some of these studies have used
post cards and e-mails instead of sealed letters. This
modification has allowed researchers to determine the
impact of the type of message on helping behavior.
The lost letter technique allows researchers to
determine people’s attitudes or the factors that influence
helping behavior without directly asking them
(known as an unobtrusive measure). Because participants
are unaware that they are participating in a
study, they will not alter their behavior to “look good”
for the experimenter.
Pamela L. Bacon
See also Altruism; Attitudes; Helping Behavior; Research
Methods
Further Readings
Milgram, S., Mann, L., & Harter, S. (1965). The lost-letter
technique: A tool of social research. Public Opinion
Quarterly, 29, 437–438.
Vaes, J., Paladino, M. P., & Leyens, J. P. (2002). The lost
e-mail: Prosocial reactions induced by uniquely human
emotions. British Journal of Social Psychology,
41, 521–534.
LOVE
Definition
Love is often thought of as an intense and positive
emotion that can be experienced for a variety of close
others, including a romantic partner or spouse, close
friends, children, parents, and other relatives. For more
than three decades, social psychologists and other
social scientists have been studying love. The type of
love that has been most frequently measured and studied
is the love experienced for a romantic partner.
However, when social scientists began measuring love,
they realized that there were many different types or
subtypes, even in regard to a romantic partner.
Types
Love———537
An initial distinction was made between liking and love.
One of the first psychologists to study love, Zick Rubin,
discovered that people could distinguish between attitude
statements that measured liking (items that
referred to respect, positive evaluation, and perceptions
of similarity) and attitude statements that measured
love (items that referred to dependency, caring, and
exclusiveness). His liking and love scales have been
used in several research studies that have generated a
number of interesting findings including (1) liking and
loving are only modestly associated; (2) those who
have higher scores on the love scale spend more time
eye-gazing with their partner; and (3) higher scores
on love are predictive of staying together over time.

538———Love
Social psychologists next distinguished between
various types of love. The first distinction was between
passionate love and companionate love. Passionate
love is intense, exciting, and has the potential for both
ecstasy (when things are going well) and despair
(when things are not going well). Companionate love,
however, is less intense and is referred to as affection
that develops between two people whose lives are
intertwined. Research suggests that in most dating and
newly married relationships, both types of love exist.
Passionate love tends to develop first, although it is
also likely to dissipate first over time. Companionate
love may take longer to develop but is likely to remain
stable and not erode with the passage of time.
Passionate love, as the more intense type of love, may
sometimes increase because of misattribution of
arousal. A person can become aroused because of an
extraneous source such as consumption of caffeine or
a frightful experience and then mistakenly attribute the
arousal to passionate love for another, especially if the
other is physically attractive. Although passionate love
declines over years of marriage, research has revealed
that if couples engage in exciting and novel activities
together, the passion can be rekindled.
In a more recent typology, six types or styles of
loving have been identified. These are eros (intense,
passionate love), ludus (game-playing love), storge
(friendship love), pragma (practical love), mania
(obsessive, dependent love) and agape (selfless love).
These love styles may be considered to be attitudes or
orientations toward a particular person (e.g., a romantic
partner) but also may be considered to be stable
orientations toward relationships. For example, some
people may be thought of as erotic lovers, likely to
experience this particular style of love regardless of
the partner. However, people’s lovestyle experiences
also may change as a function of the partner’s style of
loving and how he or she behaves toward the other
partner. The two types of love that are experienced to
the greatest degree, especially among young adults,
are eros and storge. In fact, most romantic relationships
may have a combination of these two types of
love. People experience a low level of ludus, which is
good because this type of love does not lead to healthy
and long-lasting relationships. Consistent gender differences
have been found in the experience of love
styles. Ludus is experienced to a greater degree by
men than by women, and storge and pragma are experienced
to a greater degree by women.
Love also has been described as a triangle, having
three primary components: intimacy, passion, and commitment
(pictorially presented as a triangle). Each component
(triangle side) can range from low to high so
that a number of different triangle shapes and sizes are
possible. Intimacy refers to warmth, understanding,
caring, support, and connection. Passion is characterized
by physical attraction and arousal. Commitment
refers to the decision to stay in the relationship and
maintain it. The triangular model of love yields eight
different love types ranging from nonlove (no intimacy,
no passion, and no commitment) to consummate love
(high on all three components). Romantic love, often
experienced in young college romances, includes intimacy
and passion but rarely includes long-term commitment.
An empty-shell marriage has commitment,
but may no longer have passion or intimacy.
Researchers have identified many other types of
loving, including unrequited love (in which one loves
another but isn’t loved back), limerence (an intense
dependent type of love), lust, and friendship love.
Although most social scientific research has focused
on love for one specific person, typically a romantic
partner, love can also be experienced for pets, God,
strangers, and all of humanity. Compassionate love,
for example, is the type of love that focuses on selfless
caring for others, especially those who are in need
or distressed. It’s similar to empathy but more enduring.
Some nonprofit organizations, such as the Fetzer
Institute located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, have recently
become interested in promoting scientific study on
compassionate love. The hope is that the more that
can be learned about this type of love, including love
as expressed for all of humanity, the more likely
researchers can identify ways to increase it.
Attitudes About Love
Social scientists also have been interested in examining
people’s attitudes about love. How important do
people believe love is for entering and maintaining
marriage (i.e., do love and marriage go together?) Do
people believe that love is necessary to have premarital
sex? What are people’s romantic attitudes about
love? For example, do they believe in love at first sight
and that love conquers all? These beliefs are important
to study for many reasons, including that the attitudes
and beliefs people have will affect their behaviors.
Survey studies indicate that most young adults believe

that one should not enter marriage without love. The
disappearance of love from marriage over time is
thought to be a sufficient reason for a divorce by most
people. Although some young adults indicate that they
believe that sex is okay in a casual relationship and
even in a “hook-up,” most young adults and especially
women and female adolescents believe that love and
affection are necessary for premarital sexual activity.
Finally, young adults have many romantic beliefs
about love, including that if you love someone, other
obstacles can be overcome and a love partner and relationship
can be perfect. These beliefs have sometimes
been referred to as positive illusions and have been
found to be good for relationships because they contribute
to people engaging in actions that lead to positive
events in the relationship.
Falling in Love
Many people can remember the first time they had an
upsurge of affection for another and may have labeled
this turning point in the relationship “falling in love.”
Researchers have identified the factors that lead to initial
attraction as well as falling in love. People report
that they fall in love because of desirable characteristics
of the other (e.g., kindness, physical attractiveness)
and because the other expresses attraction toward
them, such as through eye contact. Falling in love can
lead to an increased feeling of self-worth, at least in
the initial stage and especially if it’s reciprocated.
Determinants of Love
Researchers also have tried to identify the factors that
make love grow over time or at least not decrease. The
most common way of studying determinants of love is
to survey individuals about their relationship and have
them complete a scale to measure how much they love
their partners, and then also have them complete measures
on several factors that are predicted to be associated
with love. A design that follows the relationships
over time is more useful than data at only one point in
time for determining causal directions. Research has
indicated that feelings of love are associated with factors
such as self-disclosure, equity (fair exchange of
resources), frequent and satisfying sex, and positive
beliefs about the relationship. Research done by Diane
Felmlee and Susan Sprecher also indicates that love
increases when parents and friends support the
relationship. Each of these factors that have been
identified as determinants of love, however, also can be
consequences of love. That is, when people feel more
love, their self-disclosure, sex, fair exchange, and
attempts to seek support from family and friends for
the relationship may increase.
Implications
Love is important to relationships, to individuals, and
to society. Relationships that are loving are more
likely to be satisfying and last over time. Individuals
who experience love and support by others and also
feel love for others are more likely to have high levels
of mental and physical health. Society also benefits
from people forming loving connections with each
other. Love leads to reproduction (and replacement of
members in a society), familial relationships for the
raising of children to adulthood, and humanitarian
efforts toward others. Social psychological investigation
has helped significantly to expand the knowledge
regarding the multidimensional nature of this important
concept of love, as well as the attitudes associated
with it. The scientific community and society has
much to gain from the continued investigation of this
pivotal and central human emotion.
Susan Sprecher
Diane Felmlee
See also Companionate Love; Emotion; Intimacy; Positive
Illusions; Romantic Love; Triangular Theory of Love
Further Readings
Love———539
Felmlee, D., & Sprecher, S. (2006). Love. In J. E. Stets &
J. H. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of sociology of emotions
(pp. 389–409). New York: Springer.
Hatfield, E., & Sprecher, S. (1986). Measuring passionate
love in intimate relationships. Journal of Adolescence,
9, 383–410.
Hendrick, S. S., & Hendrick, C. (1992). Romantic love.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Sprecher, S., & Toro-Morn, M. (2002). A study of men and
women from different sides of earth to determine if men
are from Mars and women are from Venus in their beliefs
about love and romantic relationships. Sex Roles,
46, 131–147.

540———Lowballing
LOWBALLING
Definition
Lowballing is a strategy to increase compliance. In
lowballing, the person making a request gets another
person (i.e., the target of compliance) to make a commitment
to a particular course of action. After making
that commitment, the requester reveals hidden costs
associated with the requested course of action. The
target of compliance is then more likely to follow
through with the request (i.e., to comply) than if the
hidden costs had been revealed at the time of the
initial request.
Examples
Car salespeople have been observed using the lowball
strategy to increase the likelihood that the customer will
purchase a car. In this situation, the salesperson negotiates
with the customer to arrive at a sales price that the
customer feels is a good deal. After the customer commits
to that price (e.g., via oral agreement, signing
paperwork, putting money down), the salesperson takes
the agreement to the manager for approval. Upon
returning, the salesperson indicates that the manager
will only approve a purchase price of $500 more than
the previously agreed-upon price. Because the customer
initially made a commitment to purchase the car,
he or she is likely to follow through on the purchase,
even though it is no longer that good of a deal. In this
scenario, the initial price was a lowball offer, which the
salesperson never intended to honor.
Lowballing also occurs in nonsales situations. For
example, a professor asks students to help move boxes
of books from the office building to the library. After
the students agree, the professor reveals that the
students must arrive on campus at 7:30 A.M. to help.
Because the students have already agreed to help the
professor, they are more likely to follow through than
if they had initially been asked to help early in the
morning.
The Importance of Commitment
The lowballing effect depends on the target of compliance
making a public commitment to the initial
request. For several reasons, it is difficult for the target
of compliance to back out of the commitment.
First, the target of the lowball feels a commitment to
the person who made the request (e.g., the customer
“made a deal” with the salesperson). Second, the
target feels a commitment to the course of action
involved (e.g., the customer made a commitment to
buy a car). And finally, once the target has made the
commitment, he or she becomes excited about the
prospect of the course of action involved (e.g., while
the salesperson “discusses the offer with the manager,”
the customer envisions driving home in the new
car). Given these forms of commitment, the customer
is likely to follow through with the behavior, even
though it is more costly than the original commitment
(e.g., the customer buys the car even though the actual
purchase price is higher than the initial agreement).
Research suggests that the lowballing technique is
robust, in that it remains effective even when the targets
of compliance are aware of the strategy and its
effectiveness.
Kathryn A. Morris
See also Compliance; Foot-in-the-Door Technique; Influence
Further Readings
Burger, J. M., & Cornelius, T. (2003). Raising the price of
agreement: Public commitment and the lowball
compliance procedure. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 33, 923–934.

MARITAL SATISFACTION
Definition
Marital satisfaction is a mental state that reflects the
perceived benefits and costs of marriage to a particular
person. The more costs a marriage partner inflicts on a
person, the less satisfied one generally is with the marriage
and with the marriage partner. Similarly, the
greater the perceived benefits are, the more satisfied
one is with the marriage and with the marriage partner.
Cognition
Components and Mechanisms
In perceiving whether a spouse’s behavior is costly
or beneficial, cognitions, or thoughts about the behavior,
are important. If one’s spouse performs a negative
(costly) behavior, this may be attributed either to
characteristics of the spouse (for example, he or she is
lazy), or instead to circumstances surrounding the
spouse’s behavior (for example, it was an especially
taxing day at work, and he or she doesn’t feel like
making dinner). In the case of marital satisfaction,
attributing costly behavior to characteristics of one’s
spouse, rather than to circumstances surrounding his
or her behavior, is associated with decreased marital
satisfaction, as well as marital deterioration. These maladaptive
attributions occur more often with negative
behaviors in marital problem-solving discussions, and
these attributions do not appear to be a result of either
partner being depressed, having a neurotic personality,
or tending toward physical aggression. The way
M
541
people interpret behavior appears to be related to how
satisfied they are with their marriage.
Intimately related to an individual’s thoughts about
behaviors are the individual’s feelings about behaviors,
or affect. Research on affect and marital satisfaction
is not conclusive yet; some studies have shown
that negative affect is related to decreased marital satisfaction,
whereas others have shown it has no effect
or even increases it. Future research needs to clarify
more specifically how negative affect is related to
marital satisfaction.
Physiology
There is a well-established relationship between
being married and maintaining physical well-being.
This, in the most immediate sense, is established by
the physiological functioning of the two married individuals.
Recent research has indicated that married
couples who are more satisfied with their relationship
also exhibit greater synchrony among their physiological
systems compared with those married couples
who are less satisfied. That is, maritally satisfied
couples are more likely to maintain synchrony among
each partner’s electrodermal (or electrical resistance
of the skin) and heart rate systems, which may be a
mechanism by which married couples maintain greater
physical well-being than unmarried individuals.
Interaction Patterns
Patterns of interaction between spouses can affect
how satisfied they are with their marriage. The pattern
most often related to marital dissatisfaction is one of
demand/withdrawal. In this pattern, one partner (often

542———Marital Satisfaction
the wife) criticizes or nags the other about change,
while the other partner (usually the husband) evades
the confrontation and discussion. It operates such that
initial criticism leads to disengagement, which leads to
further confrontation and even further disengagement.
This pattern has clear implications for marital satisfaction,
with both parties developing dissatisfaction.
Social Support
Another component of satisfaction within a marriage
is the degree of social support for each of the
partners and for the relationship. Support processes
are reliably associated with good marital functioning,
as well as with healthful outcomes within families. A
marriage partner who provides good social support for
his or her spouse contributes to the spouse’s marital
satisfaction.
Violence
Physical violence also is closely linked with marital
satisfaction. Individuals involved in physically
abusive relationships are more likely to be dissatisfied
with their marriage than are individuals not involved
in abusive relationships. Escalation to physical violence
can result from many factors, one of which is
alcohol use. And somewhat surprisingly, some form
of physical aggression is present in 57% of newlywed
marriages, indicating that the relationship between
violence and marital satisfaction may not be as
straightforward as is often presumed.
Contextual Factors
Many factors enter into assessments of marital satisfaction:
a spouse’s personality, his or her performance
of mate-guarding behaviors, his or her
likelihood of infidelity, the desirability of each partner,
the presence of children, and others. If one partner
perceives that the other is inflicting costs (or
being troublesome) in these domains, he or she may
move to address them through discussions with the
partner, or by seeking a new or additional partner
who may better suit the person.
Spousal Personality Characteristics
How satisfied a person is with his or her marriage
seems to be related to, in part, the personality
characteristics of his or her spouse. Personality is often
gauged by five dimensions, including Extraversion
(surgency, dominance, extraversion vs. submissiveness,
introversion), Agreeableness (warm, trusting vs. cold,
suspicious), Conscientiousness (reliable, well organized
vs. undependable, disorganized), Neuroticism
(emotional stability, secure, even-tempered vs. nervous,
temperamental) and Openness to Experience (intellect,
perceptive, curious vs. imperceptive). Marital
dissatisfaction is most often related to a spouse’s emotional
instability, but dissatisfaction is also related
to having a partner who is low in Conscientiousness,
low in Agreeableness, and low in Openness/intellect.
People married to those with these personality characteristics
often complain that their spouses are neglectful,
dependent, possessive, condescending, jealous,
unfaithful, unreliable, emotionally constricted, selfcentered,
sexualizing of others, and abusive of alcohol.
Thus, the personality characteristics of each spouse
contribute greatly to the relationship, culminating in
satisfying marriage or its ending in divorce.
Spousal Mate Guarding
Even after finding a suitable partner and forming a
lasting relationship, challenges associated with maintaining
that relationship ensue. Men and women often
attempt to prevent another person from encroaching on
their marriage by performing mate-guarding behaviors.
Some of these behaviors can actually inflict costs
on the spouse and, consequently, are related to lessened
marital satisfaction. These mate-guarding behaviors
include monopolizing the partner’s time (for
example, she spent all of her free time with him so he
could not meet other women), threatening or punishing
infidelity (for example, he hit her when he caught
her flirting with someone else), and being emotionally
manipulative (for example, she threatened to harm
herself if he ever left). Marriages in which one or both
partners frequently perform these costly guarding
behaviors are more often dissatisfied marriages.
Spousal Susceptibility to Infidelity
Being unfaithful can unmistakably cause problems
in marriages. Discovered infidelities raise issues of
honesty, trust between the partners, commitment, and,
ultimately, love. Because a spouse’s infidelity has the
potential to inflict these emotional costs, marital satisfaction
appears to be negatively related to the likelihood
that a spouse will be unfaithful. That is, the more
likely one’s partner is to be unfaithful, the less satisfied
one is with his or her marriage and marriage partner.

Mate Value
Mate value can be thought of as the desirability
of a partner, a composite of a variety of characteristics
including physical attractiveness, intelligence,
and personality. Marriages in which there is a discrepancy
between the partners in mate value are marriages
in which both partners are more likely to be unfaithful,
signaling marital dissatisfaction. When a husband,
for example, is perceived as having a higher mate
value than his wife, he, as well as she (perhaps for
retaliatory reasons), is more likely to be unfaithful to
their marriage. The lower marital satisfaction associated
with this contextual marital difficulty, of differing
mate values between the partners, appears as an indicator
to the higher mate value individual that he or she
might seek a better-matched partner elsewhere.
Children
The introduction of a child drastically changes the
marital context. Marital satisfaction is influenced
by, and has influences on, children. The presence of
children in a marriage has the paradoxical effect of
increasing the stability of the marriage (when the
children are young, at least), while decreasing marital
satisfaction. That is, parenthood makes a marriage
less happy but more likely to last. In addition, marital
strife, an indicator of dissatisfaction, has been shown
to factor into the well-functioning differences between
children who come from divorced homes and children
who do not.
Additional Factors
In addition, family background factors, such as the
relationship satisfaction of one’s parents’ marriage, are
related to marital satisfaction in an individual’s current
marriage. Perhaps surprisingly, parental marital satisfaction
seems to be more closely related to one’s own present
marital satisfaction than is one’s parents’ divorce.
Adult attachment styles also are related to marital
satisfaction, in that securely attached adults are more
often satisfied in their marriage than are those individuals
who are avoidant or anxiously ambivalently
attached. Some circumstances, like traumatic events
(for example, hurricanes, or testicular cancer), appear
to actually strengthen marital satisfaction. Stressors in
economic or work-related realms often contribute to
decreased marital satisfaction, however. For example,
displaying negative affect in marital relationships has
Marital Satisfaction———543
been shown to be more frequent among blue-collar,
rather than white-collar, employees.
Marital satisfaction, in addition to verbal aggression
and conflict frequency, appears also to be related to
the performance of joint religious activities (like praying
together) and to perceptions of the sacredness of
their relationship. And although not a direct measure of
marital satisfaction, but replete with implications, the
presence of available alternative partners in one’s environment
is related to a greater likelihood of divorce.
Marital Satisfaction Over Time
One component of marital satisfaction is an understanding
of the factors that influence it presently, a
sort of snapshot of it, but it’s also important to understand
how these factors play a role in its development
over time.
Marital satisfaction was once believed to follow a
U-shaped trajectory over time, such that couples began
their marriages satisfied, this satisfaction somewhat
waned over the years, but resurfaced to newlywed levels
after many years together. This was found to be the
case in studies with cross-sectional data, where marital
satisfaction was assessed once, drawn from participants
with a variety of ages, but is now actually better
understood by following the marital satisfaction trajectory
of particular couples over the years. It now seems
that, on average, marital satisfaction drops markedly
over the first 10 years, and continues to gradually
decrease over the subsequent decades. There are
individual differences in the path that marital satisfaction
follows over time, however, as not all marital
satisfaction decreases in a linear way (a slow, steady
decrease), but may include more dramatic decreases at
times, or may even increase. One study found a minority
of couples in their sample reported increasing
levels of marital satisfaction over time.
To date, the many contextual variables mentioned
earlier, like the presence of children, mate value discrepancies,
and likelihood of infidelity, in conjunction
with particular personality characteristics of
the marriage partners, most notably neuroticism and
emotional stability, have been identified as contributors
to the general decrease in marital satisfaction over
time.
Measuring Marital Satisfaction
Assessing marital satisfaction in research is often
done through self-report surveys, in which participants

544———Masculinity/Femininity
respond to a variety of questions assessing their satisfaction
with different facets of their marriage. The concept
of marital satisfaction is not necessarily gauged
by assessing a lack of dissatisfaction in the relationship;
factors that lead to marital distress are not necessarily
the inverse of factors that promote satisfying
relationships. Factors that promote healthy relationships
and are present in satisfying, long-term marriages
are important to consider, as well. Thus, thorough
measures of marital satisfaction assess qualities that
contribute negatively, as well as uniquely positively, to
the marriage.
Emily A. Stone
Todd K. Shackelford
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Close Relationships;
Happiness; Love; Positive Illusions
Further Readings
Bradbury, T. N., Fincham, F. D., & Beach, S. R. H. (2000).
Research on the nature and determinants of marital
satisfaction: A decade in review. Journal of Marriage
and the Family, 62, 964–980.
Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire (Rev. ed.). New
York: Basic Books.
Buss, D. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). Susceptibility to
infidelity in the first year of marriage. Journal of
Research in Personality, 31, 193–221.
Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (1997). Neuroticism, marital
interaction, and the trajectory of marital satisfaction. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 1075–1092.
Shackelford, T. K., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Marital
satisfaction and spousal cost-infliction. Personality and
Individual Differences, 28, 917–928.
MARKET PRICING
See RELATIONAL MODELS THEORY
MASCULINITY/FEMININITY
Definition
The terms masculinity and femininity refer to traits
or characteristics typically associated with being male
or female, respectively. Traditionally, masculinity and
femininity have been conceptualized as opposite ends
of a single dimension, with masculinity at one extreme
and femininity at the other. By this definition, high
masculinity implies the absence of femininity, and vice
versa. In other words, people can be classified as either
masculine or feminine. Contemporary definitions
propose that masculinity and femininity are separate
dimensions, allowing for the possibility that individuals
may simultaneously possess both masculine and
feminine attributes.
The Single-Factor Approach
The Attitude Interest Analysis Survey (AIAS) was the
first attempt to measure masculinity versus femininity.
To develop the test, hundreds of scale items—including
measures of attitudes, emotions, personality traits, and
occupational preferences—were given to American
junior high and high school students in the 1930s.
Only items that elicited different responses from girls
and boys were included in the final version of the measure.
Items that the typical girl endorsed—such as
ignorance, desire for a small income, and a fondness
for washing dishes—received femininity points. Items
that the typical boy endorsed—such as intelligence,
desire for a large income, and dislike of tall women—
received masculinity points. Because these items
clearly reflect gender stereotypes and role expectations
prevalent at the time the scale was developed,
responses to these items may simply reflect the desire
to be a “normal” man or woman. It is not surprising
then that the AIAS was less reliable than other standard
measures of personality and was not related to
other criteria of masculinity and femininity (e.g.,
teachers’ ratings of students’ masculinity and femininity).
Because of these methodological issues and a lack
of theoretical basis, the AIAS is no longer used today.
Multifactorial Approaches
Contemporary scales of masculinity/femininity have
abandoned the single-factor approach in favor of multifactorial
models. In the 1970s, the Bem Sex Role
Inventory (BSRI) introduced the concept of androgyny
by allowing for combinations of two independent
dimensions of masculinity and femininity. Importantly,
the items on the BSRI were not developed using differences
in the responses typical of males and females,
as was the AIAS. Instead, the BSRI was developed by
asking male and female respondents to indicate how
desirable it was for an American man or woman to
possess various traits. The final version of the scale
is composed of 20 femininity items, 20 masculinity

items, and 20 neutral items. Respondents indicate how
much each adjective is self-descriptive. Based on these
responses, people may be classified as feminine (high
femininity, low masculinity), masculine (low femininity,
high masculinity), androgynous (high femininity,
high masculinity), or undifferentiated (low femininity,
low masculinity).
The Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ),
another measure of masculinity/femininity developed
in the 1970s, also assumes that dimensions of masculinity
and femininity are independent dimensions.
Scale items for this measure were developed in ways
similar to the development of the BSRI. The scale
consists of 16 socially desirable items designed to
measure instrumental traits (e.g., competitive), often
associated with males, and expressive traits (e.g., gentle),
often associated with females. Although the BSRI
and PAQ are similar in content, they differ in their theoretical
implications.
Currently, the BSRI is used within the framework
of gender schema theory as a measure of men and
women’s degree of sex-typing. Sex-typed individuals
(i.e., men classified as masculine or women classified
as feminine) are said to be gender-schematic—or to
use gender as a way to organize information in their
world. Strong gender schemas develop through strong
identification with gender roles, in turn leading to
attitudes and behaviors consistent with gender role
expectations. Thus, masculinity and femininity scores
on the BSRI reflect a tendency to conceptualize the
world in terms of male and female.
In contrast, the creators of the PAQ have rejected
the notion that there is one underlying factor of masculinity
and one factor of femininity. Instead, multiple
gender-related phenomena, such as physical attributes,
occupational preferences, and personality traits,
contribute to multiple factors that contribute to gender
identity—or one’s own sense of maleness and femaleness.
From this perspective then, PAQ and BSRI
scores do not represent the global concepts of
masculinity/femininity or gender schemas. Rather,
they are simply measures of instrumental and expressive
traits, one of many factors contributing to gender
identity. Thus, scores should only be related to gender-related
behaviors to the extent they are influenced
by instrumentality and expressiveness.
Correlates of Masculinity/Femininity
In support of gender schema theory, initial studies
demonstrated that BSRI scores predicted gender-related
behaviors such as nurturance, agency, and expressiveness.
For example, in one study, students who were
categorized as feminine or androgynous displayed
more nurturing behaviors while interacting with a baby
compared with masculine or undifferentiated students.
However, the creators of the PAQ argue that BSRI
scores are only predictive of instrumental and expressive
behaviors. Empirical evidence supports this claim.
Some studies have found little or no relationship between
the BSRI and typical measures of gender attitudes and
behaviors. Failure to predict related gender constructs
may be indicative of psychometric flaws or problems
with the underlying theory.
Measuring masculinity/femininity in a theoretically
meaningful way continues to be problematic.
Currently, the multifactor gender identity perspective
of masculinity and femininity has received stronger
empirical support than other models. Despite theoretical
criticisms, both the BSRI and PAQ remain frequently
used measures in gender research.
Ann E. Hoover
Stephanie A. Goodwin
See also Gender Differences; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Bem, S. L. (1974). The measurement of psychological
androgyny. Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 42, 155–162.
Lippa, R. A. (2005). Gender, nature, and nurture. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Spence, J. T., & Helmreich, R. L. (1980). Masculine
instrumentality and feminine expressiveness: Their
relationship with sex role attitudes and behaviors.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, 5, 147–163.
MATCHING HYPOTHESIS
Matching Hypothesis———545
Definition
The matching hypothesis refers to the proposition that
people are attracted to and form relationships with
individuals who resemble them on a variety of attributes,
including demographic characteristics (e.g., age,
ethnicity, and education level), personality traits,
attitudes and values, and even physical attributes
(e.g., attractiveness).

546———Meaning Maintenance Model
Background and Importance
Theorists interested in relationship development
believe that similarity plays a key role in the process
by which people select their friends and romantic
partners. During the initial phase of relationship formation,
when two people have not yet become good
friends or committed partners, they assess the extent
to which they resemble one another in demographic
background, values and interests, personality, and
other characteristics. The perception of similarity promotes
feelings of mutual rapport and positive sentiment
between the two, as well as the expectation that
further interaction will be rewarding. These feelings,
in turn, increase the likelihood that their relationship
will continue to develop.
Evidence
There is ample evidence in support of the matching
hypothesis in the realm of interpersonal attraction and
friendship formation. Not only do people overwhelmingly
prefer to interact with similar others, but a
person’s friends and associates are more likely to
resemble that person on virtually every dimension
examined, both positive and negative.
The evidence is mixed in the realm of romantic
attraction and mate selection. There is definitely a
tendency for men and women to marry spouses who
resemble them. Researchers have found extensive
similarity between marital partners on characteristics
such as age, race, ethnicity, education level, socioeconomic
status, religion, and physical attractiveness
as well as on a host of personality traits and
cognitive abilities. This well-documented tendency
for similar individuals to marry is commonly referred
to as homogamy or assortment.
The fact that people tend to end up with romantic
partners who resemble them, however, does not necessarily
mean that they prefer similar over dissimilar
mates. There is evidence, particularly with respect to
the characteristic of physical attractiveness, that both
men and women actually prefer the most attractive
partner possible. However, although people might ideally
want a partner with highly desirable features, they
might not possess enough desirable attributes themselves
to be able to attract that individual. Because
people seek the best possible mate but are constrained
by their own assets, the process of romantic partner
selection thus inevitably results in the pairing of individuals
with similar characteristics.
Nonetheless, sufficient evidence supports the matching
hypothesis to negate the old adage that “opposites
attract.” They typically do not.
Pamela C. Regan
See also Attraction; Close Relationships; Equity Theory;
Social Exchange Theory
Further Readings
Berscheid, E., & Reis, H. T. (1998). Attraction and close
relationships. In D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey
(Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed.,
pp. 193–281). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kalick, S. M., & Hamilton, T. E. (1996). The matching
hypothesis re-examined. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 51, 673–682.
Murstein, B. I. (1980). Mate selection in the 1970s. Journal
of Marriage and the Family, 42, 777–792.
MEANING MAINTENANCE MODEL
Definition
People expect that certain experiences will be associated
with one another. For example, if a person goes
out to dinner, he or she expects the waiter to bring
what he or she ordered. If a person sees a crow, he or
she expects it to be black. People expect that good
people will be rewarded in life, bad people will be
punished, and that their friends will be kind to them.
Sometimes, however, these expectations are violated
by unusual experiences. Sometimes the waiter brings
the wrong breakfast, and sometimes friends are cruel.
Sometimes tragedies befall nice people, villains prosper,
or an albino crow lands on a neighbor’s roof.
The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes
that whenever these expected associations are
violated by unexpected experiences, it goes against
people’s shared desire to maintain meaning, or to feel
that their experiences generally make sense. Often,
when people’s expectations are violated, they can
revise them (“A white crow? Hmm ...I guess that
some crows can be white as well as black”), or they
can reinterpret the experience so that it no longer
appears to violate their expectations (“A white crow?
I guess I didn’t see it right. It must have been a
dove”).

Alternatively, violated expectations can prompt
people to seek out or remind themselves of other
experiences that still do make sense to them (“Weird.
A white crow? Hmm ...maybe I’ll watch that movie
again...the one I’ve seen a dozen times before”).
MMM proposes that when people’s expected associations
are violated, they often reaffirm other expected
associations that haven’t been violated, even if the
expected associations being reaffirmed don’t have
much to do with the expected associations that were
violated to begin with. MMM calls this process fluid
compensation and proposes that expected associations
are substitutable with one another when they attempt
to restore a feeling that their experiences generally
make sense.
What Is Meaning?
Meaning comprises the expected associations that
connect people’s experiences to one another—any
experience, and any way that experiences can be connected.
Meaning is what connects people’s experiences
of the people, places, objects, and ideas all
around them (e.g., hammers to nails, cold to snow,
fathers to sons, or dawn to the rising sun). Meaning is
what connects experiences of one’s own self (e.g.,
one’s thoughts, behaviors, desires, attributes, abilities,
roles, and past incarnations), and meaning is what
connects one to the outside world (e.g., purpose,
value, belonging). Despite the many ways that people
can connect their experiences, meaning always manifests
as expected associations that allow them to feel
that these experiences make sense.
Why Do People Maintain Meaning?
The idea that people have a general desire to maintain
expected associations was suggested by many
Western existentialists in the mid-19th and 20th centuries,
including Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger,
and Albert Camus. These philosophers imagined
that all humanity shared a common desire to see their
experiences as connected to one another in ways that
generally made sense. Science, religion, and philosophy
were imagined to be different ways of connecting
one’s experiences of the outside world, connecting
elements of one’s own self, and ultimately, connecting
oneself to the world around him or her. These connections
were called meaning, and when people experience
something, anything, that isn’t connected to their
Meaning Maintenance Model———547
existing expected associations, it was said to be meaningless;
such experiences could only be considered
meaningful once people have found a way of connecting
them to their existing expected associations.
According to the existentialists, feelings of meaninglessness
could be evoked by any experience that violated
one’s expected associations, be it a simple error
in judgment, an unexpected observation, a surreal
image, feeling alienated from lifelong friends, or
thoughts of one’s own mortality, as death was thought
to represent one’s final disconnection from the world
around him or her.
When experimental psychologists began to talk
about meaning in the early 20th century, they used
a novel term that was introduced by the English
psychologist Fredric Bartlett. Bartlett called these
expected associations schemas. Where the existentialists
once spoke of meaning, psychologists focused
their attention on different kinds of schemas, scripts,
worldviews, and paradigms, eventually using many
different terms to express the same essential concept:
expected associations that connect people’s experiences
to one another in ways that make sense.
Psychologists have now spent the better part of a
century exploring the specific functions served by
different kinds of expected associations. For example,
some unconscious paradigms focus people’s
attention, which in turn enables them to memorize
and recall their experiences. Other scripts provide
people a basis for predicting different events in their
environment, and allow them to influence their outcomes.
Social schemas help people understand their
place in society and how they are expected to behave.
Many worldviews help people cope with tragedy and
trauma by connecting these events to beliefs about a
higher purpose and cultural values. Although many
theories explore the many functions of meaning, MMM
is unique in proposing a general desire to maintain
meaning beyond whatever functions it may serve.
How Do People Maintain Meaning?
Different kinds of psychologists have different theories
that try to explain how people maintain expected
associations. For example, developmental psychologists
speak of Jean Piaget’s theory of equilibrium, and
many social psychologists are influenced by Leon
Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory. Like MMM,
these theories propose that people strive to connect
their experiences to one another through a series of

548———Media Violence and Aggression
expected associations, while acknowledging that,
from time to time, people are exposed to experiences
that violate these expectations.
To date, these and other meaning maintenance
accounts propose that people deal with violated expectations
in one of two ways: revision or reinterpretation.
When people have an experience that doesn’t make
sense, they will either revise their expectations to
include the unusual experience (e.g., “A white crow?
Some crows are white”; “Death as the end of life?
Death is a part of living”), or they may reinterpret the
unusual experience such that it no longer appears to
violate their expectations (e.g., “I did that boring job
for no reward? I must have done it because the job
was actually fun and interesting”; “Tragedy befalling
virtuous people? It wasn’t a tragedy because it made
them stronger”). In addition to revision and reinterpretation,
MMM proposes a third way that people deal
with violations of expected associations; in the face
of meaninglessness, people often reaffirm other,
generally unrelated expected associations to restore a
general feeling that their experiences make sense.
MMM proposes that people maintain expected
associations to satisfy their desire to feel that their
experiences make sense, beyond any specific function
that expected associations may serve. When unusual
experiences violate expected associations, this violation
compromises the specific function served by
those expected associations and challenges people’s
general desire to have experiences make sense. When
people try to restore a general sense of meaningfulness,
expected associations become substitutable for
one another; reaffirming one set of expected associations
(e.g., social affiliation) may be as good as reaffirming
another set of expected associations (e.g.,
self-concept) when expected associations are violated
that serve an entirely different function (e.g., visual
schema). The meaning framework being reaffirmed
may have no bearing whatsoever on the meaning
framework that was originally violated, so it can be said
that expected associations are substitutable with one
another in this fluid compensation process.
There is much evidence in the social psychological
literature for substitutable fluid compensation. For
example, researchers have shown that if people experience
unexpected inconsistencies in their lives, they
may reaffirm their adherence to social values that have
nothing whatsoever to do with those inconsistencies.
Similarly, if people have their self-concept violated
by unexpected failure feedback, they may respond by
reaffirming their connection to an established social
group that has no bearing on the aspect of self that
was violated. Making people uncertain about their
visual perceptions may prompt them to more vigorously
reaffirm unrelated social values, as does making
people feel that they are connected to a group of people
that they normally see as being quite different from
themselves.
Another example of substitutable compensatory
reaffirmation involves reminding people about their
eventual death, which in turn prompts them to reaffirm
other expected associations more vigorously.
This reaffirmation can manifest itself as many different
behaviors—seeking greater affiliation with others,
showing increasing dislike of people who criticize
their current affiliations, or even as seeking patterned
associations within seemingly random strings of
letters. Although many separate theories attempt to
explain these individual behavioral phenomena,
MMM proposes that all of these studies (and many,
many more) demonstrate the same general psychological
impulse: One meaning framework is threatened,
and another, unrelated meaning framework undergoes
compensatory reaffirmation.
Travis Proulx
See also Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Terror Management
Theory
Further Readings
Heine, S., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. (2006). The Meaning
Maintenance Model: On the coherence of social
motivation. Personality and Social Psychological Review,
10, 88–111.
MEDIA VIOLENCE AND AGGRESSION
Definition
Violent media includes all forms of mass communication
that depict the threat to use force, the act of using
force, or the consequences of the use of force against
animate beings (including cartoon characters or other
species as well as humans). There are many forms of
media, including TV programs, movies, video games,
comic books, and music. More than five decades of

scientific data lead to the irrefutable conclusion that
exposure to violent media increases aggression. About
300 studies involving more than 50,000 subjects have
been conducted on this topic.
Violent Media Effects
Exposure to violent media can have several undesirable
effects. One effect is that people who consume a
lot of violent media become less sympathetic to victims
of violence. In one study, people who played
violent video games assigned less harsh penalties
to criminals than did those who played nonviolent
games. People also perceive victims as injured less
and display less empathy toward them after exposure
to violent media. One reason why people may become
more tolerant of violence and less sympathetic toward
victims is because they become desensitized to it over
time. Research has shown that after consuming violent
media, people have lower heart rate and blood
pressure in response to real depictions of violence.
In addition to desensitizing people to the effects
of violence, violent media also increase aggressive
thoughts. One result is that people who consume a lot
of violent media are more likely to attend to hostile
information and expect others to behave in a hostile
manner. They may also interpret ambiguous situations
in the worst possible light, assuming that the behavior
of others reflects hostility rather than other, more positive
traits such as assertiveness. Some researchers have
also found that violent media also increase aggressive
feelings. Most importantly, exposure to violent media
also makes people act more aggressively toward others.
Violent Video Games
Although most studies have focused on violent television
and movies, the same general pattern of effects
appears to be present after exposure to different forms
of media, including violent music, violent comic
books, and violent video games. The effects of violent
video games on people’s attitudes toward victims of
violence are of particular concern. Feeling empathy
requires taking the perspective of the victim, whereas
violent video games encourage players to take the perspective
of the perpetrator. Violent video games should
also have a larger effect on aggressive behavior than
violent TV programs and films. Watching a violent TV
program or film is a passive activity, whereas playing
a violent video game is active. Research has shown
Media Violence and Aggression———549
that people learn better when they are actively
involved. Viewers of violent shows may or may not
identify with violent characters, whereas players of
violent video games are forced to identify with violent
characters. Any rewards that come from watching violent
shows are indirect. The rewards that come from
playing violent video games are direct. The player gets
points or advances to the next level of the game by
killing others. The player also sees impressive visual
effects and hears verbal praise (e.g., “Nice shot!”
“Impressive!”) after behaving aggressively.
Different Types of
Violent Media Studies
Experimental studies have shown that exposure to
media violence causes people to become more tolerant
of aggressive behavior and to behave more aggressively
toward others immediately after exposure.
Although laboratory experiments involving noise
blasts and electric shocks have been criticized for
their somewhat artificial nature, field experiments
have produced similar results. For example, in one
field experiment, delinquent boys who were shown
violent films every night for five nights were more
likely than were those shown nonviolent films to get
into fights with other boys. Similar effects have been
observed with nondelinquent children who saw a single
episode of a violent children’s television program.
Another criticism about experimental studies is
that they do not measure actual criminal violence.
Although acting aggressively is not always a desirable
trait, it is not the same as breaking the law or committing
serious acts of violence. But stories of copycat
violence tend to make the public most concerned about
the effects of violent media. Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold, the students who killed 13 people and
wounded 23 in the Columbine massacre, were both
avid players of violent video games. Before the massacre,
both of them played a specially modified version
of the video game Doom. In a videotape released after
the massacre, Harris refers to his gun as “Arlene,”
which is the name of the protagonist’s love interest in
the Doom novels. This connection suggests that consuming
violent media and aggression are related, but
does violent media actually cause criminal violence?
It would be difficult, if not impossible, to conduct a
safe and ethical laboratory study on the effect of violent
media on violent behavior. However, it is probably
not so much the immediate effect of media violence on

550———Media Violence and Aggression
violent crime that is of concern but, rather, the aggregated
long-term effects. Children are exposed to about
10,000 violent crimes in the media per year, and each
of these has a cumulative effect on their thoughts, feelings,
and actions. Longitudinal studies have shown that
exposure to violent media is related to serious violent
and antisocial behavior. For example, the amount of
violent media consumed as a child is related to how
many fights a person will get into in high school.
Similarly, men who watched violent media during
childhood were nearly twice as likely to have assaulted
their spouse 15 years later. In another longitudinal
study, consumption of violent media at age 14 predicted
violent crimes committed at age 22.
What Types of Media
Are Most Harmful?
All violent media do not have the same effect, and all
people are not affected the same way by violent media.
For example, how violence is depicted is important.
Both realistic violence and violence that goes unpunished
increase the likelihood of aggression. Also, pairing
violence with sex seems to have a particularly strong
effect on men’s aggressive attitudes and behavior
toward women.
Who Is Most Affected
by Violent Media?
Who watches violent media is also important. A number
of personality traits seem to place some viewers at
greater risk than others. One key variable is the trait
of aggressiveness. People who are characteristically
aggressive seem to be more affected by violent media
than are people who are not characteristically aggressive.
However, the relationship between trait aggression
and violent media is complex, and these findings
only represent trait differences at a single point in time.
Exposure to media violence also causes trait aggressiveness,
which in turn increases the likelihood of
aggressive behavior. This suggests that the short-term
effects of violent media observed in experimental
research may become increasingly pronounced within
individuals as they are repeatedly exposed to violence,
leading to a downward spiral into greater levels of
aggression.
Importantly, longitudinal studies have also addressed
the causal direction of this downward spiral. It could
be argued that people who behave aggressively are
more likely to watch violent television. Researchers
have found that although exposure to aggressive media
as a child is related to acts of aggression later in life,
aggression as a child is unrelated to exposure to violent
media as a young adult, effectively ruling out
the possibility that a predisposition to watch violent
media is causing this effect.
Gender norms or sex differences may also play
a role. Some studies have found that boys are
more influenced by media violence than girls are, but
these effects are inconsistent. Other researchers find
little difference between boys and girls. Longitudinal
studies may provide some explanation for this
inconsistency. Gender differences in aggression have
decreased over time, possibly because more aggressive
female models have appeared on TV and because
it has become more socially acceptable for females to
behave aggressively.
When someone is exposed to violent media is also
important. Although all age groups are equally susceptible
to the short-term effects of violent media on
aggression, exposure to violent television at a young
age is a particularly strong predictor of violent behavior
in later life. It is not yet clear whether this finding
is simply a result of additional years of exposure to
violent media or a result of exposure to violence during
a critical period of children’s social development.
Implications
Although many individual differences moderate the
impact of violent media on aggressive and even
violent behavior, on the whole, consumption of violent
media increases aggressive and antisocial behavior.
The effect of violent media on aggression is not
trivial, either. Although the typical effect size for
exposure to violent media is small by conventional
standards and is thus dismissed by some critics, this
small effect translates into significant consequences
for society as a whole, which may be a better standard
by which to measure the magnitude of the effect. A
recent review found that the effect of exposure to violent
media is stronger than the effect of secondhand
smoke on lung cancer, the effect of asbestos on
cancer, and the effect of lead poisoning on mental
functioning. Although media violence is not the only
factor that increases aggression and violence, it is an
important factor.
Brad J. Bushman
Jesse J. Chandler

See also Aggression; Empathy; Gender Differences;
Individual Differences; Intimate Partner Violence
Further Readings
Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, L., Donnerstein, E., Huesmann,
R. L., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., et al. (2003). The
influence of media violence on youth. Psychological
Science in the Public Interest, 4, 81–110.
Anderson, C. A., & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Media violence
and societal violence. Science, 295, 2377–2378.
Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2001). Media violence
and the American public: Scientific facts versus media
misinformation. American Psychologist, 56, 477–489.
Bushman, B. J., & Anderson, C. A. (2002). Violent video
games and hostile expectations: A test of the general
aggression model. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 28, 1679–1686.
Huesmann, L. R., Moise-Titus, J., Podolski, C. L., & Eron,
L. D. (2003). Longitudinal relations between children’s
exposure to TV violence and their aggressive and violent
behavior in young adulthood: 1977–1992. Developmental
Psychology, 39, 201–221.
MEMORY
Definition
Most contemporary researchers discuss three elements
to the concept of memory: (1) Memory is the
place or storage area where social and nonsocial
information is held; (2) memory is also the specifics
or content of an experience or event, also referred
to as the memory trace; and (3) memory is the term
used to describe the mental process through which
people learn, store, or remember this information. In
addition, when discussing memory and memory
processes, researchers often refer to the related concept
of a mental representation. A mental representation
is an encoded construction that people can access,
store, retrieve, and use in a variety of ways. For example,
each person has a mental representation of his or
her mother. The collections of feelings, beliefs, and
knowledge you have about your mother constitute your
mental representation of her.
Background and History
Memory is a topic that has enjoyed the attention
of academics and thinkers for literally thousands of
Memory———551
years. Almost 2,500 years ago, Plato argued that
memory was a wax tablet whereupon one’s everyday
experiences left their impressions. An important
consequence of this characterization, one that was
accepted as truth for some time, is that once a memory
is encoded it is set and unchangeable. Although
a memory can be forgotten for some time, it could
eventually be completely and accurately retrieved.
Conversely, Aristotle argued that memories were associations
among different stimuli and experiences. This
idea was further developed by the likes of John Locke
and David Hume in the 1600s and 1700s. An associative
network allows for a greater fluidity of memory
and implies that memories and mental representations
may change or be forgotten over time. This latter view
is more consistent with current psychological thought.
One of the most comprehensive early approaches
to human memory was published by Hermann Ebbinghaus
in his 1885 book on the subject. Ebbinghaus’s
work focused on the learning of new information (typically
nonsense words), and he developed curves to
describe how people learned and subsequently forgot
new information. Many of his results have laid the
foundations for current thought on learning and
memory for new information. Some time later, Sir
Frederic Bartlett began focusing on how existing
knowledge influenced learning and memory. He
proposed that memory was actually a constructive
process and that people, in trying to recollect, often
reconstructed memories from the fragments that were
available. Since these early findings, understanding
memory processes has been a focus in a number or
areas of psychology including perception, behaviorism,
verbal learning, and neuroscience. Consistent
with this broad focus in the psychological literature,
memory and memory effects have been a core subject
of study in social psychology.
Development of Models of Memory
Within the concept of memory, researchers have made
a distinction between explicit (often referred to as
declarative) and implicit (often referred to as nondeclarative)
memory. Explicit memory can be defined as
the conscious or intentional act of trying to remember
something (such as your mother’s birthday), whereas
implicit memory can be thought of as the way in which
people’s memories and prior experiences (i.e., mental
representations) affect the way they think about and
process information in their social worlds. An example
of this would be how people’s attitudes about a topic

552———Memory
(their beliefs or opinions stored in memory) affect how
they process incoming information about that topic.
For example, your attitude toward your mother influences
your definition of what represents a good versus
a bad mother. Importantly, with implicit memories,
people are not necessarily aware that their memories
have an influence on them. Explicit memory can
be further divided into episodic memory (memory for
specific events) and semantic memory (memory for
the meaning of things, such as words).
In the 1950s, researchers began to carefully delineate
different models of memory. Two types of memory
models that have substantially affected the field of
social psychology are the related concepts of associative
networks and schemas. The associative network
model posits that memories are simply the collected
associations between different nodes of concepts,
sensations, and perceptions. These nodes are linked
by being repeatedly associated with each other. Every
time the memory is accessed or activated, the associative
link between the nodes is strengthened. The more
often this happens, the easier the association (i.e., the
memory) is to activate. Associative network models
fundamentally propose a bottom-up processing strategy
whereby larger meanings are constructed from the
associations among linked concepts.
Conversely, schemas can be defined as more comprehensive
representations in memory that provide a
framework for interpreting new information. As such,
schemas suggest a top-down processing strategy. New
information is incorporated into existing schemas, and
this information is understood in relation to it. Whereas
the associative network approach suggests that people
incorporate new information by creating novel associations,
schema theory suggests people understand
new information by relating it to their existing knowledge
and expectations. Far from being contradictory,
these processes work in a complementary fashion,
depending on the requirements of the situation.
Memory in the Context
of Social Psychology
Although research into memory has been conducted
primarily by cognitive psychologists, it is a core research
area within social psychology as well. Imagine that
you could not remember the people you met from day
to day. Each time you saw your roommate, friends, or
family members, you would need to get to know them
all over again. Clearly, memory is essential to our
social interactions.
Consequently, a substantial amount of research
in social psychology has explored how associative
networks and schemas play a role in everyday social
experience. A significant amount of research suggests
that people go into situations with certain expectations.
These expectations are based on their previous
experiences and beliefs (i.e., their mental representation
about an event, person, or situation). For example,
researchers have demonstrated that people have
a general tendency to recall and recognize attitudeconsistent
information better than they recall attitudeinconsistent
information. Although the strength of the
overall effect has been debated, people prefer information
that is consistent with their attitudes. Given
certain circumstances, however, memory biases can
be eliminated or even reversed. For example, some
evidence suggests that under certain conditions, people
will actively try to counterargue attitude-inconsistent
information they encounter, and this may result in
better recall for the attitude-inconsistent information.
Similar findings have been reported in the impression
formation literature. That is, when people meet a
person for the first time, their expectations about the
person (e.g., stereotypes about specific groups and
their members) or the situation (e.g., a script or set
of beliefs about how an event, such as a romantic
encounter, should unfold) can influence how they perceive
and judge that person. If they expect someone to
be nice, they will remember him or her as being pleasant
and friendly. Interestingly, if their expectations are
particularly strong when they encounter schemaincongruent
information, that inconsistent information
may be remembered better (i.e., they may begin to create
a new associative network or information). Thus, as
with the attitude literature, people tend to demonstrate
a confirmatory bias, but if their expectations are
strong, the inconsistent information may be particularly
salient and thus may be remembered better.
Although there has been debate in the literature about
how and when these effects occur, mental representations
and memory affect how people interact with their
social worlds.
Applications of Memory Research
The social psychological aspects of memory research
have been applied to real-world settings in several
areas. For example, police and the courts have had a
necessary interest in human memory. Much of what
happens in the court system relies on people’s memories
and how their mental representations influence

information processing. Issues such as interviewing
witnesses, eyewitness identification, and jury decision
making have all received a great deal of attention in
the social psychological literature. Within the area of
eyewitness memory, one popular area of research has
been the exploration of false memories. A significant
amount of empirical research indicates that false
memories are relatively easy to create and that these
memories can be held with as much confidence and
clarity as true memories. This further reinforces the
concept of memory as malleable over time and retrieval
as a reconstructive process.
Outside of the social psychological literature, memory
research has been applied to, and conducted in,
several areas such as clinical psychology (e.g., exploring
long- and short-term amnesia; the role of memory
in schizophrenia, dementia, and depression), developmental
psychology (e.g., exploring how memory skills
and processes develop in childhood and progress
through adolescence, adulthood, and old age), and
of course, cognitive psychology (e.g., exploring basic
processes in attention, perception, and memory modeling).
Thus, memory and memory research have been
and will continue to be major focuses within social
psychology and the broader psychological literature.
Steven M. Smith
See also Eyewitness Testimony, Accuracy of; Metacognition;
Primacy Effect, Memory
Further Readings
Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory: The brain, the
mind and the past. New York: Basic Books.
Smith, E. R. (1998). Mental representation and memory. In
D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The
handbook of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 391–445).
Boston: McGraw-Hill.
MENTAL ACCOUNTING
Definition
Mental accounting is a theory that describes how
people think about money. This theory suggests that
people track and coordinate their financial activities
by partitioning money into mental accounts, which
are used to make spending decisions. Examples
of mental accounts might include an “entertainment
account” or an “education account,” each representing
money specifically budgeted for that endeavor.
Mental accounting represents a shift from traditional
economic theory, which suggests that people
think about their assets as a single account representing
their total state of wealth. According to economic
theory, spending decisions are based on a purchase’s
utility relative to all other potential purchases. Mental
accounting instead suggests that spending decisions
are based on utility relative only to other purchases in
the relevant account.
Background
The concept of mental accounting first emerged with
studies about spending behavior related to sunk costs
(money spent on a future event that cannot be
refunded). Mental accounting research has since
expanded to include more in-depth analyses of spending
behavior as well as how mental accounts are
opened and closed and how income is apportioned to
accounts.
Evidence
The following examples illustrate the findings of mental
accounting research.
Sunk Costs
Mental Accounting———553
One early mental accounting study examined
whether people would attend a basketball game in the
middle of a blizzard. Those who purchased a ticket in
advance choose to go see the game, despite not wanting
to drive in bad weather. In contrast, people planning
to purchase a ticket at the game decide to stay
home to avoid driving in poor conditions. This difference
can be attributed to the observation that for
advance ticket holders, the mental account for “basketball
game viewing” remains open until the game is
attended. If the game is not attended, the account may
remain open indefinitely, which can be a source of
mental discomfort.
Assignment of Activities to Accounts
Research investigating assignment of activities to
mental accounts presents scenarios like the following:
Scenario 1: Imagine that you spent $20 on a ticket to go
see a concert. When you get to the concert, you pull out

554———Mental Accounting
your wallet and realize that you have lost the ticket
you’d bought. If you want to see the concert, you need
to buy another $20 ticket. Would you buy the ticket?
Scenario 2: Imagine you go to the concert without a
ticket, planning to buy one there. When you pull out
your wallet, you realize that you have lost a $20 bill.
Tickets to the show cost $20. Would you buy the
ticket?
People are less likely to buy a ticket after losing a
ticket (Scenario 1) than after losing $20 (Scenario 2).
This is inconsistent with traditional economic theory
because the scenarios are economically equivalent;
in both versions, the choice to skip the concert means
having $20 less and the choice to see the concert
means having $40 less in overall wealth.
Mental accounting better explains the results of
this ticket-buying study. In the first scenario, both
$20 expenditures are charged to the “entertainment”
account, which makes it seem like $40 is being spent
on the concert ticket. In the second scenario, the lost
$20 is charged to the “general fund” account and only
the $20 spent on the ticket is charged to the “entertainment”
account, which makes it seem like the ticket
cost only $20.
Transaction Utility
Research on transaction utility (the perception and
experience of outcomes) reveals that altering the
purchase context causes people to be willing to pay
different prices for the same product. In one study, participants
were asked how much money they would
spend on a bottle of beer. Half the participants were
told they could buy the beer from a nearby resort, and
half the participants were told they could buy the beer
from a nearby grocery store. People report they are
willing to pay $2.65 for a bottle of beer purchased
from an expensive resort but only $1.50 for the same
bottle of beer when purchased from a grocery store.
Economic theory predicts that willingness to pay
should not be influenced by factors like the product’s
source. Mental accounting research reveals that this
is not actually the case and that people perceive and
experience outcomes differently depending on the
context; the same beer is charged to different mental
accounts based on the particular circumstances of the
purchase.
Mental Accounting in Real Life
Mental accounting has been studied using hypothetical
scenarios like those described earlier and in
the field within diverse populations. One field study
investigated mental accounting in taxi drivers, finding
that drivers tend to work longer on days when they are
making less money and quit earlier on days when they
are making lots of money. This study revealed that
taxi drivers have a mental account for income that fills
each day. Once the account has been filled, the workday
can be considered over. Economic theory predicts
that drivers would work longer on high-earning days
and quit earlier on slow days in the interest of making
the most money possible per hour worked, but this is
exactly the opposite of what most drivers do. Drivers
seem unwilling to close the income account each day
until they receive a fixed amount of money.
Another study found that people treat windfalls
(unexpected income) differently than earnings from a
paycheck. These two sources of income correspond to
different mental accounts, and as such, people tend
to spend the money differently. Regular earnings are
used for predictable expenses and bonuses are used
for special luxury purchases. Economic theory, however,
predicts that people would treat all income
the same regardless of source. As this is not the case,
mental accounting provides a better description of
how people think about money.
Importance and Implications
Mental accounting helps illustrate that economic theory
cannot always account for people’s behavior. It
demonstrates that money is not always treated as
representing an overall state of wealth and that psychological
factors are important to consider in predicting
everyday behavior when it comes to earning or
spending money.
See also Behavioral Economics; Gain–Loss Framing;
Prospect Theory; Sunk Cost
Further Readings
Joanne Kane
Ethan Pew
Thaler, R. H. (1999). Mental accounting matters. Journal of
Behavioral Decision Making, 12, 183–206.

MENTAL CONTROL
Definition
Mental control refers to the ways in which people
control their thoughts and emotions to remain in
agreement with their goals. People engage in mental
control when they suppress a thought, concentrate on
a feeling or sensation, restrain an emotional response,
or strive to maintain a mood. Mental control proves
difficult for most people, and the study of mental control
has implications for the treatment of a wide range
of psychological disorders.
History and Background
The scientific study of mental control is relatively new
to psychology. Before 1987, the term mental control
did not appear in any searches of the psychological literature.
The tendency for people to exert control over
their thoughts and emotions has been observed culturally
for more than a century, however. Perhaps the
most famous instance of mental control came from the
Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who described a time in
which he instructed his younger brother to sit in a corner
and not to think of a white bear. Once challenged
to suppress thoughts of a white bear, the younger
Tolstoy stood in the corner, confused, and frustrated at
having to suppress unwanted thoughts of a white bear.
The earliest notion of mental control in the psychological
literature came from the writings of Sigmund
Freud on the study of repression, which he described
as the tendency for people to discard certain thoughts
out of consciousness unintentionally. Repression
occurs outside of conscious awareness, based on
motives of which the person is unaware, and results in
the elimination of both a particular memory and the
memory that represents the event of repression.
Although the Freudian view of repression held a dominant
place in psychology throughout the early 20th
century, research investigating this view has yielded
little supportive evidence. In the 1980s, researchers
began to consider the impact of conscious efforts to
suppress unwanted thoughts. The tendency for people
to exert mental control over unwanted thoughts has
been widely documented in both normal individuals
and those with a wide variety of mental disorders,
such as depression, obsessions and compulsions, and
post-traumatic stress. These researchers sought to examine
the results of attempted suppression on subsequent
cognition, emotion, and behavioral tasks.
Suppression Cycle
Early mental control researchers sought to determine
the process by which people exert mental control.
Daniel Wegner and colleagues have shown that when
people exert mental control, they often do so in a
cyclical manner. People asked to suppress the thought
of a white bear, for example, begin suppression with a
self-distraction phase in which they plan to distract
themselves (e.g., “I’ll think of something else”). The
second phase involves choosing a distracter (e.g., “I’ll
think about a book”), which results in the intrusive
return of the unwanted thought (e.g., “The white bear
is there again”). When the unwanted thought has
returned, the cycle repeats with a return to the plan to
self-distract (e.g., “Now I’ll think of something else”).
This suppression cycle comprises two main cognitive
processes—controlled distracter search and automatic
target search. Controlled distracter search
involves a conscious search for thoughts that are not
the unwanted thought, which is carried out with the
goal of replacing the unwanted thought. Automatic
target search entails searching for any sign of the
unwanted thought, and this process detects whether the
controlled distracter search is successful at replacing
the unwanted thought. Research has shown that the
availability of potential distracters in the environment
influences the distracters that people use while exerting
mental control. People also rely on their current
mental states to serve as distracters during suppression.
For example, people suffering from depression have
been shown to choose depressing distracters during
suppression. Another study showed that people who
were induced into a positive or negative mood selected
distracters that were related to their mood. These
findings suggest that mental control is a process that
involves the initial suppression of the unwanted
thought or emotion and the search for materials in
the environment that are related or unrelated to the
suppressed thought or emotion.
Consequences
Mental Control———555
Although much research has investigated the process
by which people exert mental control in their everyday

556———Mere Exposure Effect
lives, other research has examined what the aftereffects
of exerting mental control may be. Wegner and
colleagues have shown consistently that exerting mental
control over some particular event or object causes
people to show a greater level of obsession or preoccupation
with the suppressed object than do people
who had never suppressed a thought or emotion
regarding the particular event or object. This rebounding
effect was first observed in a study by Wegner
and colleagues. Some participants in this study were
instructed to suppress the thought of a white bear,
whereas other participants completed a similar task
but were not asked to suppress the thought of a white
bear. After participants had completed this initial task
(in which they either suppressed the thought of a
white bear or not), participants were asked to think of
a white bear and to ring a bell every time a white bear
came to mind. Participants who had suppressed the
thought of a white bear during the initial task rang
the bell more than did participants who had not suppressed
the thought of a white bear during the initial
task. Thus, the initial act of suppressing the thought of
a white bear led to increased activation of the concept
of a white bear in the mind of these participants.
Another consequence of exerting mental control
is impaired self-control. Roy Baumeister and colleagues
have demonstrated that participants who suppressed
a thought on an initial task showed impaired
performance on a subsequent self-control task compared
with participants who had not previously suppressed
a thought. These findings suggest that mental
control is an effortful process that can cause impairments
in a person’s ability to engage in self-control
successfully.
C. Nathan DeWall
See also Ego Depletion; Ironic Processes; Motivated
Cognition; Self-Control Measures; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice,
D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited
resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
74, 1252–1265.
Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S., III, & White, L.
(1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
53, 5–13.
MERE EXPOSURE EFFECT
Definition
The mere exposure effect describes the phenomenon
that simply encountering a stimulus repeatedly somehow
makes one like it more. Perhaps the stimulus is a
painting on the wall, a melody on a radio, or a face of
a person you pass by every day—somehow all these
stimuli tend to “grow on you.” The mere exposure
effect is technically defined as an enhancement of attitude
toward a novel stimulus as a result of repeated
encounters with that stimulus. Interestingly, the mere
exposure effect does not require any kind of reward for
perceiving the stimulus. All that is required is that the
stimulus is merely shown, however briefly or incidentally,
to the individual. So, for example, briefly glimpsing
a picture or passively listening to a melody is
enough for the picture and melody to become preferred
over pictures and melodies that one has not seen or
heard before. In short, contrary to the adage that familiarity
breeds contempt, the mere exposure effect suggests
just the opposite: Becoming familiar with a novel
stimulus engenders liking for the stimulus.
Background
The mere exposure effect was first systematically
examined by Robert Zajonc, who reported his findings
in the influential 1968 article “Attitudinal Effects of
Mere Exposure.” He presented two kinds of evidence
in support of the mere exposure effect. The first kind
of evidence was correlational and established a relationship
between the frequency of occurrence of certain
stimuli and their evaluative meaning. For example,
Zajonc reported that words with positive rather than
negative meanings have a higher frequency of usage in
literature, magazines, and other publications. Thus, the
word pretty is used more frequently than ugly (1,195
vs. 178), on is more frequent than off (30,224 vs.
3,644), and first is more frequent than last (5,154
vs. 3,517). Similar findings have also been obtained
with numbers, letters, and other apparently neutral
stimuli. However, this evidence is correlational, so it is
impossible to say if stimulus frequency is the cause
of positive meaning or if positive meaning causes the
stimulus to be used more frequently. To alleviate
concerns associated with the correlational evidence,
Zajonc also presented experimental evidence. For

example, he performed an experiment and showed that
nonsensical words as well as yearbook pictures of
faces are rated more favorably after they have been
merely exposed to participants. Since then, researchers
have experimentally documented the mere exposure
effect using a wide variety of stimuli, including simple
and complex line drawings and paintings, simple and
complex tonal sequences and musical pieces, geometric
figures, foods, odors, and photographs of people.
Interestingly, the participants in those experiments
included college students, amnesic patients, rats, and
even newborn chicks, suggesting that the mere exposure
effect reflects a fairly fundamental aspect of
psychological functioning.
Conditions Affecting Strength
During this research, scientists have discovered several
conditions that modify the strength of the mere exposure
effect. Thus, the mere exposure effect is stronger
when exposure durations are brief. In fact, the mere
exposure effect is sometimes stronger with subliminal
rather than supraliminal presentations. The mere exposure
effect is also stronger when the repetition scheme
is heterogeneous (i.e., with the exposures of a stimulus
being interspersed with the presentations of other
stimuli) rather than homogeneous (i.e., with all the
exposures being of the same stimulus). Furthermore,
the magnitude of the mere exposure effect reaches a
peak after 10 to 20 stimulus exposures and thereafter
levels off. Finally, stronger mere exposure effects are
elicited by more complex stimuli and when the experimental
situation is set up such that boredom is minimized.
In fact, boredom and saturation can sometimes
reverse the generally positive effect of mere exposure—
a phenomenon certainly experienced by the reader
when a massively repeated advertising jingle becomes
simply annoying. Some reversals of the mere exposure
effect have also been reported with stimuli that are initially
negative, though it is unclear whether the
increased negativity is due to exposure per se or rather
to the unpleasantness that comes from repeated induction
of negative affect.
Implications
Some studies on the mere exposure effect suggest
that the phenomenon has wide-ranging personal and
social implications. It may influence who people become
attracted to; what products, art, and entertainment
Mere Exposure Effect ———557
they enjoy; and even their everyday moods. Regarding
interpersonal attraction, one study found that subjects
shown a photograph of the same person each week
for four weeks exhibited greater liking for that person
than when compared with subjects shown a photograph
of a different person each week. In another study,
preschoolers who watched Sesame Street episodes that
involved children of Japanese, Canadian, and North
American Indian heritage were more likely to indicate
that they would like to play with such children than
were preschoolers who had not seen these episodes.
In the domain of advertising, researchers have
shown that unobtrusive exposure to cigarette brands
enhances participants’ brand preference and their purchase
intentions. Even people’s aesthetic inclinations
are shaped by mere exposure. For example, adult
preferences for impressionistic paintings were found
to increase as the frequency of occurrence of the
images of the paintings in library books increased. In
another study, subjects were incidentally exposed to
various pieces of orchestral music at varying frequencies.
Again, as the number of exposures to a piece of
orchestral music increased, then so did the subjects’
liking ratings for the music.
Apparently, mere repeated exposure may even
boost mood states of individuals. In one experiment,
subjects were subliminally exposed to either 25 different
Chinese ideographs (single exposure condition)
or to 5 Chinese ideographs that were repeated in
random sequence (repeated exposure condition).
Assessment of subjects’ overall mood states indicated
that those subjects in the repeated exposure condition
exhibited a more positive mood than did those subjects
in the single exposure condition.
Theoretical Interpretations
There are many theoretical interpretations of exactly
how mere repeated exposure enhances our liking
for the stimulus. One class of explanations seeks the
answer in simple biological processes common to
many organisms, including mammals and birds. Thus,
it has been proposed that organisms respond to a novel
stimulus with an initial sense of uncertainty, which
feels negative. Repeated exposure can reduce such
uncertainty, and thus engender more positive feelings.
A related proposal suggests that organisms approach
novel stimuli expecting possible negative consequences
and that the absence of such consequences
during repeated exposure is experienced as positive.

558———Mere Ownership Effect
Finally, those biologically inspired proposals emphasize
that mere familiarity with a stimulus can serve as
a probabilistic cue that a stimulus is relatively safe
(after all, the individual survived to see it again).
A competing class of explanations seeks the answer
in more perceptual and cognitive processes and treats
the mere exposure effect as a kind of implicit memory
phenomenon. One proposal suggests that repeated
exposure gradually strengthens a stimulus memory
trace and thus enhances the ease of its later identification.
This ease of perception can elicit positive affect
because it allows people to better deal with the stimulus
in a current situation. The positive affect created by
the ease of perception may, of course, generalize to
the nature of the stimulus, or participants’ own mood,
explaining a relatively wide scope of mere exposure
effects. Importantly, for this process to occur, participants
should not know why the stimulus is easy to
process. Otherwise, they are unlikely to attribute the
sense of positivity from the ease of perceiving the
stimulus to an actual preference for the stimulus. This
idea explains why mere exposure effects are stronger
when stimuli are presented subliminally and when
stimuli are not recognized from the exposure phase.
Furthermore, the ease of perception idea explains why
the mere exposure effect is more easily obtained for
more complex stimuli because their memory traces are
more likely to benefit from progressive strengthening
by repetition. Finally, the perceptual account of the
mere exposure effect fits well with many other studies
suggesting that other ways of enhancing the ease of
stimulus perception of a single stimulus (e.g., via stimulus
contrast, duration, clarify, or priming) tend to
enhance participants’ liking for those stimuli in ways
comparable to repetition.
The debate, however, over the exact mechanism by
which repeated mere exposure exerts its effects is far
from resolved and will no doubt be a hot topic in the
psychological literature for some time to come.
See also Attitudes; Attraction; Priming; Memory
Further Readings
Troy Chenier
Piotr Winkielman
Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and
meta-analysis of research 1968–1987. Psychological
Bulletin, 106, 265–289.
Bornstein, R. F., & D’Agostino, P. R. (1994). The attribution
and discounting of perceptual fluency: Preliminary tests
of a perceptual fluency/attributional model of the mere
exposure effect. Social Cognition, 12, 103–128.
Lee, A. Y. (2001). The mere exposure effect: An uncertainty
reduction explanation revisited. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1255–1266.
Winkielman, P., Schwarz, N., Fazendeiro, T., & Reber, R.
(2003). The hedonic marking of processing fluency:
Implications for evaluative judgment. In J. Musch &
K. C. Klauer (Eds.), The psychology of evaluation:
Affective processes in cognition and emotion
(pp. 189–217). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Zajonc, R. B. (1968). Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1–27.
MERE OWNERSHIP EFFECT
Definition
The mere ownership effect refers to an individual’s
tendency to evaluate an object more favorably merely
because he or she owns it. The endowment effect is a
related phenomenon that concerns the finding that
sellers require more money to sell an object than buyers
are willing to pay for it. Taken together, these phenomena
indicate that ownership is a psychologically
meaningful variable that can influence the way that
one thinks about and evaluates objects in the external
world.
Context and Importance
The mere ownership effect has been hypothesized to
occur because people are motivated to see themselves
in a positive light. Thus, the mere ownership effect
illustrates the importance of the self in mediating how
people interpret the world.
Self-concept refers to the beliefs a person holds
about the self. Self-esteem refers to how much a person
likes or dislikes the self. Because people are motivated
to maintain high self-esteem, people strive to see
themselves in a positive light. This tendency toward
self-enhancement can take many forms. For example,
people tend to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing
a negative event such as an illness or accident.
Similarly, individuals overestimate their abilities on
skills such as driving a car or behaving in a morally
correct way. People also focus selectively on positive,
rather than negative, beliefs about themselves.
People show indirect self-enhancement by positively
evaluating targets associated with the self. For

example, people evaluate their own groups more positively
than others’ groups. The basis for association
can include significant dimensions such as race or
irrelevant dimensions such as a shared birth date.
Explaining Ownership Effects
The mere ownership effect is a form of indirect selfenhancement
similar to the bias people show regarding
their own, rather than others’, groups. The concept
of ownership creates a psychological association
between the owner and the object. To the extent that
an owner sees the owned object in a favorable light, he
or she can then indirectly come to see the self in a
more favorable light, as well.
The endowment effect is thought to operate for a
different reason than self-enhancement. The endowment
effect works because of the different way that
people think about gains and losses. People tend to be
more distressed by losses than they are made happy
by gains. For example, people would probably be
more irate by a $10-a-week pay cut than they would
be made happy by a $10-a-week raise. In other words,
the absolute value of their change in emotional state
would be larger for a loss than a gain.
According to the gain–loss explanation for the
endowment effect, selling a possession is perceived
as a loss. In contrast, buying is seen as a gain. The
seller’s reluctance to accept a loss causes him or her
to ask for a little extra compensation that potential
buyers are unwilling to provide.
Both the mere ownership effect and the endowment
effect reflect an important conflict that has occurred
between psychology and economics. If people behaved
in the purely rational fashion that economics assumes,
then the endowment effect and the mere ownership
effect would not occur. From the perspective of economics,
the object is the same regardless of who owns
it. The idea that owners think about the object differently
than nonowners do indicates that a full understanding
of economics will have to acknowledge
psychological principles.
Evidence
Evidence for the mere ownership effect has been
demonstrated using laboratory-based experiments. In
the ownership condition, an individual is provided
with ownership of an object, typically justified as
a gift for participating. Participants are later asked to
rate the owned object as well as other, nonowned
objects. In the nonownership condition, participants
rate the objects in the absence of ownership. Generally,
the same object is rated as more attractive when it is
owned rather than not owned.
In research on the endowment effect, a miniature
economy is created in which half the participants are
each provided ownership of an object and the other
half are not. Potential sellers are asked to indicate
the lowest price they would accept to sell the object,
whereas potential buyers are asked to indicate the
highest price they would pay to buy the object. Typically,
the average seller’s price is higher than the average
buyer’s price.
One possible limitation of these kinds of experiments
is that giving someone a gift may encourage the
recipient to evaluate it in a positive manner to show
appreciation rather than because he or she actually
sees the item in a more positive light. To address this
problem, researchers have asked people to evaluate
objects that they already own. They found that people
listed a greater number of positive traits associated
with their own cars rather than others’ cars.
Implications
The self is a complex concept that consists of many
parts, including achievements, ancestors, descendants,
and education. The self also consists of what one
owns. The mere ownership effect illustrates there is a
relationship between one’s possessions and how one
sees oneself.
Given the existence of the mere ownership effect
and the endowment effect, at first glance, a person
might wonder how it could be that anything ever
sells. In the course of a typical negotiation, people
may come to realize that they need to reduce their
aspirations for transactions to occur. In addition,
ownership effects do not operate for all possessions
or even for the same possession at different points in
time.
See also Gain–Loss Framing; Self; Self-Concept;
Self-Enhancement; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Mere Ownership Effect———559
James K. Beggan
Beggan, J. K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial
perception: The mere ownership effect. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 229–237.

560———Meta-Analysis
Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Rochberg-Halton, E. (1981). The
meaning of things: Domestic symbols and the self.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. H. (1990).
Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase
theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98, 1325–1348.
META-ANALYSIS
Meta-analysis uses statistical techniques to summarize
results from different empirical studies on a given
topic to learn more about that topic. In other words,
meta-analyses bring together the results of many different
studies, although the number of studies may be
as small as two in some specialized contexts. Because
these quantitative reviews are analyses of analyses,
they are literally meta-analyses. The practice is also
known as research synthesis, a term that more completely
encompasses the steps involved in conducting
such a review. Meta-analysis might be thought of as
an empirical history of research on a particular topic,
in that it tracks effects that have accumulated across
time and attempts to show how different methods that
researchers use may make their effects change in size
or in direction.
Rationale and Procedures
As in any scientific field, social psychology makes
progress by judging the evidence that has accumulated.
Consequently, literature reviews of studies
can be extremely influential, particularly when metaanalysis
is used to review them. In the past three
decades, the scholarly community has embraced the
position that reviewing is itself a scientific method
with identifiable steps that should be followed to be
most accurate and valid.
At the outset, an analyst carefully defines the variables
at the center of the phenomenon and considers
the history of the research problem and of typical
studies in the literature. Usually, the research problem
will be defined as a relation between two variables,
such as the influence of an independent variable on
a dependent variable. For example, a review might
consider the extent to which women use a more
relationship-oriented leadership style compared with
men. Typically, the analyst will also consider what circumstances
may change the relation in question. For
example, an analyst might predict that women will
lead in a style that is more relationship-oriented than
men and that this tendency will be especially present
when studies examine leadership roles that are
communal in nature (e.g., nurse supervisor, elementary
principal).
Analysts must next take great care to decide which
studies belong in the meta-analysis, the next step
in the process, because any conclusions the metaanalysis
might reach are limited by the methods of the
studies in the sample. As a rule, meta-analyses profit
by focusing on the studies that use stronger methods,
although which particular methods are “stronger”
might vary from area to area. Whereas laboratorybased
research (e.g., social perception, persuasion)
tends to value internal validity more than external
validity, field-based research (e.g., leadership style,
political attitudes) tends to reverse these values.
Ideally, a meta-analysis will locate every study ever
conducted on a subject. Yet, for some topics, the task
can be quite daunting because of sheer numbers of
studies available. As merely one example, in their
1978 meta-analysis, Robert Rosenthal and Donald B.
Rubin reported on 345 studies of the experimenter
expectancy effect. It is important to locate as many
studies as possible that might be suitable for inclusion
using as many techniques as possible (e.g., computer
and Internet searches, e-mails to active researchers,
consulting reference lists, manual searching of related
journals). If there are too many studies to include all,
the analyst might randomly sample from the studies
or, more commonly, narrow the focus to a meaningful
subliterature.
Once the sample of studies is in hand, each study
is coded for relevant dimensions that might have
affected the study outcomes. To permit reliability
statistics, two or more coders must do this coding. In
some cases, an analyst might ask experts to judge
methods used in the studies on particular dimensions
(e.g., the extent to which a measure of leadership
style is relationship-oriented). In other cases, an analyst
might ask people with no training for their views
about aspects of the reviewed studies (e.g., the extent
to which leadership roles were communal).
To be included in a meta-analysis, a study must
offer some minimal quantitative information that
addresses the relation between the variables (e.g.,
means and standard deviations for the compared
groups, F tests, t tests). Standing alone, these statistical
tests would reveal little about the phenomenon.

When the tests appear in a single standardized metric,
the effect size, the situation typically clarifies dramatically.
The most common effect sizes are d (the standardized
mean difference between two groups) and r
(the correlation coefficient gauging the association
between two variables). Each effect size receives a
positive or negative sign to indicate the direction of
the effect. As an example, a 1990 meta-analysis that
Blair T. Johnson and Alice H. Eagly conducted to
examine gender differences in leadership style defined
effect sizes in such a way that positive signs were
stereotypic (e.g., women more relationship-oriented)
and negative signs were counterstereotypic (e.g., men
more relationship-oriented). Typically, d is used for
comparisons of two groups or groupings (e.g., gender
differences in leadership style) and r for continuous
variables (e.g., self-esteem and attractiveness).
Then, the reviewer analyzes the effect sizes, first
examining the mean effect size to evaluate its magnitude,
direction, and significance. More advanced analyses
examine whether differing study methods change,
or moderate, the magnitude of the effect sizes. In all
of these analyses, sophisticated statistics help show
whether the studies’ effect sizes consistently agree
with the general tendencies. Still other techniques
help reveal which particular studies’ findings differed
most widely from the others, or examine the plausibility
of a publication bias in the literature. Inspection
for publication bias can be especially important when
skepticism exists about whether the phenomenon
under investigation is genuine. In such cases, published
studies might be more likely to find a pattern
than would unpublished studies. For example, many
doubt the existence of so-called Phi effects, which
refers to “mind reading.” Any review of studies testing
for the existence of Phi would have to be sensitive to
the possibility that journals may tend to accept confirmations
of the phenomenon more than disconfirmations
of it.
Various strategies are available to detect the presence
of publication bias. As an example, Rosenthal
and Rubin’s fail-safe N provides a method to estimate
the number of studies averaging nonsignificant
that would change a mean effect size to being nonsignificant.
If the number is large, then it is intuitively
implausible that publication bias is an issue. Other,
more sophisticated techniques permit reviewers to
infer what effect size values non-included studies
might take and how the inclusion of such values might
affect the mean effect size. The detection of publication
Meta-Analysis———561
bias is especially important when the goal of the metaanalytic
review is to examine the statistical significance
or the simple magnitude of a phenomenon.
Publication bias is a far less pressing concern when
the goal of the review is instead to examine how study
dimensions explain when the studies’ effect sizes are
larger or smaller or when they reverse in their signs.
Indeed, the mere presence of wide variation in the
magnitude of effect sizes often suggests a lack of
publication bias.
Interpretation and presentation of the meta-analytic
findings is the final step of the process. One consideration
is the magnitude the mean effect sizes in the
review. In 1969, Jacob Cohen informally analyzed the
magnitude of effects commonly yielded by psychological
research and offered guidelines for judging
effect size magnitude. Table 1 shows these standards
for d, r, and r 2 ; the latter statistic indicates the extent
to which one variable explains variation in the other.
To illustrate, a small effect size (d = 0.20) is the difference
in height between 15- and 16-year-old girls, a
medium effect (d = 0.50) is difference in intelligence
scores between clerical and semiskilled workers, and
a large effect (d = 0.80) is the difference in intelligence
scores between college professors and college
freshmen. It is important to recognize that quantitative
magnitude is only one way to interpret effect size.
Even very small mean effect sizes can be of great
import for practical or applied contexts. In a close race
for political office, for example, even a mass media
campaign with a small effect size could reverse the
outcome.
Ideally, meta-analyses advance knowledge about a
phenomenon not only by showing the size of the typical
effect but also by showing when the studies get
larger or smaller effects, or by showing when effects
Table 1 Guidelines for Magnitude of d and r
Size d
Effect Size Metric
r r2 Small 0.20 .100 .010
Medium 0.50 .243 .059
Large 0.80 .371 .138
Source: Adapted from Cohen (1969).
Note: r appears in its point-biserial form.

562———Meta-Awareness
reverse in direction. At their best, meta-analyses
test theories about the phenomenon. For example,
Johnson and Eagly’s meta-analysis of gender differences
in leadership style showed, consistent with their
social-role theory hypothesis, that women had more
relationship-oriented styles than men did, especially
when the leadership role was communal in nature.
Meta-analyses provide an empirical history of past
research and suggest promising directions for future
research. As a consequence of a carefully conducted
meta-analysis, primary-level studies can be designed
with the complete literature in mind and therefore
have a better chance of contributing new knowledge.
In this way, science can advance the most efficiently
to produce new knowledge.
See also Research Methods
Further Readings
Blair T. Johnson
Cohen, J. (1969). Statistical power analysis for the
behavioral sciences. New York: Academic Press.
Cooper, H. M., & Hedges, L. V. (Eds.). (1994). The
handbook of research synthesis. New York: Russell Sage.
Johnson, B. T., & Eagly, A. H. (2000). Quantitative synthesis
of social psychological research. In H. T. Reis &
C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in
social and personality psychology (pp. 496–528).
London: Cambridge University Press.
Lipsey, M. W., & Wilson, D. B. (2001). Practical
meta-analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
META-AWARENESS
To have an experience is not necessarily to know that
one is having it. Situations such as suddenly realizing
that one has not been listening to one’s spouse (despite
nodding attentively) or catching oneself shouting, “I’m
not angry,” illustrate that people sometimes fail to
notice what is going on in their own heads. The intuition
that there is a difference between having an
experience and recognizing it permeates everyday
language, as illustrated by the popular expression “getting
in touch with your feelings” and the famous
lyrical refrain “if you’re happy and you know it, clap
your hands.” A variety of psychological terms have
been used to characterize how people vary in their
awareness of their thoughts and feelings, including
metacognitive awareness, private self-awareness,
reflective awareness, introspective awareness, higherorder
consciousness, second-order consciousness,
autonoetic consciousness, and mindfulness. Nevertheless,
typically when researchers consider the awareness
associated with psychological phenomena, the
question boils down to whether a particular phenomenon
is conscious. Attitudes are implicit or explicit,
thoughts are conscious or unconscious, behaviors are
automatic or controlled. Routinely, discussions fail to
acknowledge the possibility that a thought, feeling, or
action could be experienced without being explicitly
noticed.
In this entry, the term meta-awareness is used
to refer to the explicit noticing of the content of experience.
Importantly, meta-awareness need not be assumed
to be a distinct state of consciousness; rather, it may
merely entail a particular topic for the focus of attention,
that is, “What am I thinking or feeling.” Because this is
just one of many possible directions in which attention
can be focused, it follows that meta-awareness is intermittent.
The answer to this question represents a description
of one’s state, rather than the state itself, so it offers
individuals the opportunity to step out of the situation,
which may be critical for effective self-regulation.
However, it also raises the possibility that in the redescription
process, individuals might get it wrong.
Two types of dissociations follow from the claim
that meta-awareness involves the intermittent rerepresentation
of the contents of consciousness. Temporal
dissociations occur when one temporarily fails
to attend to the contents of consciousness. Once the
focus of conscious turns onto itself, translation dissociations
may occur if the re-representation process
misrepresents the original experience.
Temporal Dissociations
Temporal dissociations between experience and metaawareness
are indicated in cases in which the induction
of meta-awareness causes one to assess aspects
of experience that had previously eluded explicit
appraisal. A variety of psychological phenomena can
be thought of in this manner.
Mind-Wandering During Reading
Everyone has had the experience while reading
of suddenly noticing that although his or her eyes
have continued to move across the page, one’s
mind has been entirely elsewhere. The occurrence of

mind-wandering during attentionally demanding tasks
such as reading is particularly informative because it is
incompatible with successfully carrying out such tasks
and thus suggests that individuals have lost metaawareness
of what they are currently thinking about.
Additional evidence that mind-wandering during reading
is associated with an absence of meta-awareness
comes from studies in which individuals report every
time they notice their minds wandering during reading,
while also being probed periodically and asked to indicate
whether they were mind-wandering at that particular
moment. Such studies find that participants are
often caught mind-wandering by the probes before
they notice it themselves. These findings demonstrate
that individuals frequently lack meta-awareness of the
fact that they are mind-wandering, even when they are
in a study in which they are specifically instructed to
be vigilant for such lapses.
Automaticity
Automatic behaviors are often assumed to be
nonconscious. However, there is a peculiarity to
this designation because it is difficult to imagine that
individuals lack any experience corresponding to the
automatic behaviors. Consider a person driving automatically
while engaging in some secondary task (e.g.,
talking on the cell phone). Although such driving is
compromised, one still experiences the road at some
level. Similarly, when people engage in habitual consumptive
behaviors, for example, smoking or eating,
they presumably experience what they are consuming,
yet may fail to take explicit stock of what they are doing.
This may explain why people often unwittingly relapse
in habits they are trying to quit. In short, it seems that
rather than being unconscious, many automatic activities
may be experienced but lacking in meta-awareness.
Moods
At any given time, people’s experience is being
colored by the particular mood that they are in. They
may be happy because it is sunny out, or grumpy
because they’ve had a bad day at work. However,
because people often fail to notice their moods, moods
can have undue influence on people’s judgments and
behaviors. When in an unnoticed bad mood, people
may be more likely to snap at their partners, and when
in an unnoticed good mood, they may be more likely
to believe that their lives are going particularly well.
Translation Dissociations
If meta-awareness requires re-representing the
contents of consciousness, then it follows that some
information may become lost or distorted in the translation.
Examples of translation dissociations include
the following.
Verbal Reflection
Some experiences are inherently difficult to put
into words: the appearance of a face, the taste of a
wine, the intuitions leading to insights. If individuals
attempt to translate these inherently nonverbal experiences
into words, then the resulting re-representations
may fail to do justice to the original experience.
Consistent with this view, studies have demonstrated
that when people attempt to describe their nonverbal
experiences, performance disruptions can ensue.
Importantly, verbal reflection does not hamper performance
when individuals describe experiences that are
more readily translated into words.
Motivation
In some situations, individuals may be explicitly
motivated to misrepresent their experiences to themselves.
For example, individuals who are homophobic
would clearly not want to recognize that they
were actually aroused by viewing graphic depictions
of homosexual acts. Nevertheless, when homophobes
were shown explicit movies of individuals engaging in
homosexual acts, their degree of sexual arousal was
significantly greater than that of controls. In this case,
individuals may experience the arousal but, because of
their strong motivation to ignore it, fail to become
meta-aware of that experience. A similar account may
help explain why individuals labeled as “repressors”
can show substantial physiological (galvanic skin
response) markers of experiencing stress when shown
stressful videos but report experiencing no stress.
Because they are highly motivated to deny their stress,
they simply do not allow themselves to acknowledge it.
Faulty Theories
Meta-Awareness———563
If individuals have a particularly strong theory
about what they should be experiencing in a particular
situation, this may color their appraisal of their
actual experience. A compelling recent example of
this comes from people’s reports of their experience

564———Metacognition
of catching a ball. Most people believe that as they
watch a ball, their eyes first rise and then go down following
the trajectory of the ball. Indeed, this is the
case when one watches someone else catch a ball.
However, when people catch a ball themselves, they
actually maintain the ball at precisely the same visual
angle. Nevertheless, when people who just caught a
ball are asked what they experienced, they report their
theory of what they think should have happened rather
than what they actually experienced.
Future Applications
Because researchers have tended to overlook the fact
that people can fluctuate in their meta-awareness of
experience, there are many unanswered questions about
this intriguing aspect of consciousness. The following
are just two examples.
Implicit Attitudes
In recent years, considerable attention has been
given to implicit attitudes with the assumption that such
attitudes are unconscious. The Implicit Association
Test, for example, has been applied in countless contexts
to reveal attitudes that are assumed to be below
the threshold of awareness. However, it is possible
that implicit attitude measures may, at least sometimes,
reveal attitudes that people experience but are
unwilling or unable to acknowledge to themselves.
For example, implicit racists may indeed experience
some aversion when seeing members of another race,
but may simply fail to acknowledge this aversion to
themselves.
Individual Differences
Although there are a variety of personality measures
that assess the degree to which individuals focus
on their internal states, relatively little research
has examined whether there are reliable differences
in people’s ability to accurately gauge their internal
states. In recent years, there have been major advances
in psychophysiological and behavioral measurements
of emotion, thereby making it increasingly possible to
assess emotional state without having to rely on selfreport
measures. This raises the fascinating question
of whether some people are more accurate in identifying
changes in their emotional responses than others.
It seems quite plausible that individuals who show
greater coherence between self-reported changes in
affective states and other measures might be particularly
effective in affective self-regulation because they
are more “in touch” with their feelings.
Jonathan W. Schooler
Jonathan Smallwood
See also Consciousness; Implicit Attitudes; Individual
Differences; Mindfulness and Mindlessness; Mind-
Wandering; Self-Awareness
Further Readings
Schooler, J. W. (2001). Discovering memories in the light of
meta-awareness. The Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment
and Trauma, 4, 105–136.
Schooler, J. W. (2002). Re-representing consciousness:
Dissociations between consciousness and metaconsciousness.
Trends in Cognitive Science, 6, 339–344.
Schooler, J., & Schreiber, C. A. (2004). Experience,
meta-consciousness, and the paradox of introspection.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(7–8), 17–39.
Schooler, J. W., & Schreiber, C. (2005). To know or not to
know: Consciousness, meta-consciousness, and
motivation. In J. P. Forgas, K. R. Williams, & W. von
Hippel (Eds.), Social motivation: Conscious and
non-conscious processes (pp. 351–372). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
METACOGNITION
Definition
Metacognition means “thinking about cognition,” and
given that cognition generally refers to the processes
of thinking, metacognition means “thinking about
thinking.” Metacognitive strategies are what people
use to manage and understand their own thinking
processes. Metacognition refers to knowledge about
cognitive processes (“I’m bad at names”), monitoring
of cognitive processes (“I’ll remember that equation”),
and control of cognitive processes (“Using flash cards
works for me” or “I’ll need to spend at least 2 hours
studying this”).
Background
People are often in situations in which they are required
to evaluate the contents of their memory. When people

are approached on a busy street and are asked for directions,
how do they know if they know the directions or
not? When studying a list of items to be remembered,
how do people know how much time they should spend
studying each item for memorization? Furthermore,
how do people know that they know the name of
a movie they once saw, even though they cannot produce
the name of the movie? These phenomena fall
under the category of metacognition. Metacognition
is a broad category of self-knowledge monitoring.
Metamemory is a category of metacognition that refers
to the act of knowing about what you remember.
Metacognition is generally implicated in the knowledge,
monitoring, and controlling of retrieval and
inference processes involved in the memory system.
Knowledge refers to the evaluation of conscious
experience. Monitoring refers to how one evaluates
what one already knows (or does not know). Processes
involved in metacognitive monitoring include ease
of learning judgments, judgments of learning, feeling
of knowing judgments, and confidence in retrieved
answers. Metacognitive control includes learning
strategies such as allocation of study time, termination
of study, selection of memory search strategies, and
decisions to terminate the search.
Metacognition involves the monitoring and control
of what is called the meta-level and the object-level,
with information flowing between each level. The
meta-level is the conscious awareness of what is or is
not in memory, whereas the object-level is the actual
item in memory. The meta-level essentially creates a
model of the object-level, giving people the sense of
awareness of that object’s existence in memory. Based
on this meta-level model, people can quickly evaluate
what they know or think they know so they can decide
whether they should spend the effort trying to recall
the information. An example of how the meta-level
works might be the person being asked directions by
a traveler. Before attempting to recall the directions,
the person will determine if he or she even knows the
directions before he or she begins to try to recall the
specific directions. Once the meta-level evaluates
the memory state of the object-level and determines
that the directions are known, a search for specific
details would follow.
Given that metacognition involves the memory system,
it will be helpful to briefly review the processes of
human memory. Memory proper can be divided into
three separate processes: (1) acquisition, (2) retention,
and (3) retrieval. Acquisition is how people get information
in memory. Acquiring information could be
Metacognition ———565
reading a text passage, watching a movie, or talking to
someone. The second stage, retention, refers to the
maintenance of knowledge so that it is not forgotten or
overwritten. The third and final stage is retrieval of
the stored information. Retrieval, for example, might
be the recall of the information (e.g., giving the traveler
the directions) or the recognition of the information
(e.g., marking the correct answer on a multiple
choice test). Depending on which aspect of the memory
stage is involved, different monitoring and control
processes are involved.
The Metacognitive System
The metacognitive system consists of two types of
monitoring: (1) prospective, occurring before and during
acquisition of information, and (2) retrospective,
occurring after acquisition of information. Ease of
learning and judgments of learning are examples of
prospective monitoring.
Ease of learning involves the selection of appropriate
strategies to learn the new information and which
aspect of the information would be easiest to learn. For
example, if the traveler decides that the directions are
too difficult to remember, he or she might attempt to
write them down, or he or she may ask for directions
based on geographical locations rather than street-bystreet
directions. One way researchers study ease of
learning is by having students participating in a memorization
study indicate which items on a list would
be easier to learn (ease of learning judgments). Participants
would then be allowed a specific amount of time
to learn the list during acquisition. Following a period
when the information is retained in memory, a recall
or recognition test would follow. The researcher then
compares the ease of learning judgments with the
memory performance to determine how well the judgments
predicted performance. The findings indicate
that ease of learning judgments can be accurate in
predicting learning.
Judgments of learning occur during and after the
acquisition stage of memory. Participants in a study
examining judgments of learning may be asked to
study a list of items and then asked to indicate which
items they had learned the best. Or participants may
be asked to provide judgments of learning after a
retention period, just before the memory test is administered.
Similar to the ease of learning judgments,
judgments of learning are compared with a later memory
test to determine how accurate the participants
were in their judgments. Research has found that

566———Metacognition
judgments of learning become more accurate after
practice trials. It is not known if judgments of learning
are based on ease of learning or if they are based
on previous recall trials.
Feeling of knowing can be either prospective or
retrospective. Feeling of knowing is typically measured
as an indication of how well a participant thinks
he or she will be able to recognize the correct answer
to a question in a subsequent multiple-choice task.
Feeling of knowing studies typically use a recalljudgment-recognition
task whereby participants are
asked general information questions (sometimes trivia
questions). If the participant is unable to recall the
answer, he or she is then asked to provide a judgment
evaluating the likelihood that he or she will be able to
recognize the answer when seen in a multiple choice
type test. When compared with recognition performance,
feelings of knowing judgments are generally
greater than chance, but far from perfect predictors of
recognition. However, research on feeling of knowing
has helped establish that people are able to provide
accurate self-reports of their metacognitive states.
Confidence judgments are retrospective because
they are taken after the retrieval of an item from memory.
For example, after an eyewitness to a crime identifies
someone from a lineup, he or she is often asked
to provide an evaluation of his or her confidence in the
identification either on a scale (e.g., from 1–10) or in
terms of a percentage (“I’m 100% sure”). Confidence
judgments are varyingly related to the accuracy of
recall, depending on the type of information that is
being recalled (verbal, spatial, pictorial), how much
time the person had to study the information, or the
context within which the judgment is being taken,
among other factors. In some instances, such as in
the eyewitness identification example, the relationship
between confidence and accuracy is low, and thus confidence
is not necessarily predictive of correct identification
performance.
Metacognitive monitoring is studied by having participants
provide judgments of their metacognitive
state (e.g., “I know that,” “I remember that,” “I don’t
know,” “I’m not sure”). A more naturally occurring
metacognitive state is when a person has difficulty
retrieving an item from memory yet has a sense that
retrieval is imminent. This is commonly referred to as
a tip-of-the-tongue state. In a tip-of-the-tongue state,
a person is often able to partially recall bits and
pieces of information related to the sought-after item.
Researchers have often used partial recall created
while in a tip-of-the-tongue state as a “window” into
the memory process because they can examine the
types of partial information being recalled in relation
to the properties of the memory item actually sought.
It is believed that tip-of-the-tongue states are more
than a memory curiosity and that they serve as a
mechanism to evaluate one’s memory state and direct
metacognitive control.
Ease of learning, judgments of learning, feeling
of knowing, and confidence are ways metacognitive
monitoring is examined. These processes are interrelated
with metacognitive control. As with monitoring,
metacognitive control is different for the different
stages of memory. Control during the acquisition of
memory can involve the selecting of the different
types of processes to use. For example, if the item to
be remembered is thought to be easy, very little processing
may be allocated to the item. However, if an
item is thought to be difficult, more elaborate rehearsal
may be allocated. Control over the allocation of the
amount of time given to study each item also occurs at
the acquisition phase. For example, when studying for
an exam, a student may decide to spend more time on
a particular item that he or she feels will be eventually
learned and little to no time on an item that is thought
to be too difficult to learn and thus resulting in a waste
of time. This control process is related to ease of learning.
Finally, the decision to terminate study is a control
process occurring at the acquisition phase. This decision
is usually related to judgments of learning.
Metacognitive control over search strategies occurs
during the retrieval of memory. These include the
selection of search strategies and the termination of
search. How elaborate a search does a person conduct
for an item in memory? When approached and asked
for directions in an unfamiliar part of town, it is not
reasonable to exert too much time and energy attempting
recall. However, if approached while in a familiar
area, more effort may be allocated to a search. This
process is related to the feeling of knowing. Tip-of-thetongue
states also influence retrieval strategies. When
in a tip-of-the-tongue state, a person may spend so
much time and cognitive resources to recall the information
he or she becomes preoccupied and at times
immobilized.
Otto H. MacLin
See also Controlled Processes; Learning Theory; Memory;
Self-Awareness

Further Readings
Leonesio, J., & Nelson, T. (1990). Do different metamemory
judgments tap the same underlying aspects of memory?
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,
and Cognition, 16(3), 464–470.
Metcalfe, J., & Shimamura, A. (1994). Metacognition:
Knowing about knowing. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nelson, T. (1992). Metacognition: Core readings. Boston:
Allyn & Bacon.
Perfect, T., & Schwartz, B. L. (2002). Applied metacognition.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Schwartz, B. L. (2001). Tip-of-the-tongue states:
Phenomenology, mechanism, and lexical retrieval.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
METATRAITS
Definition
The term metatraits refers to differences in the extent
to which people possess a given trait. Consider the
trait of friendliness. People may differ not only in how
friendly they are, but also in how much friendliness is
relevant to their personality and guides their behavior.
Friendliness may be a central aspect of Jane’s personality
and influence how she acts in many situations
(e.g., with friends, romantic partners, coworkers,
family members). However, friendliness may not be
very relevant to Sue’s personality, and therefore will
not predict how friendly she acts around different
people. The existence of metatraits means that when
people measure a person’s standing on a given trait
(e.g., Agreeableness), they need to know not only
where the person stands on the trait (e.g., how agreeable
he or she is), but also how relevant the trait is to
his or her personality (e.g., is agreeableness a relevant
trait for the individual?).
When someone asks you to describe your personality,
you will likely give a description that includes at
least some personality traits. When describing other
people, people also frequently describe the personality
traits they possess. One person you know may
be shy, responsible, and determined, whereas another
person you know may be open to new experiences,
extraverted, and lazy. Most psychologists agree that
people’s personality can be defined, at least in part,
based on their standing on personality traits.
Although psychologists agree that an individual’s
personality consists of where he or she stands on
particular traits, they disagree about whether different
traits are more important and relevant to some individuals
than others. Researchers who adopt a nomothetic
approach to personality argue that an individual’s personality
can be understood by finding out where he or
she falls on a relatively small number of traits, and that
one does not need to understand how these traits differ
in their importance or relevance to the individual.
Researchers who adopt an idiographic approach to
personality argue that some traits are more relevant to
some individuals than to others, and that failing to consider
differences in how relevant traits are to individuals
leads to important information being lost about
the individual’s personality. The concept of metatraits
comes from the idiographic approach to personality.
Measurement
Metatraits———567
Although it is relatively straightforward to measure a
person’s standing on a personality trait (e.g., to measure
Extraversion, one might ask individuals to rate
how outgoing they are, how much they like to be
around others), it has proven more difficult to measure
how relevant that trait is to the individual. One
approach researchers have taken is to see how variable
people’s responses are to items measuring the same
personality trait. Imagine you are completing a 10item
scale assessing your ability to empathize with
others. If you respond very differently to items that are
all supposedly measuring empathy, then an argument
could be made that where you stand on empathy is
not as relevant to your personality as to someone
who responds in a consistent manner to all the items.
Although this approach is reasonable, one problem
with the method is that factors other than the relevance
of the trait may produce variability in item responses
(e.g., poor intelligence, laziness).
Therefore, researchers have recommended additional
measures to assess metatraits. Some researchers
have measured metatraits by seeing how stable people’s
responses to a personality trait scale are over three
administrations (separated by at least a week). The
more stable an individual’s scores on the personality
trait, the more relevant that trait is to the individual.
Other researchers have recommended measuring trait
relevance by measuring how fast someone responds
to items measuring a trait (the faster the individual
responds, the more relevant the trait), or by counting
how many times a trait is mentioned when a person
describes his or her life story (the more times a trait is

568———Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
mentioned when talking about yourself, the more relevant
the trait to your personality).
Evidence of Importance
Understanding metatraits is important because the relevance
of a given trait to an individual’s personality is
expected to determine whether the trait influences
the individual’s experience and behavior. Early
research supported the hypothesis that personality
traits would better predict behavior when the trait
was more relevant to the individual. However, other
researchers failed to replicate this relationship. More
recently, researchers have found that the relationship
between a person’s self-ratings of personality and
other people’s ratings of the person’s personality is
stronger for those traits most relevant to his or her personality.
This suggests that other people are more
accurate at rating a person on traits more relevant to
his or her personality. Recent research has shown that
personality is a better predictor of objective job
performance when the traits being assessed are more
relevant to the individual’s personality.
Future Research
An exciting area for future research on metatraits is
whether some personality traits are more relevant to
people in general than others. For example, researchers
have argued five primary traits underlay our personality:
Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness,
Conscientiousness, and Neuroticism. These traits
may be more relevant to people in general than are
traits such as empathy, self-consciousness, and body
image. The differences among traits in their relevance
to individuals emphasize the importance of developing
measures to assess how relevant a given trait is to the
population of interest. To take an extreme example,
imagine a culture in which personal ambition is deemphasized
and individuals are expected to do what
they are told by authorities. In such a culture, the trait
of achievement striving would not be relevant to
the population, and therefore if members of this culture
were to complete a measure of achievement striving,
their scores on the measure would be largely meaningless.
Understanding the relevance of a trait to different
samples will help researchers select participants for
whom scores on the trait are most meaningful.
Thomas W. Britt
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Individual Differences;
Personality and Social Behavior; Personality Judgments,
Accuracy of; Traits
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Tice, D. M. (1988). Metatraits. Journal
of Personality, 56, 571–598.
Bem, D. J., & Allen, A. (1974). On predicting some of the
people some of the time: The search for cross-situational
consistencies in behavior. Psychological Review,
81, 506–520.
Britt, T. W., & Shepperd, J. A. (1999). Trait relevance and
trait assessment. Personality and Social Psychology
Review, 3, 108–122.
Dwight, S. A., Wolf, P. P., & Golden, J. H. (2002). Metatraits:
Enhancing criterion-related validity through the
assessment of traitedness. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 32, 2202–2212.
Paunonen, S. V. (1988). Trait relevance and the differential
predictability of behavior. Journal of Personality,
56, 599–619.
MILGRAM’S OBEDIENCE TO
AUTHORITY STUDIES
Nations and cultures differ among themselves in
countless ways, ranging from something as superficial
as how people dress, to more serious matters, such as
unwritten rules of appropriate social conduct. But one
of the universals of social behavior that transcends
specific groups is the presence of hierarchical forms
of social organization. That is, all civilized societies
seem to have people in positions of authority who
are recognized as having the power or the right to issue
commands that others feel obligated to follow. Most of
the time, these authority–follower relationships serve
useful functions. For example, children need to listen
to parents to teach them right from wrong, that it is
dangerous to cross the street when the light turns red,
and countless other things. But there is also a potentially
darker side to commands from authorities: their
ability to lead their followers to act in ways that violate
the followers’ sense of right or wrong.
The most dramatic and powerful demonstration of
this dark side of obedience was provided by a classic
series of experiments on obedience to authority conducted
by Stanley Milgram as a beginning assistant

professor at Yale University in 1961–1962. The work
was stimulated by his attempt to shed some light on
the Holocaust—the systematic murder of six million
Jewish men, women, and children during World War
II by the Germans, aided by their allies. For Milgram,
obedience seemed a likely explanation to pursue
because it was generally known that Germany society
placed a high value on unquestioning obedience to
authorities. In fact, initially his plan was to repeat his
experiment in Germany, after completing his research
with American subjects. This plan was scrapped after
completing his research at Yale because he found such
a high degree of obedience among his American subjects
that he saw no need to go to Germany.
Yale was Milgram’s first academic position after
receiving his Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard
University. Although he was very creative and, later in
his career, he conducted many other inventive studies,
none surpassed his very first experiments, the obedience
studies, in their importance and fame.
Obedience Experiments
The subjects in the obedience experiments were normal
adults who had responded to an ad in the New
Haven Register, recruiting volunteers for a study of
memory. When a subject arrived in Milgram’s lab, he
was met by the experimenter, who explained that his
job was to try to teach another subject—the learner—
to memorize a list of adjective–noun pairs. During the
testing phase, each time the learner made a mistake,
the subject-teacher was to punish the learner with an
electric shock by pressing one of a row of 30 switches
on a very realistic looking “shock generator.” Above
each switch was a voltage label, beginning with
15 volts and ending with 450 volts. The experimenter
told the teacher-subject that the rule was that on each
subsequent error he had to give the next, more intense
shock. So, on the first mistake, he would press the first
switch, which supposedly delivered 15 volts; then the
next time the learner erred, the teacher would press
the next switch, corresponding to 30 volts, and so on.
And he was to continue with the procedure until the
learner memorized all the word-pairs.
The learner, seated in an adjacent room, was to
receive the shocks via electrodes attached to his wrist.
In actuality, the shock box was a fake, well-crafted
prop that did not really deliver shocks, and the learner
was in cahoots with the experimenter, deliberately
making mistakes on specific trials and responding
Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies———569
with a scripted set of increasingly agonizing and
pitiful protests. For example, at 120 volts, he yelled,
“Ugh! This really hurts,” and by 195 volts he was
howling, “Let me out of here! My heart’s bothering
me! . . .” Whenever the subject hesitated, the experimenter
commanded him to continue with such prepared
prompts as “The experiment requires that you
continue.” Despite the learner’s apparent suffering and
the fact that the experimenter—though he projected
an aura of technical proficiency—had no punitive
means to enforce his commands, more than 60%
of the subjects were fully obedient, continuing to
“shock” the victim to the 450-volt maximum.
Importance
Did we need Milgram to teach us that people tend to
obey authorities? Of course not. What he did show that
was eye-opening was just how powerful this tendency
is—powerful enough to override moral principles.
When acting autonomously, people don’t generally
hurt or harm an innocent individual who did nothing
to merit harsh treatment. Yet, when commanded by an
authority, most subjects readily did just that.
What is the psychological mechanism that enables
an authority’s commands to transform a normally
humane individual into a pitiless tormentor? According
to Milgram, when a person accepts the legitimacy of
an authority—that the authority has the right to dictate
one’s behavior—that acceptance is accompanied by
two changes in the person’s mental set. First, the person
relinquishes responsibility for his or her actions to the
authority, and in so doing yields to the authority’s
judgments about the morality of what the person is
requested to do. Second, the person accepts the authority’s
definition of the situation. So, if the authority sees
someone as deserving of punishment, the person will
also adopt that viewpoint.
Almost as important to know about the obedience
experiments as what they tell us is what they don’t tell
us. It would be a mistake to conclude from Milgram’s
results that beneath the veneer of civility that people
usually exhibit in their social relations they are actually
ruthless and vicious, and their pent-up meanness is
held in check by the rules and laws of society. That is,
Milgram’s laboratory merely created the opportunity
for his subjects to give expression to their normally
repressed sadistic tendencies. In other words, according
to this view, Milgram’s experiments don’t enlighten
people about the unexpected power of authorities, but

570———Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies
merely expose the force of people’s destructive natures
that are normally bottled up.
Milgram carried out more than 20 different versions
of his obedience experiment, in addition to the
one described. One of them clearly demolishes this
contrary view. In this experiment, the beginning
is very similar to Milgram’s other conditions. The
teacher-subject “punishes” the learner for each mistake
with increasingly intense shocks, while the learner,
sitting on the other side of the wall, complains more
and more vehemently. This continues to 150 volts,
when something unusual happens. The experimenter
tells the teacher that they will have to stop because the
learner’s complaints are unusually strong, and he is
concerned about the learner’s well-being. Suddenly, a
protesting voice is heard from the adjacent room. The
learner insists that the experiment continue. His friend
who had been a previous participant in the experiment
told him that he went all the way, and to stop now
would be a blot on his own manliness. If bottled-up
destructive urges were the underlying cause of the
subjects’ behavior, they couldn’t have asked for a
better excuse to vent them. And yet, not one single
subject continued beyond this point. The experimental
authority’s command was to stop, and everybody
obeyed his commands.
The revelatory power of the obedience experiments
goes beyond the vivid demonstration of people’s
extreme readiness to obey authorities, even destructive
ones. Milgram’s experiments also serve as powerful
sources of support for one of the main lessons of
social psychology: To paraphrase Milgram himself,
often it is not the kind of person you are but, rather,
the kind of situation you find yourself in that will determine
how you act.
Among Milgram’s series of experiments, a subset
of four, the four-part proximity series, speaks directly
to this point. In these experiments, Milgram varied the
physical and emotional distance between the subjectteacher
and the learner. At one end, in the condition of
greatest distance, the Remote condition, the teacher
and learner are separated by a wall, and there is only
minimal complaint from the learner: He bangs on the
wall twice during the whole shock sequence. In the
second condition—the Voice-Feedback condition—
the two are brought closer, at least emotionally. They
are still in separate rooms, but now vocal protests are
introduced into the procedure. With increasing voltages,
the learner’s complaints get more urgent and
shrill. In the third condition—the Proximity (close
and near) condition—distance is further reduced
by seating the learner next to the teacher. Now the
teacher not only hears the learner’s screams, but also
sees him writhing in pain. In the fourth and final condition,
the teacher-learner distance is reduced to zero.
In this variation, rather than being hooked up to electrodes,
the learner gets punished by having to actively
place his hand on a shock plate. At 150 volts, he
refuses to continue doing that and so the experimenter
instructs the teacher to force his hand onto the electrified
plate. The results: The amount of obedience
gradually declined as teacher–learner distance was
reduced. Although in the first condition, the Remote
condition, 65% were fully obedient, only 30% continued
giving the whole range of shocks in the last one,
the Touch-Proximity condition.
Implications
An important long-range consequence of Milgram’s
research is the regulations that are now in place in the
United States and many other countries to safeguard
the well-being of the human research subject. The
ethical controversy stirred up by the obedience experiments,
in which many subjects underwent an unanticipated
and highly stressful experience—together with
a handful of other ethically questionable experiments—
led the U.S. government to enact regulations governing
human research in the mid-1970s. The centerpiece
of these regulations is the requirement that any institution
conducting research with human subjects have
an institutional review board (IRB) that screens each
research proposal to ensure that participants will not
be harmed. Ironically, the IRBs themselves have become
a focus of controversy, especially among social psychologists.
Most would agree that, in principle, they
play an important role. However, many researchers
believe that sometimes IRBs are overzealous in carrying
out their duties and disapprove experiments
that are essentially benign and harmless, thereby stifling
research that could potentially result in valuable
advances in our knowledge.
Milgram’s productive career was a relatively short
one. He died of heart failure on December 20, 1984,
at age 51. But the legacy of his obedience experiments
lives on, serving as continuing reminders of people’s
extreme willingness to obey authorities. And, having
been enlightened about this, people can try to be more
vigilant in guarding themselves against unwelcome
commands. When ordered to do something that is

immoral or just plain wrong, stop and ask yourself, “Is
this something I would do on my own initiative?”
Thomas Blass
See also Aggression; Compliance; Deception (Methodological
Technique); Influence; Relational Models Theory
Further Readings
Blass, T. (Ed.). (2000). Obedience to authority: Current
perspectives on the Milgram paradigm. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Blass, T. (2004). The man who shocked the world: The life
and legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371–378.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental
view. New York: Harper & Row. (A 30th anniversary
edition, with an added preface by Jerome Bruner, was
published in 2004 by HarperCollins.)
MIMICRY
Mimicry refers to the unconscious and unintentional
imitation of other people’s accents, speech patterns,
postures, gestures, mannerisms, moods, and emotions.
Examples of mimicry include picking up regional
accents or expressions when on vacation, or shaking
one’s leg upon observing another person’s leg shaking.
Background
In the 1970s and 1980s, research on mimicry focused
on exploring the relationship between behavioral
mimicry (i.e., shared motor movements) and rapport
between interaction partners. The two were found
to be positively correlated. For example, counselors
who mimic the postures of their clients are perceived
by their clients to be more empathetic, warm, genuine,
with more expertise; mothers and babies who share
motor movements have more rapport; and classrooms
characterized by high teacher–student rapport have
more shared movements.
By the 1990s, researchers agreed that mimicry
is related to empathy, rapport, and liking. However,
because the thrust of the early research was on demonstrating
an association between behavioral mimicry
and rapport, rather than on demonstrating experimentally
that mimicry does occur and the conditions under
which it occurs, several questions remained to be
explored. One question concerned the ubiquity of
mimicry. Does mimicry occur above chance levels in a
social interaction? Another question concerned how
the effects are produced. Does mimicry lead to rapport
or does rapport lead to mimicry? Moreover, early
research paid little attention to the fact that most mimicry
occurs without conscious intention or awareness.
If people’s behaviors passively and unintentionally
change to match those of others in their social
environments, then what are the minimal conditions
needed to produce these chameleon effects? Do people
mimic strangers or just friends? Do people need to
have an active goal to get along with and be liked by
the interaction partner?
Several experiments were conducted in the late 1990s
to address these questions. In them, participants took
turns with another participant (actually a confederate—
part of the research team) describing a series of
pictures. When the confederate performed certain
behaviors, such as face rubbing or foot shaking, participants
unintentionally rubbed their faces more
or shook their feet more. In some cases, confederates
were intentionally unlikable and mimicry still
occurred. Participants were not able to report after
the interaction what the confederate’s mannerisms
were, or that they mimicked those mannerisms. In
other experiments, the confederate either mimicked
the postures, movements, and mannerisms displayed
by the participants or not. Mimicked participants liked
the confederate more and perceived their interactions
as being smoother. Taken together, these studies suggested
that mimicry leads to greater rapport, and it
occurs at greater than chance levels, in the absence of
any overarching goal to affiliate with an interaction
partner, and without awareness or intention.
Why Does Mimicry Occur?
Mimicry———571
One current explanation for why mimicry occurs is
the perception–behavior link. Essentially, perceiving
someone behave in a certain way activates a representation
of that behavior in the mind of the perceiver and
makes the perceiver more likely to engage in that
behavior too. This happens because the mental representation
that is activated when a person perceives a
behavior overlaps with the mental representation that
is activated when the person engages in that behavior

572———Mindfulness and Mindlessness
himself or herself, so the activation of one leads to the
activation of the other.
Although this explanation suggests that mimicry is
a by-product of the way concepts in people’s minds
are structured, this is not to say that social factors
do not influence mimicry. Mimicry has evolved in the
context of social interactions and serves an important
social function. Recent experimental research has
shown that people unconsciously mimic more when
they have a goal to affiliate with others. Thus, if they
want another person to like them, they start to mimic
the other person more. Furthermore, a number of
social contexts have been identified that seem to
heighten people’s desire to affiliate with others and
therefore heighten their tendency to unwittingly
mimic others’ behaviors. For example, people are
more likely to mimic peers, someone who has power
over their outcomes, or someone who has ostracized
them. People also engage in mimicry more if they are
feeling too distinct from others.
Research has also shown that personality characteristics
make certain people more likely to mimic
than others. One such personality characteristic is
self-monitoring. People who are motivated and able to
monitor their public images and adjust to their social
contexts are more likely to mimic their interaction
partners when there are affiliation cues in the environment
than are people who are less concerned with
adjusting to their social environment. Another personality
characteristic associated with mimicry is interdependent
versus independent self-construal. People
who perceive themselves to be part of a collective and
strive to assimilate to their group—for example,
people from Japan—are more likely to mimic their
interaction partners than are people who perceive
themselves to be distinct from others and possess
individualistic ideals—for example, people from the
United States. Finally, perspective taking has been
related to mimicry, such that people who tend to put
themselves in other people’s shoes engage in more
mimicry than those who do not.
What Are the Consequences?
What are the consequences of behavioral mimicry?
For the person who was mimicked, mimicry makes
interaction partners seem more likable and makes
interactions seem smoother. Mimicry also renders the
mimicked person more helpful toward the mimicker
and more open to persuasion attempts by the mimicker.
The effects of mimicry appear to generalize
beyond the mimicker, making the person who was
mimicked feel closer to others in general and engage
in more prosocial behaviors, such as donating money
to charities. Mimicry can also have consequences
for the mimicker. For example, by imitating the postures,
gestures, and facial expressions of another,
one’s own preferences, attitudes, and emotional experiences
are affected. The phenomenon whereby feelings
are elicited by patterns of one’s facial, postural, and
behavioral expressions is called mood contagion or
emotional contagion.
Tanya L. Chartrand
Amy N. Dalton
See also Emotional Contagion; Independent Self-Construals;
Interdependent Self-Construals; Nonconscious Processes;
Self-Monitoring
Further Readings
Chartrand, T. L., Maddux, W. W., & Lakin, J. L. (2003).
Beyond the perception-behavior link: The ubiquitous
utility and motivational moderators of nonconscious
mimicry. In R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, & J. A. Bargh
(Eds.), Unintended thought 2: The new unconscious.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Dijksterhuis, A., & Bargh, J. A. (2001). The perceptionbehavior
expressway: Automatic effects of social
perception on social behavior. Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, 33, 1–40.
MINDFULNESS AND MINDLESSNESS
Definitions
What is mindfulness? Phenomenologically, it is the
feeling of involvement or engagement. How do people
achieve it? Learning to be mindful does not require
meditation. It is the simple process of actively noticing
new things. It doesn’t matter how smart or relevant
the new distinctions are; just that they are novel for
the person at the time. By actively drawing novel distinctions,
people become situated in the present,
sensitive to context and perspective, and they come to
understand that although they can follow rules and

outines, those rules and routines should guide, not
govern, their behavior. It is not difficult to understand
the advantages to being in the present. When in the
present, people can take advantage of new opportunities
and avert the danger not yet arisen. Indeed, everyone
thinks they are in the present. When they are
mindless, however, they’re “not there” to know that they
are not in the present.
What is mindlessness? It is not the same thing as
ignorance. Mindlessness is an inactive state of mind
that is characterized by reliance on distinctions drawn
in the past. When people are mindless, they are trapped
in a rigid perspective, insensitive to the ways in which
meaning changes depending on subtle changes in context.
The past dominates, and they behave much like
automatons without knowing it, where rules and
routines govern rather than guide what they do.
Essentially, they freeze their understanding and
become oblivious to subtle changes that would have
led them to act differently, if only they were aware of
the changes. As will become clear, mindlessness is
pervasive and costly and operates in all aspects of
people’s lives. Although people can see it and feel it in
other people, they are blind to it in themselves.
Mindlessness comes about in two ways: either
through repetition or on a single exposure to information.
The first case is the more familiar. Most people
have had the experience, for example, of driving and
then realizing, only because of the distance they have
come, that they made part of the trip on automatic
pilot, as mindless behavior is sometimes called.
Another example of mindlessness through repetition
is when people learn something by practicing it so that
it becomes like second nature to them. People try to
learn the new skill so well that they don’t have to think
about it. The problem is that if they’ve been successful,
it won’t occur to them to think about it even when
it would be to their advantage to do so.
People also become mindless when they hear or read
something and accept it without questioning it. Most of
what people know about the world or themselves they
have mindlessly learned in this way. One example of
mindlessness is described in the book The Power of
Mindful Learning. The author was at a friend’s house
for dinner, and the table was set with the fork on the
right side of the plate. The author felt as though some
natural law had been violated: The fork “goes” on the
left side! She knew this was ridiculous. Who cares
where the fork is placed? Yet it felt wrong to her, even
Mindfulness and Mindlessness———573
though she could generate many reasons it was better
for it to be placed on the right. She thought about how
she had learned this. The author didn’t memorize information
about how to set a table. One day as a child, her
mother simply said to her that the fork goes on the left.
Forever after, that is where she was destined to put it,
no matter what circumstances might suggest doing otherwise.
The author became trapped without any awareness
that the way she learned the information would
stay in place in the future. Whether people become
mindless over time or on initial exposure to information,
they unwittingly lock themselves into a single
understanding of information.
Costs of Mindlessness
With this understanding of the difference between
mindlessness and mindfulness, the next step is to
understand the costs of being mindless. For those who
learned to drive many years ago, they were taught that
if they needed to stop the car on a slippery surface, the
safest way was to slowly, gently, pump the brake.
Today, most new cars have antilock brakes. To stop on
a slippery surface now, the safest thing to do is to step
on the brake firmly and hold it down. When caught on
ice, those who learned to drive years ago will still
gently pump the brakes. What was once safe is now
dangerous. The context has changed, but their behavior
remains the same.
Much of the time people are mindless. Of course,
they are unaware when they are in that state of mind
because they are “not there” to notice. To notice,
they must have been mindful. More than 25 years of
research reveals that mindlessness may be very costly
to people. In these studies, researchers have found that
an increase in mindfulness results in an increase in
competence, health and longevity, positive affect,
creativity, charisma, and reduced burnout, to name a
few of the findings.
Absolutes and Mindlessness
Most of what people learn they learn in an absolute
way, without regard to how the information might be
different in different contexts. For example, textbooks
tell us that horses are herbivorous—that is, they don’t
eat meat. But although typically this is true, if a horse
is hungry enough, or the meat is disguised, or the
horse was given very small amounts of meat mixed

574———Mind-Wandering
with its feed growing up, a horse may very well eat
meat. When people learn mindlessly, they take the
information in as true without asking under what conditions
it may not be true. This is the way people learn
most things. This is why people are frequently in error
but rarely in doubt.
When information is given by an authority, appears
irrelevant, or is presented in absolute language, it
typically does not occur to people to question it. They
accept it and become trapped in the mind-set, oblivious
to how it could be otherwise. Authorities are
sometimes wrong or overstate their case, and what is
irrelevant today may be relevant tomorrow. Virtually
all the information people are given is given to them
in absolute language. A child, for example, may be
told, “A family consists of a mommy, a daddy, and a
child.” All is fine unless, for example, daddy leaves
home. Now it won’t feel right to the child when told,
“We are still a family.” Instead of absolute language,
if told that one understanding of a family is a mother,
father, and a child, the problem would not arise if the
circumstances change. That is, mindful learning is
more like learning probable “truths” rather than mindlessly
accepting absolutes.
Language too often binds people to a single perspective,
with mindlessness as a result. As students of
general semantics tell us, the map is not the territory.
In one 1987 study, Alison Piper and Ellen Langer
introduced people to a novel object in either an
absolute or conditional way. The subjects were told
that the object “is” or “could be” a dog’s chew toy.
Piper and Langer then created a need for an eraser. The
question Piper and Langer considered was who would
think to use the object as an eraser? The answer was
only those subjects who were told “it could be a dog’s
chew toy.” The name of something is only one way an
object can be understood. If people learn about it as if
the “map” and the “territory” are the same thing, creative
uses of the information will not occur to them.
Meditation and Mindfulness
One way to break out of these mind-sets is to meditate.
Meditation, regardless of the particular form,
is engaged to lead to post-meditative mindfulness.
Meditation grew up in the East. Whether practicing
Zen Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation, typically
the individual is to sit still and meditate for
20 minutes twice a day. If done successfully over time,
the categories the individual mindlessly accepted start
to break down. The path to mindfulness that Langer
and her colleagues have studied may be more relevant
to those in the West. The two paths to mindfulness are
by no means mutually exclusive. In their work, Langer
and colleagues provoke mindfulness by active distinction-drawing.
Noticing new things about the target, no
matter how small or trivial the distinctions may be,
reveals that it looks different from different perspectives.
When people learn facts in a conditional way,
they are more likely to draw novel distinctions and
thus stay attentive to context and perspective.
Most aspects of American culture currently lead
people to try to reduce uncertainty: They learn so that
they will know what things are. Nevertheless, things
are always changing. Even the cells in the human
body are constantly changing. When people experience
stability, they are confusing the stability of their
mind-sets with the underlying phenomenon. Instead,
they should consider exploiting the power of uncertainty
so that they can learn what things can become.
Mindfulness that is characterized by novel distinctiondrawing
and meditation that results in post-meditative
mindfulness will lead people in this direction. When
people stay uncertain, they stay in the present and they
notice; when they notice, they become mindful.
Ellen Langer
See also Automaticity; Conscious Processes; Learning
Theory; Meaning Maintenance Model; Meta-Awareness;
Metacognition; Need for Closure
Further Readings
Langer, E. (1997). The power of mindful learning. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Langer, E. (2005). On becoming an artist: Reinventing
yourself through mindful creativity. New York: Ballantine.
MIND-WANDERING
People’s experience of their own thoughts is that
thoughts rarely stay still; sometimes people’s thinking
is constrained by the task they are performing; at other
moments, people’s minds wander easily from topic
to topic. The essential property of mind-wandering is
that people’s attention to the task fluctuates over time;
instead of paying attention to the activity in which

they are engaged, they often focus privately on their
thoughts and feelings. In this entry, what is known
about the situations in which mind-wandering is experienced
will be described, along with some of the
consequences of these experiences when they occur.
Finally, what the future may hold for the study of this
remarkable yet ill-understood aspect of people’s
mental lives will be considered. First, the historical
context within which to understand the study of mindwandering
will be considered.
Historical Context
People are often told that humans are social animals,
so it is a surprise to consider that often what goes on
in the private mental lives of people is most interesting
to psychologists. Mind-wandering is an interesting
psychological phenomenon for just this reason:
It is a uniquely human act, it is an essential part of
a person’s internal world, and it is an experience that
all readers of this encyclopedia will immediately recognize.
Moreover, mind-wandering occurs in almost
all circumstances, throughout the life span, and, in
all cultures, suggesting that it is a universal part of
the human condition. Despite the clear importance
of mind-wandering to humans, psychologists are still
relatively ignorant about mind-wandering relative
to other aspects of social psychology covered in this
encyclopedia.
One reason for the relative ignorance about mindwandering
is because the nature of the experience
often falls outside the boundaries of phenomena
considered important by mainstream psychology. The
assumptions of the work of behaviorists in the 20th
century provide a clear example. Behaviorists often
assumed that, first, the data of psychology should
be based on observable facts rather than on the introspective
evidence that had formed the focus of research
in the previous century, and, second, that applying
principles of learning was essential to understanding
psychological phenomena. Mind-wandering is a clear
candidate for neither—it is private experience and so
accessible only through introspection. Moreover,
because of its privacy, mind-wandering is an experience
that is specifically unrelated to the learning that
occurs in the environment.
In the 1960s, it became clear that the models of
psychological functions based on the behaviorist
account were too simple. The cognitive revolution,
which occurred in response to these simple models,
Mind-Wandering———575
emphasized the importance of internal cognitive states
in determining human behavior. Despite the pioneering
work of Jerome Singer and John Antrobus, who
developed reliable techniques for measuring private
experience, the mainstream of cognitive psychology
remained reluctant to embrace mind-wandering
research. Many cognitive psychologists felt that these
states were best measured by the use of objective
measures such as response times, rather than through
verbal reports as is the modus operandi for mindwandering.
In addition, many researchers were put off
because of researchers’ lack of ability to manipulate—
switch on and off mind-wandering—preventing the ability
to draw causal conclusions.
Thirty years have passed and psychologists have not
fully grasped the study of mind-wandering, and yet,
interest in these spontaneous aspects of humans’ internal
lives is growing. One reason for this increase in
interest is technological advances in psychophysiological
measurement of the brain. The development of tools
that allow psychologists to make detailed measurements
of the extent to which attention is focused externally,
such as event-related potentials, or can pinpoint
the network of brain regions that show activation during
mind-wandering, such as functional magnetic
resonance imaging, suggest that it may be possible to
observe changes consequent on mind-wandering in
the waking brain. Objective correlates for mindwandering
would reduce researchers’ reliance on
verbal reports and so improve the status of mindwandering
as an important psychological phenomenon.
The When and Where
of Mind-Wandering
Most psychologists would probably agree that mindwandering
occurs most often in simple tasks with few
interruptions. It is common, for example, to notice
mind-wandering while reading or driving on an empty
freeway. Similarly, people who engage in meditation
will—all too clearly—recognize the rapidity with
which attention can switch away from their breathing
to their thoughts. These instincts are borne out by
research. In the 1960s, research demonstrated that
mind-wandering showed an inverse linear relationship
with the time between events in a task. That is, the
more targets in a block of a task, the less likely the
participants were to report mind-wandering.
Mind-wandering is also frequent when people don’t
need to hold something in mind. This was demonstrated

576———Mind-Wandering
in a study in which participants either held a number in
mind for a short interval, before saying it out loud, or
simply repeated the numbers out loud immediately
upon hearing them. Mind-wandering was reported less
often when people had to remember the numbers for
these very short intervals than if they simply repeated
them. The act of holding information in mind involves
working memory, and so it has been suggested that
mind-wandering is suppressed by tasks involving working
memory load.
These simple information-processing influences,
however, do not do justice to the other main influence
on the experience of mind-wandering. A quick review
of your last enjoyable visit to the cinema or consideration
of the last good book you read clearly indicates
that often one’s mind wanders least when one is
interested, intrigued, or absorbed. One study examined
the relation between mind-wandering and interest.
Participants read a number of texts, selected on
the basis of either interest or difficulty. During reading,
participants were less likely to be off task when
reading interesting, but not difficult, text. When
reading dry expository texts (like a social psychology
textbook!), the lack of an absorbing narrative meant
that participants had to resort to being vigilant regarding
their own lapses to ensure they stayed on task.
Oh, No! Mind-Wandering and
the Attentional Lapse
All people have at some time made a very simple mistake
that occurred, not because the task they were
performing was difficult, but instead because they
were not giving sufficient attention to what they were
doing. Common examples of these sorts of mistakes
include pouring coffee, rather than milk, onto your
cornflakes or throwing away the vegetables but keeping
the peelings. In the literature, these mistakes are
referred to as action slips and often occur as a consequence
of mind-wandering.
Researchers can study an analog of these thoughts
under laboratory conditions. In these studies, individuals
perform an extremely simple signal detection
task. Participants are presented with long sequences
of stimuli (e.g., the numbers 0 through 9 in a random
order) and are asked to press a key whenever these
items appear on the screen. Participants are also told
not to respond to a small selection of the items (e.g.,
the number 3). In these circumstances, because the
task is so straightforward, the failure to correctly
inhibit a response is often the result of failure to pay
enough attention to the task, and so often results from
mind-wandering. After this mistake, normal individuals,
but not head-injured participants, usually indicate
that they were aware that they made a mistake. This
awareness that attention had lapsed is referred to as
the Oops phenomenon and indicates that the attentional
system is tuned to disrupt experiences like
mind-wandering if they lead to failures in one’s ability
to react appropriately to salient external events.
Although the attentional system is very aware of
some mistakes, certain sorts of errors seem to fly
under people’s radar when they are mind-wandering.
It is common during reading, for example, to notice
that even though the words have been sounding in
your head, for some little time your attention was elsewhere.
When people notice that their minds have wandered
in this fashion, it is often apparent that this has
been occurring for some time because they can often
reconstruct the narrative of their thoughts or trace
back in the book to the last place they were paying
attention.
To demonstrate this phenomenon in the laboratory,
researchers asked people to detect periods when the
text turned to nonsense. People often missed these
sentences and read for an average 17 words before
they recognized that the text was not making sense.
The researchers also demonstrated that periods when
participants were missing gibberish were associated
with greater frequencies of mind-wandering than
would be gained by random sampling alone. These
empirical studies provide evidence that when the
mind wanders, a person often continues to read for
some time without actually registering the meaning
of what is being presented. The lengths of time for
which these errors occur suggest that during mindwandering,
participants may become so wrapped up
in their internal worlds that they lose awareness that
they are doing so. This failure to be aware of one’s
awareness is a failure of meta-awareness (i.e., the
awareness of one’s own experiences).
What’s Next?
The questions facing those who study mind-wandering
are some of the most intriguing problems in social
psychology today. Once research has successfully identified
the neural substrates of the system that is

esponsible for wandering, this will bring exciting
questions. One possibility is that the determination of
the neural substrates of mind-wandering will allow
psychologists to understand the functional purpose
of the system that produces these thoughts. Several
authors have suggested that mind-wandering is associated
with creativity and insight problem solving,
and it is possible that functional magnetic resonance
imaging could help elucidate this issue.
The most interesting question that arises from consideration
of this topic is why the mind wanders. One
possibility is that people mind-wander simply because
their cognitive system is only able to maintain awareness
of their own experiences intermittently. The common
experience of catching one’s mind wandering
provides strong phenomenal support for the notion
that people at times are unaware that they have ceased
to pay attention to their task. As such, the frequency of
mind-wandering could indicate the extent to which
people are unaware of their own experiences. A second
suggestion is that mind-wandering simply reflects
people’s inability to control their own cognitive
processes. The simple fact that people often experience
these thoughts even though they are attempting
to concentrate on a task suggests that mind-wandering
may occasionally occur without their tacit consent.
In fact, a body of research, ironic processes theory,
demonstrates that attempts at cognitive control often
create conditions when the intentional control of
experience is undermined. Finally, it is possible that
mind-wandering occurs because pertinent personal
goals can become automatically activated in people’s
awareness.
See also Attention; Ironic Processes; Memory;
Meta-Awareness
Further Readings
Jonathan Smallwood
Jonathan W. Schooler
Robertson, I. H., Manly, T., Andrade, J., Baddeley, B. T., &
Yiend, J. (1997). Oops: Performance correlates of
everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured
and normal subjects. Neurospsychologia, 35(6), 747–758.
Singer, J. L. (1966). Daydreaming. New York: Random
House.
Smallwood, J., & Schooler, J. W. (2006). The restless mind.
Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 946–958.
Minimal Group Paradigm———577
Wegner, D. M. (1997). Why the mind wanders. In
J. D. Cohen & J. W. Schooler (Eds.), Scientific
approaches to consciousness (pp. 295–315). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
MINIMAL GROUP PARADIGM
Definition
The minimal group paradigm is a procedure that
researchers use to create new social groups in the laboratory.
The goal is to categorize individuals into
groups based on minimal criteria that are relatively
trivial or arbitrary. For example, the classic procedure
involves asking participants to rate paintings made by
two artists with similar abstract styles. Participants are
then told that they are members of a group that prefers
one of the painters to the other. This is their new
ingroup, and the people who prefer the other painter
represent a new outgroup. In reality, participants are
assigned randomly to one of the two groups. In addition,
the members of each group remain anonymous
and group members have no interaction or contact
with one another. Thus, the minimal group paradigm
creates a situation in which individuals are separated
into novel ingroups and outgroups, and these individuals
have no previous experience with these groups.
Purpose
The minimal group paradigm was first used in the
1960s to examine whether social prejudice and discriminatory
behavior result from the mere categorization
of people into ingroups and outgroups. Previously,
researchers had studied prejudice and discrimination
involving preexisting groups with long histories (for
example, based on race, ethnicity, or nationality). It
largely was believed that these groups perceive real
conflict with one another (for example, over
resources) and that this conflict leads to beliefs and
behavior that favor the ingroup over the outgroup.
A European psychologist, Henri Tajfel, wondered
whether the experience of conflict was actually necessary
to produce ingroup-favoring biases. Perhaps
prejudice and discrimination are more fundamental
and basic to the human condition. Tajfel and his
colleagues demonstrated that participants assigned to

578———Minimal Group Paradigm
groups using the minimal group paradigm behaved in
ways that favored their new ingroup and disadvantaged
the outgroup. Thus, conflict between groups
does not appear to be necessary to produce ingroup
favoritism (although conflict is still very important to
intergroup relations).
Ingroup Favoritism and
Outgroup Derogation
The minimal group paradigm has since been used by
researchers hundreds of times. Merely categorizing
people into new groups affects a wide variety of
perceptions, evaluations, and behaviors that reveal the
degree to which people favor new ingroups over new
outgroups. For example, group members evaluate new
ingroups more positively on personality and other
trait ratings (such as “likeable” and “cooperative”),
and they evaluate products and decisions made by new
ingroups more positively (even when they personally
didn’t contribute to these products or decisions).
Group members also allocate more resources (including
money) to members of new ingroups. There is
some controversy about the degree to which group
members respond in a positive way toward the ingroup
(ingroup favoritism) versus a negative way toward the
outgroup (outgroup derogation). On the whole, however,
it appears that ingroup favoritism is more prevalent
than is outgroup derogation in the minimal group
paradigm.
The tendency to express ingroup favoritism is very
robust and persists even when changes are made to
the minimal group paradigm. For example, researchers
have changed the basis on which participants believe
they are assigned into groups. In the original procedure,
participants were led to believe that they shared
a preference for a particular artist with their fellow
ingroup members. Perhaps this perceived similarity
drives ingroup favoritism. However, even when group
assignment is completely random (e.g., based on a
coin flip), people continue to favor the ingroup over
the outgroup in many ways. Researchers also have
examined how status differences between the new
ingroup and outgroup affect ingroup favoritism. For
example, participants have been told that either a
majority or a minority of people are classified into
their new ingroup. Regardless, participants continue to
express ingroup favoritism. Participants also have been
told that their new ingroup performed either better
or worse on an intelligence test than the outgroup.
Surprisingly, participants who were told that their
group performed worse than the outgroup still evaluated
the ingroup more positively than the outgroup.
Theoretical Explanations
Social psychologists have suggested several reasons
why group members display ingroup favoritism in the
minimal group paradigm. Tajfel and his colleagues
provided an explanation focusing on social categorization
and social identity. Social categorization refers to
the way in which people are classified into social
groups. Just as people automatically perceive nonsocial
objects as belonging to different categories (for
example, shoes versus mittens), they also tend to categorize
people into different groups. Social categorization
is useful because it provides order and meaning to
the social environment. For example, it is useful to be
able to distinguish police officers from pharmacists. In
different situations, different bases for categorizing
people become relevant. For example, categorization
may be based on gender or sexual orientation when
people discuss romantic relationships, whereas it may
be based on nationality or religious affiliation when
people discuss international terrorism. In addition to
classifying others into groups, social categorization
also typically results in the classification of the self
into a particular group. For example, a man may think
of himself primarily as being male in some situations,
whereas in other situations, he may think of himself
primarily as being an American. Social identity refers
to the aspects of the self-image that derive from these
group memberships. When a particular group membership
is used as the basis for social categorization,
the corresponding social identity is based on that group
membership. Thus, if a man is thinking about himself
as an American (perhaps because he is speaking with a
Japanese business associate about differences between
the two countries), then his American identity is at the
forefront. Importantly, according to Tajfel, social identity
can be more or less positive in different contexts,
and this has implications for self-esteem. Having positive
self-regard (high self-esteem) is a basic human
motive. So, people often engage in mental gymnastics
(so to speak) to maintain or enhance their self-esteem.
How does all of this help explain ingroup favoritism
in the minimal group paradigm? According to Tajfel,
the link between social identity and self-esteem creates
pressure to evaluate ingroups positively in comparison
with outgroups. This is called positive differentiation.

In the minimal group paradigm, the only relevant basis
for social categorization is the novel ingroup and
outgroup that the participants have just learned about.
Thus, participants’ social identities and self-esteem are
linked to these new groups. Because their self-esteem
is on the line, they express favoritism toward the new
ingroup (in whatever manner the research context provides)
to positively distinguish the new ingroup from
the new outgroup. So, participants evaluate the ingroup
more positively, rate the ingroup’s products and decisions
as being superior, and give more resources to the
ingroup all as ways to maintain a positive social identity
and protect or enhance their sense of self-esteem.
Other researchers have suggested other explanations
for ingroup favoritism in the minimal group
paradigm. For example, it may be that assigning participants
into groups affects their expectancies about
the proper way to behave in that context. That is,
people may have learned that interactions between
groups are typically competitive, and thus they act
competitively whenever they are in an intergroup context.
Alternatively, people may evaluate the ingroup
more positively and give them more resources because
they expect their ingroup members to do the same
for them. This is known as reciprocity. Another explanation
is that learning about new social groups creates
uncertainty and ambiguity. Generally speaking, people
are uncomfortable in situations in which they are
uncertain or unfamiliar. Designating the ingroup as
being superior to the outgroup may restore some
degree of certainty and order to the social environment
that is created by the minimal group paradigm. Finally,
several researchers have suggested that when people
learn about new social groups to which they belong,
they automatically assume that the new ingroup will be
similar to themselves. Given that most people perceive
themselves positively, the default expectation is that
new ingroups are also positive.
Broader Implications
In terms of societal implications, the robust tendency
to express ingroup favoritism has two sides. On one
hand, the basic tendency appears to be one in which
people favor the ingroup rather than derogate the outgroup.
This positive orientation toward the ingroup is
likely beneficial when interacting with fellow ingroup
members. On the other hand, ingroup favoritism sets
the stage for negative intergroup relations.
Richard H. Gramzow
See also Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Self-Categorization
Theory; Social Categorization; Social Identity Theory
Further Readings
Minority Social Influence———579
Aberson, C. L., Healy, M., & Romero, V. (2000). Ingroup
bias and self-esteem: A meta-analysis. Personality and
Social Psychology Review, 4, 157–173.
Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal
intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis.
Psychological Bulletin, 86, 307–324.
Gramzow, R. H., & Gaertner, L. (2005). Self-esteem and
favoritism toward novel in-groups: The self as an
evaluative base. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 88, 801–815.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory
of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. G. Austin
(Eds.), Psychology of intergroup relations (2nd ed.,
pp. 7–24). Chicago: Nelson-Hall.
MINORITY SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Definition
Many tasks and decisions are completed by groups of
people instead of by a single person. One challenge of
group tasks and decisions is that members of groups
are not always in agreement with each other; some
members of the group might hold that one view or
behavior is preferable, whereas other group members
might hold that an opposing view or behavior is
preferable. For example, work groups may disagree
on business plans, medical teams may disagree on
patient diagnoses, and trial juries may disagree on a
defendant’s guilt or innocence.
In many situations in which group members disagree,
opposing views are not equally represented in
the group. For example, 4 jurors in a 12-person jury
may believe the defendant to be not guilty, whereas
the remaining 8 believe the defendant to be guilty.
One view is expressed by a numerical minority (e.g.,
4 jurors who claim not guilty) and an opposing view
is expressed by a numerical majority (e.g., 8 jurors
who claim guilty). Although subgroups may differ in
aspects such as power, status, or individual characteristics,
the terms majority and minority refer to the
number of people who support each view. Both
the majority and minority groups may strive to change
the opposing views of the other group members.

580———Minority Social Influence
Minority social influence refers to the minority
group’s influence on the majority group members’
views or behavior. Although minority and majority
members may share the goal of influencing group
members who hold opposing views, they differ in
their underlying motivations, the strategies to achieve
influence, and the outcomes of those strategies.
Motivations for Minority Influence
Although a majority is typically thought of as more
influential than a minority, minority group members
may be particularly motivated to influence the group’s
views and behaviors in certain situations, such as
when minority members are highly invested in the
outcome of the group task or decision. This is especially
likely if the outcome of the task or decision has
direct implications for the minority group members.
For example, a work group may decide that an effective
way to save money is to eliminate departments.
The minority members of the work group who would
lose their jobs as a result of this decision have a strong
interest in lobbying for an alternative plan that would
not eliminate their departments.
Sometimes members of the minority may be motivated
to influence majority members because the
minority members have more knowledge or expertise
than the majority members do. For example, the
minority of a medical team might include the most
experienced doctors of the group. If the team of doctors
is in disagreement about a diagnosis, the experts
in the minority may be especially motivated to guide
the decision that the group makes. The minority of
experts may attempt to convince the majority members
to trust the minority’s knowledge and expertise.
Personal characteristics of the members of minority
groups also might encourage them to influence the
outcome of a group task or decision. For example,
minority members who are very outgoing or have high
self-esteem are more likely to speak up if they disagree
with the majority. Some minority members may
feel threatened because the majority outnumbers
them. This feeling of threat might encourage minority
members to increase their number of supporters to be
equal to or exceed the majority in size. Also, minority
group members may feel a personal responsibility to
defend their views if their views are very strong or
very important to them. Although it is often easier to
side with the majority to bring the group to an agreement,
the minority might be motivated to take a stand
and attempt to influence the majority view or behavior
for many reasons.
Strategies for Minority Influence
The strategies that minority groups use to influence
the majority group are fundamentally different from
the strategies majority groups use to influence the
minority group. In general, majority group members
seek to maintain the status quo, or current majority
view and behavior within the group, whereas minority
members seek to change the status quo. Stated another
way, minority group members work to change the
way the group generally believes or acts. In contrast,
majority group members tend to play a more defensive
role to keep the group view and behavior the way
it is. To preserve the status quo, majority members
focus on inducing compliance in group members to
influence them to publicly endorse the majority position,
regardless of their private beliefs. Minority members,
on the other hand, try to induce conversion in
group members to change what group members privately
believe. Ultimately, minority members hope
that the changed private belief will lead to a change in
public behavior (e.g., voting) that coincides with the
private belief.
To induce conversion, minority members must
engage the attention of majority members. Next, minority
members should coherently express their alternative
view and provide a strong rationale for it. The goal is to
cast doubt or uncertainty on the majority view and present
the minority’s view as the best alternative. After
the initial presentation of their position, members of the
minority must be consistent in their support for their
position over time. In this way, the minority demonstrates
that the alternative position is credible and that
the minority is committed to the view. Finally, minority
members should emphasize that the only way to restore
stability and agreement in the group is by majority
members changing their views.
Although these general strategies increase the
chances that the minority will successfully influence
the majority to adopt its position, they might not be
effective in all situations. For instance, a particularly
powerful majority group might be extremely resistant
to the minority view no matter how strong the minority
case might be. However, the minority may still
influence the majority through indirect routes. For
instance, minority members may continuously remind
the majority of the importance or implications of the

group’s task or decision, which may encourage
members of the majority to think more critically about
their views or delay a final decision until they seek
more information. If majority members are willing to
collect more information, they may be more willing to
consider the details of the minority’s viewpoint.
Another important factor in minority social influence
is the relationship between the minority and
majority in the group at the time that a disagreement
occurs. If the members of the minority have
established relationships or shared experiences with
members of the majority, then attempts at minority
influence may be more successful. For example, the
minority members might have agreed with majority
members in previous tasks or decisions. As a result,
majority members might be more welcoming of an
opposing view from minority members who have
established a positive relationship with the majority in
the past.
Outcomes of Minority Influence
In general, minority social influence may differ from
majority influence in both the degree and kind of outcomes
of their strategies. The social influence that is
elicited by a minority group is usually more private
and indirect than is influence by a majority group.
In addition, the effects of minority influence may not
appear immediately. However, minority influence
may change majority group members’ private beliefs,
which can lead to changes in outward behavior later.
Minority social influence also may alter the group’s
general view on issues that are indirectly related to the
task or decision at hand. Minority influence may stimulate
divergent thinking among majority members,
thus encouraging the majority to consider multiple
perspectives on an issue. This increased flexibility in
majority members’ thinking may lead to changes in
some different but related views. For example, a majority
group that opposes abortion rights may face a
minority that supports abortion rights. Although the
majority may refuse to change its view on abortion, it
may be willing to consider changing views on related
issues such as contraception use. Even if divergent thinking
does not change the view that the majority holds on
the disagreement at hand (e.g., abortion), flexible thinking
may be the first step toward change in the future.
Alecia M. Santuzzi
Jason T. Reed
See also Dual Process Theories; Group Decision Making;
Influence; Social Impact Theory
Further Readings
Misattribution of Arousal———581
De Drue, C. K. W., & De Vries, N. K. (2001). Group
consensus and minority influence: Implications for
innovation. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Nemeth, C. J., & Goncalo, J. A. (2005). Influence and
persuasion in small groups. In T. C. Brock & M. C. Green
(Eds.), Persuasion: Psychological insights and
perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 171–194). Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.
White, E., & Davis, J. H. (Eds.). (1996). Understanding
group behavior: Consensual action by small groups.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
MISATTRIBUTION OF AROUSAL
Definition
Misattribution of arousal refers to the idea that physiological
arousal can be perceived to stem from a
source that is not actually the cause of the arousal,
which may have implications for the emotions one
experiences. For example, if a professor was unknowingly
served a caffeinated latte at her coffee shop one
morning instead of the decaf she ordered, and then
during her midmorning lecture noticed her heart racing
and her hands visibly shaking, she may assess
the situation and determine the class full of staring
students to be the cause of her arousal (rather than the
caffeine buzz actually responsible for the symptoms).
Consequently, the professor may feel unusually nervous
during her lecture.
Background
The concept of misattribution of arousal is based on
Stanley Schachter’s two-factor theory of emotion.
Although most people probably think they just
spontaneously know how they feel, experiencing an
emotion is a little more complicated according to
the two-factor theory. The theory suggests that two
components are necessary to experience an emotion:
physiological arousal and a label for it. Schachter suggested
that physiological states are ambiguous, so one
looks to the situation to figure out how one feels. So if

582———Misattribution of Arousal
your heart is pounding and you have just swerved out
of the way of an oncoming car, you will attribute the
pounding heart to the accident you almost had, and
therefore will label your emotion “fear.” But if your
near collision is with a classmate upon whom you
have recently developed a crush, you would probably
interpret your pounding heart quite differently. You
may think, “This must be love that I am feeling.”
Based on the two-factor theory, emotional experience
is malleable because the emotion experienced depends
partly on one’s interpretation of the events that caused
the physiological arousal.
Classic Research
Schachter and his colleague Jerome Singer tested the
misattribution of arousal hypothesis in a classic experiment
conducted in 1962. They told participants that
they were testing the effects of a vitamin on people’s
vision. In reality, however, some participants were
injected with epinephrine (a drug that causes arousal,
such as increased heart rate and shakiness). Of these
participants, some were warned that the drug causes
arousal and others were not. Schachter and Singer predicted
that participants who were not informed of the
drug’s effects would look to the situation to try to figure
out what they were feeling. Therefore, participants
unknowingly given the arousal-causing drug were
expected to display emotions more consistent with situational
cues compared with participants not given the
drug and participants accurately informed about the
drug’s effects. The results of the experiment supported
this hypothesis. Compared with participants in the
other two conditions, participants who had received
the drug with no information about its effects were
more likely to report feeling angry when they were left
waiting in a room with a confederate (a person who
appeared to be another participant but was actually
part of the experiment) who acted angry about the
questionnaire that he and the real participant had been
asked to complete. Likewise, when the confederate
acted euphoric, participants in this condition were also
more likely to feel happy. With no information about
the actual source of their arousal, these participants
looked to the context (their fellow participants) to
acquire information about what they were actually
feeling. In contrast, participants told about the drug’s
effects had an accurate explanation for their arousal
and therefore did not misattribute it, and participants
not given the drug did not have any arousal to attribute
at all. These findings parallel the example of the professor
who did not know that caffeine was responsible
for her jitters and therefore felt nervous instead of
buzzed. In each case, attributing one’s arousal to an
erroneous source altered one’s emotional experience.
In a classic experiment conducted by Donald
Dutton and Arthur Aron in 1974, the misattribution of
arousal effect was shown to even affect feelings of
attraction. In this experiment, an attractive female
experimenter approached men as they crossed either a
high, rickety suspension bridge or a low, safe bridge at
a popular tourist site in Vancouver, Canada. Whenever
an unaccompanied male began to walk across either
bridge, he was approached by a female researcher
who asked him to complete a questionnaire. Upon
completion, the researcher wrote her phone number
on a corner of the page and said that he should feel
free to call her if he wanted information about the
study results. The researchers found that more men
called the woman after crossing the rickety bridge
compared with the stable bridge. The explanation for
this finding is that men in this condition were presumably
breathing a bit more rapidly and had their
hearts beating a bit faster than usual as a result of
crossing the scary bridge, and when these effects
occurred in the presence of an attractive woman, they
misattributed this arousal to feelings of attraction.
Implications
The misattribution paradigm has been used as a tool
by social psychologists to assess whether arousal
accompanies psychological phenomena (e.g., cognitive
dissonance). For students of social psychology,
the message is that, consistent with many findings in
social psychology, aspects of the situation can have a
profound influence on individuals—in this case, on
the emotions an individual experiences. Consequently,
you may want to take your date to a scary movie and
hope that your date will interpret his or her sweaty
palms as attraction to you, but be careful, because in
this context, arousal caused by actual feelings of
attraction may also be attributed to fear in response to
the scary film.
Jamie L. Goldenberg
See also Arousal; Emotion; Excitation-Transfer Theory

Further Readings
Sinclair, R. C., Hoffman, C., Mark, M. M., Martin, L. L., &
Pickering, T. L. (1994). Construct accessibility and the
misattribution of arousal: Schachter and Singer revisited.
Psychological Science, 5, 15–19.
Zanna, M. P., & Cooper, J. (1974). Dissonance and the pill:
An attribution approach to studying the arousal properties
of dissonance. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 29, 703–709.
Zillmann, D. (1983). Transfer of excitation in emotional
behavior. In J. T. Cacioppo & R. E. Petty (Eds.), Social
psychophysiology: A sourcebook. New York: Guilford Press.
MODELING OF BEHAVIOR
Definition
Modeling is one way in which behavior is learned.
When a person observes the behavior of another and
then imitates that behavior, he or she is modeling the
behavior. This is sometimes known as observational
learning or social learning. Modeling is a kind of vicarious
learning in which direct instruction need not
occur. Indeed, one may not be aware that another is
modeling his or her behavior. Modeling may teach a
new behavior, influence the frequency of a previously
learned behavior, or increase the frequency of a similar
behavior.
Components of Modeling
Four steps are involved in the modeling of behavior.
The first is attention. Before a behavior can be replicated,
one must pay attention to the behavior. The next
step is retention. One must be able to remember or
retain the observed behavior. The third stage is reproduction.
One must be able to translate the images
of another’s behavior into his or her own behavior. In
short, one must have the ability to reproduce the
behavior. The final stage is motivation. In the end, one
must be motivated to imitate the behavior. Until there
is a reason, one will not model the behavior.
Behaviors Influenced by Modeling
Many categories of behaviors are known to be influenced
by modeling. One such category of behavior
is helping. For example, studies have indicated that
children exposed to prosocial models were more helpful
than were children who lacked exposure to such
models. Modeling also influences aggression. Children
exposed to a model playing aggressively mimicked the
same aggressive play later, whereas peers unexposed
to the aggressive model did not play as aggressively.
Research has also found that when children observed
an aggressive behavior that produced positive outcomes
for the model, they behaved more aggressively. It seems
that having seen a positive outcome for an aggressive
model increased aggressive behavior in the observer. In
addition, modeling influences gender-role behavior.
Children learn gender-appropriate behaviors and preferences
by imitating same sex models.
Effective Models
Many factors contribute to the effectiveness of a
model. Ordinarily, the more attractive or desirable the
model is to the observer, the more likely that model
will be imitated. The desirability or attractiveness of
the model is partially influenced by the prestige the
model has to the observer. This explains why parents
and teachers often serve as models for behavior. The
effectiveness of the model is also to a degree influenced
by similarity. The more similar the model is to
the observer, the more effective the model will be.
This explains why peers provide such strong models
for behavior. Furthermore, effective models do not
have to be human or live. Puppets and cartoons, as
well as television and movie characters, often serve as
effective models for behavior.
Natalie Ciarocco
See also Aggression; Bobo Doll Studies; Helping Behavior;
Influence; Social Learning
Further Readings
Modeling of Behavior———583
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Bandura, A. (1989). Social cognitive theory. In R. Vasta (Ed.),
Annals of child development (Vol. 6, pp. 1–60). Greenwich,
CT: JAI Press.
Bandura, A., Ross, R., & Ross, S. (1961). Transmission of
aggression through imitation of aggressive models.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575–582.
Sprafkin, J. N., Liebert, R. M., & Poulos, R. W. (1975). Effects
of prosocial televised example on children’s helping. Journal
of Experimental Child Psychology, 20, 119–126.

584———MODE Model
MODE MODEL
Sometimes people’s attitudes predict their behavior
and sometimes they don’t. Most people have a positive
attitude toward donating money to charity, but
they don’t tend to give their hard-earned cash away
whenever a charitable organization requests it. Similarly,
many White individuals harbor a negative prejudice
toward Blacks, but they often treat many Black
individuals they meet with kindness and respect. Why
do people’s behaviors seem to naturally flow from
their attitudes on some occasions but not on others?
The MODE model (motivation and opportunity as
determinants of the attitude–behavior relationship)
addresses this question.
Key Concepts
Before describing the model, it is important to clarify
some concepts. Attitude means any positive or negative
association that one has with a given object, which can
be anything—a person, political issue, food, and so on.
According to the MODE model, one’s attitude toward
an object, say, one’s mother, is an association in memory
between the attitude object (mother), and one’s
evaluation of it (positive or negative). Thus, for many
objects in one’s memory, there is an evaluation directly
linked to it. Importantly, the strength of this association
can vary. For some attitude objects, there is a very
weak link between the object and its evaluation. This
would be the case for someone who, for example, has
weak attitudes toward various brands of dish detergent.
On the other hand, sometimes the link in memory
between an object and its evaluation is very strong, as
when someone has a strong positive attitude toward his
or her mother. Sometimes the link between an object
and its evaluation is so strong that merely seeing the
object automatically activates the attitude. If seeing a
picture of your mother immediately produces warm,
positive feelings, then your attitude toward your
mother is automatically activated.
Direct Influences of
Attitudes on Behavior
The MODE model argues that attitudes, particularly
strong attitudes, are functional—they steer people
toward positive things and away from negative things.
The MODE model argues that strong attitudes—those
that are automatically activated—are more likely to
guide behavior. Thus, one way that attitudes and
behavior can relate is in a relatively direct fashion. For
example, your attitude toward your mother might be
automatically activated when you see a picture of her,
which then prompts you to pick up the phone and
call her. Similarly, if you have a strong attitude
toward chocolate, the mere sight of a piece of chocolate
might immediately prompt you to pick it up and
eat it. In both of these cases, attitude-relevant behavior
flows directly from your strong attitude. This direct,
attitude-to-behavior route is one of the two ways that
the MODE model argues attitudes relate to behavior.
As suggested in the opening paragraph, however,
sometimes people’s attitudes—even strong ones—
don’t directly guide their behavior. You might, for
example, decide to wait until later to call your mother,
and you might remind yourself that you’re trying to
eat more healthfully and resist devouring that chocolate.
The MODE model also describes the conditions
under which strong, automatically activated attitudes
do not guide behavior. As the MODE acronym implies,
two factors—motivation and opportunity—must be
present to break the direct attitude-to-behavior link.
Each factor will be explained.
Motivation and Opportunity
The term motivation is used in a very broad sense
within the MODE model, but it refers to any effortful
desire one might have to behave in a certain way or
reach a certain conclusion. In the example mentioned
earlier, you might desire to eat better, which might
lead you to overcome your strong positive attitude
toward chocolate and avoid eating it. Similarly, you
might be motivated to assert your independence from
your parents, which might lead you to avoid calling
your mother at the mere sight of her picture.
Despite any motivation you might have, however,
the opportunity factor must also be present for your
behavior not to be determined by your attitude. Opportunity
means the time, energy, and ability to overcome
the influence of your attitudes. For example, you might
be motivated to eat better, but if you don’t have the
willpower to resist temptation, you might eat the
chocolate anyway. Interestingly, there are cases when
one lacks the ability to inhibit the influence of one’s
attitudes on behavior—particularly nonverbal behavior.
You might, for example, have a negative attitude
toward your boss, yet you are also probably motivated

to be nice to him or her. Despite your efforts to be nice
to your boss, you might be unable to contain that subtle
sneer when you see him or her. In other words, your
motivation to be nice is ineffective at curbing the influence
of your attitudes because of a lack of ability.
Thus, before any motivation can be effective at overcoming
the influence of your attitude, the opportunity
factor must also be present.
Evidence
A large body of research supports the basic tenets of
the MODE model. In one experiment, participants
were asked to decide between two department stores
in which to buy a camera. One store was excellent
overall, except for the camera department. The other
store had a good camera department, but was poor
overall. Participants’ store choice indicated whether
they used their attitude toward the stores to guide their
decision (if they chose the first) or whether they
moved beyond their attitudes and focused on the specific
attributes of the stores (if they chose the second).
Some participants in this study were also told that
they would have to justify their answers to others
later, and others were not (a manipulation of motivation).
Also, some participants had to reach a decision
quickly, and others had unlimited time to decide
(a manipulation of opportunity). Consistent with the
MODE model, only participants in the high motivation,
high opportunity condition chose the department
store with the better camera department. People relied
on their global attitudes toward the stores to guide
their behavior unless both motivation and opportunity
were present.
The MODE model has also been applied to the
study of racial prejudice. In one experiment, White
participants’ automatically activated attitudes toward
Blacks were assessed using a unique measure that taps
people’s strong attitudes without having to ask them.
In an earlier session, participants also completed a
measure of their motivation to control prejudiced reactions
toward Blacks, which asked participants to indicate
their agreement with items like, “I get angry with
myself when I have a thought or feeling that might be
considered prejudiced.” In a final session, participants
were shown pictures of people of various races (e.g.,
Black, White, Asian) depicted in various occupational
roles (e.g., doctor, business person, brick layer),
and were asked to make first impressions of them.
They had unlimited time to make their ratings, so the
opportunity factor was high for all participants. The
question this study addressed was whether people’s
impressions of Black and Whites would be guided
directly by their automatically activated racial attitudes,
or whether motivation to control prejudice might
be used to try to “correct” for their prejudices. The
results were consistent with the MODE model:
Participants who were not motivated to avoid racial
prejudice used their racial attitudes to make their
impressions of the people. For those with negative attitudes
toward Blacks, their impressions of the Blacks
relative to the Whites were negative, and for those with
positive attitudes toward Blacks, their impressions of
the Blacks relative to the Whites were more positive.
However, motivated participants tried to correct for
their racial biases. Interestingly, they even appeared to
overcorrect. Motivated participants with negative attitudes
toward Blacks reported more positive impressions
of Blacks relative to Whites. These individuals
might have been motivated by a fear of being accused
of prejudice. Motivated participants with positive attitudes
toward Blacks reported more negative impressions
of Blacks relative to Whites. These individuals
might have been motivated by a fear of being accused
of showing preferential treatment to Blacks.
The MODE model provides a means of conceptualizing
situations, such as racial prejudice, where
people “can’t help” but feel a particular way—that is,
when they disagree with their own attitudes. Sometimes
people’s attitudes influence their behavior directly,
through an automatic process. However, as the MODE
model states, when both motivation and opportunity
are present, people can behave differently than their
attitudes would imply.
Michael A. Olson
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Attitudes; Attitude
Strength
Further Readings
MODE Model———585
Fazio, R. H. (1990). Multiple processes by which attitudes
guide behavior: The MODE model as an integrative
framework. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 23, pp. 75–109).
New York: Academic Press.
Fazio, R. H., & Olson, M. A. (2003). Attitude structure and
function. In M. A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.), Sage
handbook of social psychology (pp. 139–160). London:
Sage.

586———Moral Development
Olson, M. A., & Fazio, R. H. (2004). Trait inferences as a
function of automatically-activated racial attitudes and
motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Basic and
Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1–12.
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., & Fazio, R. H. (1990). The role of
attitudes in memory-based decision making. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 614–622.
MODERN RACISM
See SYMBOLIC RACISM
MORAL COGNITIONS
See MORAL REASONING
MORAL DEVELOPMENT
Definition
Moral development refers to age-related changes in
the thoughts and emotions that guide individuals’
ideas of right and wrong and how they and others
should act. In addressing this broad concept, theorists
and researchers have focused on the moral cognitions,
feelings, and behaviors that tend to evolve from early
childhood to adulthood.
Moral Cognitions
Some researchers have emphasized the cognitive
component of morality by studying the development
of moral reasoning. Based on his observations of and
interviews with 4- to 12-year-old children, Jean Piaget
proposed a two-stage model of moral development.
In the first stage, young children view rules as rigid,
unchangeable, and handed down by authorities. By
the second stage, older children have become aware
that rules and laws are established and maintained
through mutual consent, and as a result, they view
rules and laws as flexible and changeable rather than
as absolute.
Lawrence Kohlberg revised and extended Piaget’s
model after extensively interviewing people of different
ages about various moral dilemmas (for example,
whether a man should steal from a pharmacist an
extremely expensive drug that may save his wife’s
life). The model that Kohlberg proposed describes
individuals’ moral reasoning as progressing through an
age-related sequence of three levels, each composed
of two distinct stages. In general, Kohlberg’s model
describes the basis of individuals’ moral judgments as
evolving from externally imposed rules and laws to
internally determined standards and principles.
There have been numerous criticisms of Kohlberg’s
conclusions concerning the development of moral
judgment. For example, Carol Gilligan argued that
Kohlberg’s view of moral reasoning emphasizes issues
of justice, law, and autonomy, which are associated
with a traditionally male perspective of morality, and
ignores issues such as a concern for the welfare of
others and the preservation of interpersonal relationships,
which are associated with a traditionally female
perspective of morality. Other critics of Kohlberg’s
theory and research on moral judgment caution that
how a person thinks about morally relevant situations
may provide little insight into how that person will act
in such situations.
Moral Feelings
Some individuals interested in moral development
have focused on various emotions (such as guilt, shame,
empathy, and sympathy) that are associated with the
enactment of morally acceptable behaviors and the
avoidance of morally unacceptable behaviors. For
example, Sigmund Freud proposed that, through
the process of identifying with the same-sex parent,
children take on their parent’s moral standards and
experience feelings of guilt when engaging in (or
anticipate engaging in) behaviors that violate those
standards.
A more positive emotion than guilt that has been
found to be very important in moral development is
empathy. Empathy is said to occur when a person
responds to another’s feeling, such as sadness, with a
similar emotion. Changes in the experience of empathy
from infancy onward are believed to be associated
with age-related changes in the individual’s ability
to take others’ perspectives, both cognitively and emotionally.
Individuals who empathize with the feelings
of others have been found to be more likely to engage
in positive interpersonal behaviors, and less likely to
engage in negative interpersonal behaviors, than are

individuals who do not empathize with the feelings
of others.
Moral Behaviors
The range of behaviors that have been considered in
studies of moral development is extremely broad.
Whereas some researchers have focused on the individual’s
ability and willingness to engage in various
prosocial behaviors (such as helping, sharing, and
comforting), others have focused on the individual’s
ability and willingness to resist engaging in various
antisocial behaviors (such as aggressing, cheating,
and lying). In addition to examining the role of moral
cognitions and emotions in moral behaviors, psychologists
have devoted considerable attention to identifying
the early socialization experiences that promote
the expression of prosocial behaviors and the avoidance
of antisocial behaviors.
An extensive body of research has demonstrated
that moral development is encouraged when parents
love and support their children, provide opportunities
for their children to learn about other people’s views
and feelings, model moral thinking and behavior themselves,
and provide opportunities for moral thinking
and behavior to be expressed and reinforced in their
children.
The discipline technique that has been found to
be most effective in encouraging moral development
is called induction. A parent who uses induction
explains to the child why his or her behavior is wrong
and should be changed by emphasizing the impact of
that misbehavior on others. Children whose parents
use induction as their primary approach to discipline
have been found to display higher levels of empathy
and prosocial behaviors, and lower levels of antisocial
behaviors, than do children whose parents rely on
physical punishment or the withdrawal of love and
attention as their primary approach to discipline.
Moral Education
Various educational programs have been designed to
enhance the moral development of children and adolescents.
As an extension of Kohlberg’s view, some
schools have set up cognitive moral education programs
that encourage groups of adolescents to discuss
a broad range of issues in the hope of promoting more
advanced moral reasoning. The character education
approach tends to be more direct, encouraging students
to learn and follow a specific moral code to guide their
behaviors in and out of school. Schools with service
learning programs attempt to promote social responsibility
by encouraging (or, in some cases, requiring)
their students to assist needy individuals within their
community. Although evidence indicates that providing
service to others is beneficial to the young helper
as well as to the recipient of the help, the role of
service learning and other school-based programs in
moral development remains controversial.
Mark A. Barnett
See also Antisocial Behavior; Helping Behavior; Moral
Reasoning
Further Readings
Hoffman, M. L. (2000). Empathy and moral development:
Implications for caring and justice. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Killen, M., & Smetana, J. G. (Eds.). (2006). Handbook of
moral development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
MORAL EMOTIONS
Moral Emotions———587
Social psychologists have long known that emotions
influence many aspects of decision making, and a
growing body of research demonstrates that this is
especially true in the domain of morality. Because
morality generally consists of rules guiding our treatment
of other people, and because emotions are often
(though not always) elicited in the context of our
interactions with other people, it is possible to conceive
of nearly all our emotions as serving morality in
some sense. However, most researchers reserve the
term moral emotions to refer to those emotions whose
primary function is the preservation and motivation of
moral thoughts and behaviors. In short, they are the
emotions that make us care about morality.
Reason Versus Emotion
Morality was traditionally thought to be largely a matter
of reasoning. Because the Western philosophical
tradition placed such a strong emphasis on the role
of reasoning for proper moral judgment, and because
emotions were seen as damaging to the reasoning

588———Moral Emotions
process in general, the study of morality focused
heavily on the development of the reasoning ability.
If anything, emotions were seen as harmful to the
moral process. At first glance, this view is not unreasonable.
After all, many emotions further one’s own
self-interest (such as happiness when one succeeds or
anger and sadness when one fails), or bias one toward
those individuals who are close to him or her (e.g., you
become more angry if someone insults your mother
than if someone insults a stranger’s mother). Because
impartiality seems to be critical for proper moral judgment,
many thinkers believed that emotions should
be eliminated from the process of moral judgment
entirely.
Nonetheless, some influential thinkers noted that
human morality seemed to depend heavily on the
presence of certain emotions. Philosophers such as
David Hume and Adam Smith were among the first to
implicate emotions (particularly sympathy) as forming
the foundations of morality. And recent research
seems to support them: Without certain emotions,
moral concern would not exist.
Evolutionary Origins
One area of research that elucidates the role of emotion
in morality comes from evolutionary theory. However,
because morality is inherently other-serving, and evolution
was traditionally understood as a selfish mechanism
(e.g., survival of the fittest), morality itself was
not properly understood by evolutionary theorists
for quite some time. Key insights from a few theorists,
however, led to an understanding that a trait that
encouraged altruistic behavior (helping others at a cost
to oneself) could be adaptive, thus increasing the probability
that the trait would be passed on to offspring.
These traits likely took the form of emotional tendencies
to help those in need and punish those who violated
rules (e.g., cheaters). The evolutionary etiology
of many emotions is still a matter of debate, but most
people now believe that the presence of moral emotions
is not inconsistent with an evolutionary account.
The Moral Emotions
Broadly speaking, three classes of emotions can be
termed moral emotions: emotions that encourage
people to care about the suffering of others (e.g., sympathy),
emotions that motivate people to punish
others (e.g., anger), and emotions that are, in essence,
punishments upon oneself for violating one’s moral
code (e.g., guilt). Some researchers also include a
class of emotions that are elicited when one sees the
positive moral acts of others, such as praise and a
form of moral awe termed elevation.
Empathy/Sympathy/Compassion
In most discussions of moral emotions, the terms
empathy and sympathy arise. These emotional
processes have long been implicated as the very foundation
of morality. A clarification about these terms
should be made: Empathy is most often defined as
feeling what another person is feeling (whether happy,
sad, or angry, for instance). It is best described as a
sort of emotional contagion and, as such, is not properly
an emotion. Sympathy is more generally understood
as caring for others. But because these terms
often are used interchangeably, some researchers
choose to use the term compassion to refer to the emotion
of caring for the suffering of others. This compassion
is often motivated by empathic/sympathetic
responses to the suffering of others. These emotions
seem to emerge very early on (infants cry at the sound
of other infants crying more than to equally loud
noncrying sounds), are present to some extent in nonhuman
primates, and are disturbingly lacking in psychopathic
individuals. This lack of empathy in
psychopaths is most likely what allows them to hurt
others with little compunction—because they don’t
feel the pain of others, they are not motivated to compassion
for the suffering of others. Having a sympathetic
reaction to the suffering of another is also one
of the best predictors of altruistic helping behavior.
Anger and Disgust
Much of morality consists of regulating the behavior
of others. As moral codes are generated, consequences
for the violation of those moral codes become
necessary. One way in which individuals mete out immediate
consequences to others is by emotional displays
of disapproval. Anger is generally a response to a
sense of interpersonal violation. Although anger
can be elicited across a wide variety of situations,
research has demonstrated that many of these situations
involve a feeling of betrayal, unfair treatment,
or injustice—concerns that fall squarely in the moral
domain. The role of disgust in morality is a little less
straightforward. Although many individuals report

eing disgusted by an individual they perceive as
morally blameworthy (e.g., being disgusted at a con
artist who robs the elderly), it is not clear that they are
referring to the same kind of disgust an individual
may feel when he or she sees rotting meat or feces
(what some researchers term core disgust). One possibility
is that individuals can recruit this core disgust
when presented with a morally shady character.
Guilt and Shame
When people violate what they perceive to be a
moral rule, they often respond with a feeling of guilt
or shame. These emotions are often referred to as
the self-conscious emotions. Shame, and its cousin,
embarrassment, regulate people’s behavior when others
are present. In non-Western cultures in which the
hierarchical structure of society is of primary (often
moral) importance, these emotions especially keep
individuals acting in a manner befitting their lowerstatus
ranking. Guilt, on the other hand, is an inherently
interpersonal emotion. It acts as a signal that an
individual may have hurt someone with whom he or
she has a relationship. As such, guilt often motivates
reparatory behavior—it only seems to go away once
an individual has righted his or her wrongs.
The Moral-Emotional Life
It is easy to see how these emotions work in concert to
uphold morality in everyday life. For instance, consider
this simple situation: Someone is suffering and
this bothers you (you feel empathy/sympathy); you
now care for this person (you feel compassion). Either
you caused his or her suffering (guilt) or someone else
caused his or her suffering (anger, disgust). These
emotions then motivate the proper actions to remedy
the situation, such as seeking justice or forgiveness.
David A. Pizarro
See also Cheater-Detection Mechanism; Disgust; Emotion;
Empathy; Guilt; Moral Reasoning
Further Readings
Frank, R. H. (1988). Passions within reason: The strategic
role of the emotions. New York: W. W. Norton.
Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. In R. J. Davidson,
K. R. Scherer, & H. H. Goldsmith (Eds.), Handbook of
affective sciences (pp. 852–870). Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Hoffman, M. L. (1990). Empathy and justice motivation.
Motivation and Emotion, 4, 151–172.
MORAL HYPOCRISY
Moral Hypocrisy———589
Definition
Webster’s Desk Dictionary of the English Language
(1990) defines moral as “1. of or concerned with principles
of right or wrong conduct. 2. being in accordance
with such principles” (p. 586); it defines hypocrisy
as “a pretense of having desirable or publicly approved
attitudes, beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not
actually possess” (p. 444). Moral hypocrisy is the motivation
to appear moral, while, if possible, avoiding the
cost of being moral. This is in opposition to moral
integrity, which is the motivation to act in accord with
moral principles—to actually be moral.
Phenomenon
Moral people often fail to act morally. One of the most
important lessons to be learned from the atrocities of
the past century—mass killings, terrorist bombings,
and corporate cover-ups—is that horrendous deeds
are not done only by monsters. There are several possible
reasons why a typical person might fail to act
morally in some situations. One of these may be that
people are often motivated by moral hypocrisy rather
than by moral integrity.
Moral philosophers often assume a causal link
from moral reasoning to moral action, but there is limited
evidence for this link. People’s ability to see the
morally right path does not guarantee that they will
follow it. Early in life, most people learn that moral
hypocrisy (e.g., appearing to act fairly when not doing
so) can be advantageous if one does not get caught.
But how best not to get caught? In the moral
masquerade, self-deception may be an asset, making it
easier to deceive others. Evolutionary biologist Robert
Trivers suggested that if one can convince oneself
that serving one’s own interests does not violate one’s
principles, one can honestly appear moral and so avoid
detection without paying the price of actually upholding
the relevant moral principle. Most people are
adept at justifying to themselves why a situation that

590———Moral Reasoning
benefits them or those they care about does not violate
their moral principles—for example, why storing their
nuclear waste in someone else’s backyard is fair. Such
justification may allow people to apply these principles
when judging others, yet avoid following the
principles themselves.
Evidence
Research suggests that moral hypocrisy is common.
College students given the opportunity to anonymously
assign themselves and another person (actually
fictitious) to two different tasks—one clearly
more desirable than the other—typically assign themselves
to the more desirable task 70% to 80% of the
time. Students reminded of the moral principle of
fairness, and given the chance to flip a coin to fairly
determine the task assignment, flip the coin about half
the time. Yet, even those who flip the coin assign
themselves to the more desirable task 80% to 90% of
the time. Clearly, most who lose the coin flip fail to
abide by it. Furthermore, those who lose the coin flip
but assign themselves the more desirable task rate
their action as more moral than do those who assign
themselves the more desirable task without going
through the charade of flipping the coin. This appearance
of fairness (flipping the coin) while avoiding the
cost of being fair (assigning oneself the desirable task)
has been taken as evidence of moral hypocrisy.
Overcoming Moral Hypocrisy
Procedures that one might think would increase moral
integrity often increase moral hypocrisy instead. Both
(a) expecting to meet the other person when assigning
the tasks and (b) explicitly indicating that fairness is
important before assigning the task increased moral
hypocrisy. In each case, a larger percentage of participants
flipped the coin, but those who did still
assigned themselves to the desirable task 80% to 90%
of the time.
Two procedures have been found to reduce moral
hypocrisy. First, when people are made self-aware
(e.g., by looking at themselves in a mirror), they
become aware of discrepancies between their behavior
and salient personal standards. This awareness
creates pressure to act in accord with these personal
standards. Among self-aware participants, task
assignment following the coin flip has been found to
be fair. Supporting the role of self-deception in moral
hypocrisy, it seems that participants looking in a
mirror could not deceive themselves regarding the
fairness of the flip, and so they acted morally.
Second, feeling empathy for the other person
seems to reduce moral hypocrisy, but not by increasing
moral integrity. Empathy is an other-oriented emotion
of sympathy and compassion for someone in
distress. When induced to feel empathy for the other
participant, many participants assigned the other to
the desirable task without flipping the coin, suggesting
an altruistic motive. However, those who flipped
the coin were no fairer than in other studies, suggesting
no increase in moral integrity.
Implications
Moral hypocrisy research highlights the important
question of whether widely espoused moral principles
such as fairness motivate people to be moral or only to
appear moral. If the latter, then psychologists would
expect people to act morally only when (a) there is
little personal cost, (b) actually being moral is the only
way to appear moral, or (c) they care about those that
might be harmed by immoral action. Research to date
supports this conclusion. Much behavior that has been
assumed to be motivated by moral integrity may be
motivated by moral hypocrisy instead.
Elizabeth C. Collins
C. Daniel Batson
See also Deception (Lying); Empathy; Moral Reasoning;
Self-Awareness; Self-Deception
Further Readings
Batson, C. D., & Thompson, E. R. (2001). Why don’t moral
people act morally? Motivational considerations. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 54–57.
MORAL REASONING
Definition
Moral reasoning refers to the processes involved
in how individuals think about right and wrong and
in how they acquire and apply moral rules and guidelines.
The psychological study of morality in general
is often referred to as the study of moral reasoning,

although moral psychology is now understood as
encompassing more than just the reasoning process.
Many of the topics that social psychologists were
originally interested in (such as obedience and conformity)
had to do in one way or another with questions
of moral judgment and behavior. Despite this
early interest in morality, the study of moral reasoning
specifically had its beginnings in the work of moral
philosophers and developmental psychologists rather
than in social psychology.
History
Although morality was originally the domain of
religion and theology, interest in the psychology of
morality has been around since at least the time
of the early Greek philosophers. Plato and Aristotle,
for instance, devoted much of their discussion to how
people came to acquire moral notions. The tradition
continued, as Western philosophers such as Immanuel
Kant and David Hume wrote much on the psychological
processes involved in moral judgment. These two
philosophers famously debated the role of reason versus
emotion in moral judgment, with Kant placing
a much greater emphasis on rational thought as the
proper foundation for moral judgment.
Kant’s ideas, particularly his emphasis on reason as
the foundation of moral judgment, influenced some of
the earliest psychological work on moral reasoning,
that of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. Piaget
believed that children developed a mature sense of
morality as their ability to reason unfolded. Particularly
important for Piaget was the idea that mature reasoning
caused a shift from children seeing the world from
only their perspective (egocentrism) toward being
able to take the perspective of others. For Piaget, this
developing ability to reason when combined with
the natural social interactions children had with one
another (which often involved having to share, take
turns, and play games together) caused children to
move from a morality based on rules, authority, and
punishment (heteronomous morality) to a morality
based on mutual respect, cooperation, and an understanding
of the thoughts and desires of other individuals
(autonomous morality).
Lawrence Kohlberg, a developmental psychologist,
expanded upon Piaget’s stage theory of development
to include multiple stages of moral reasoning spanning
through adulthood. Kohlberg first outlined his
theory of moral development in 1958, in what was to
Moral Reasoning———591
become one of the most influential psychological dissertations
of all time. Heavily influenced by the rationalist
philosophies of Kant and John Rawls (whose
theory of justice was one of the most influential political
theories of the 20th century), Kohlberg, like Piaget,
believed that as reasoning developed, so did moral
judgment. For Kohlberg, individuals progressed from
an early, egocentric morality based on the fear of punishment
and the desire for reward (stages 1 and 2, preconventional
morality), toward a more mature morality
based on social norms (stages 3 and 4, conventional
morality), and finally (though not always) to an understanding
of universal moral principles that existed
independently of social convention (stages 5 and 6,
post-conventional morality). Like Piaget, Kohlberg
believed that being exposed to social interactions
involving moral conflicts could cause progression
from one stage of moral reasoning to the next.
Although Piaget and Kohlberg set the groundwork
for the study of moral reasoning and stimulated a
wealth of research in the area (Kohlberg’s stage theory
continues to stimulate work), their ideas have been
challenged. In particular, as the study of moral reasoning
expanded from the domain of developmentalists
to include other areas of psychology, such as
cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, social
psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, researchers
began to question some of the assumptions Piaget and
Kohlberg made. For instance, many have argued that
stage theories are not the best way to characterize the
progression of moral reasoning, and there is mounting
evidence that moral emotions may be a greater influence
on people’s everyday moral thinking than was
believed by the developmentalists.
Social Psychology and
Moral Reasoning
Because social psychologists have long studied the
areas of reasoning and judgment, they have been
particularly well suited to investigate the processes
involved in everyday moral reasoning. Recently,
researchers have taken the wealth of research on topics
such as causal reasoning, intentionality, attitudes,
heuristics and biases, and emotion, and applied it toward
arriving at a better understanding of moral judgment.
One of the most interesting findings to emerge about
moral reasoning is that it seems to be different from
“regular” reasoning (reasoning about nonmoral issues)
in important ways.

592———Mortality Salience
For instance, there are several differences in the
way people think about their moral beliefs and attitudes
than about their nonmoral beliefs and attitudes.
First, moral attitudes are unlike other attitudes in that
they are surprisingly strong and resistant to change. It
is very hard, for instance, to convince a pro-life proponent
that abortion should be legal, or a pro-choice
proponent that abortion should be banned (persuasion
in the moral domain is very rare). Second, most people
believe that moral truths are universally binding—if a
person believes that something is wrong, others
should believe this too. Unlike one’s attitude toward
chocolate ice cream (the person doesn’t particularly
care whether or not others like it), it is problematic if
others don’t share a person’s attitude toward rape (it is
important to the person that others also believe it is
wrong). In fact, although Westerners generally appreciate
diversity of all sorts, researchers have shown
that diversity of moral opinion causes quite a bit of
discomfort. Third, individuals often adhere to strong
moral rules despite the consequences. For instance,
most Westerners believe that it is not permissible to
sacrifice one innocent individual to save five. Indeed,
the very notion of sacrificing innocent individuals no
matter what the benefits seems to be seen as impermissible.
These rules that are seen as impermissible
despite their consequences are often referred to as
deontological rules. These deontological rules don’t
always seem rational in the sense that most psychologists
use the word, as rationality is often defined as
making choices that maximizing good consequences.
In short, what research seems to show is that people
treat their moral beliefs, attitudes, or opinions as values
that should be protected at nearly any cost.
Because of this, many researchers have referred to
these moral rules as sacred or protected values.
Although the topic of moral reasoning has a long
history, much work remains to be done before psychologists
can be satisfied that they have answered the
fundamental question of how people think and decide
about issues of right and wrong.
David A. Pizarro
See also Guilt; Moral Emotions; Reciprocal Altruism
Further Readings
Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M.,
& Cohen, J. D. (2001, September 14). An fMRI investigation
of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science,
293, 2105–2108.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail:
A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
Psychological Review, 108, 814–834.
Sunstein C. R. (2005). Moral heuristics. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, 28(4), 531–573.
MORTALITY SALIENCE
Definition
Mortality salience refers to a psychological state in
which a person is consciously thinking about his or
her own death.
Background
Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon
Solomon coined the term in 1986 to refer to a way to
assess terror management theory. The theory posits
that the fear of death motivates individuals to sustain
faith in a cultural belief system or worldview that
makes life seem meaningful and sustain the belief that
they are significant and capable of enduring beyond
their own death. Greenberg and colleagues proposed
that, if the theory is correct, then having people think
about their own death—that is, mortality salience—
should increase people’s support of their own cultural
worldview.
Research
The most common method to induce mortality
salience is to ask participants to respond to the following
two prompts: “Please describe the emotions
the thought of your own death arouses in you” and
“Jot down, as specifically as you can, what you think
will happen to you physically as you die and once you
are physically dead.” The first finding was that
mortality salience led municipal court judges to recommend
a much higher bond in a hypothetical prostitution
case than they otherwise would. This was
interpreted as support for terror management theory
because it showed that mortality salience encouraged
the judges to uphold their worldview by punishing
someone who violated the morals of their worldview.
Studies have shown that mortality salience leads
people to react positively to those who support their
worldview and negatively to those who violate or criticize
their worldview. Additional research has found

that mortality salience affects a wide range of judgments
and behaviors that preserve faith in either one’s
worldview or one’s self-esteem.
More than 200 studies have made mortality salient
in a variety of ways and in comparison with many
control conditions. Mortality salience has been
induced by exposure to gory accident footage, death
anxiety questionnaires, and proximity to funeral
homes and cemeteries. Control conditions have
reminded participants of neutral topics and aversive
topics such as failure, uncertainty, meaninglessness,
pain, and social exclusion. These findings have generally
supported the specific role of mortality concerns
in mortality salience effects.
Studies investigating the cognitive processes
involved in mortality salience effects have shown that
mortality salience initially leads people toward distracting
themselves from thoughts of death. After a
delay, thoughts of death return to the fringes of
consciousness, at which time the worldview and selfesteem
bolstering effects of mortality salience occur.
Indeed, similar effects have been shown in response to
exposure to brief subliminal flashes of death-related
words on a computer screen; these subliminal primes
bring death thoughts to the fringes of consciousness
without making mortality salient.
Implications
In supporting terror management theory, mortality
salience research demonstrates that unconscious concerns
about one’s own death motivate a wide range
of judgments and behaviors to bolster the individual’s
faith in his or her worldview and self-worth. This work
thereby suggests that mortality concerns contribute to
nationalism, prejudice, and intergroup aggression, as
well as prosocial behavior and cultural achievements.
Jeff Greenberg
See also Consciousness; Meaning Maintenance Model;
Priming; Salience; Subliminal Perception; Terror
Management Theory
Further Readings
Becker, E. (1974). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.
Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Terror
management theory and research: Empirical assessments
and conceptual refinements. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 29,
pp. 61–139). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991). A
terror management theory of social behavior: On the
psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural
worldviews. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 93–159).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
MOTIVATED COGNITION
Motivated Cognition———593
Definition
When people think and reason, they sometimes have a
vested interest in the outcome of their thinking and
reasoning. For example, people engage in wishful
thinking about whether or not their favorite sports
team will win, or whether a relative will survive a
risky surgical procedure. In these situations, people
may be less open-minded than they might be in other
situations in which they do not have a preferred outcome
in mind.
Motivated cognition refers to the influence of
motives on various types of thought processes such as
memory, information processing, reasoning, judgment,
and decision making. Many of these processes are
relevant to social phenomena such as self-evaluation,
person perception, stereotypes, persuasion, and communication.
It is important to understand the influence
of motivation because such research explains errors
and biases in the way people make social judgments
and may offer ideas about how to offset the negative
effects of such motives.
Examples
One example of a cognitive process influenced by
motivation is memory. People tend to remember successes
more than failures, and when led to believe that
a given attribute is desirable, they are more likely to
remember past events where they displayed this
attribute than those in which they did not. People overestimate
contributions to past events such as group
discussions and projects, and revise their memory in
accordance with their motives. They might reconstruct
their memory of what attributes they considered most
important in a spouse after marrying someone who
does not have these attributes.
People’s motives also influence how they process
novel information. They are relatively more likely to
trust small samples of information consistent with

594———Motivated Cognition
desired expectations (even when they know that small
samples can be unreliable) and are more critical of
messages threatening desired beliefs. If they engage in
a particular behavior often (e.g., smoking), they are
more likely to find fault with information suggesting
this behavior is dangerous. Judgments of frequency
and probability are also influenced by motives. People
overestimate the frequency of events that support their
desired beliefs and consider their personal likelihoods
of experiencing positive events to be greater than that
for negative events.
Another cognitive process is the way in which
people make attributions (i.e., search for underlying
causes) for events. Motivational factors may cause
people to accept responsibility for successes more
than failures, and to believe that others who have
experienced negative events (e.g., rape, burglarization)
were partially responsible and perhaps deserving
of those fates. By doing so, they protect themselves
from believing that they could also experience these
events. Accessing and applying negative stereotypes
about others has been shown to help people cope with
threats to their own self-concepts. Furthermore, the
way in which people define personality traits may be
linked to self-serving motives; for example, most
people can believe they are better leaders than average
if they define leadership according to their own
personal strengths.
Types of Motives That
Influence Cognition
Many of the previous examples draw on one particular
type of motive: to confirm or sustain favorable
beliefs (particularly about the self). Many other
motives can influence cognition. When people are
accountable for their judgments—such as when these
judgments can be verified for accuracy—the motive to
make accurate, defensible judgments becomes more
impactful. The motive to form an accurate impression
of another person helps one carefully organize information
about that person and remember that information
in the future. The motive to belong, exemplified
by people’s interest in relationships and group memberships,
might also influence various types of cognitive
processes, such as judgments about romantic
partners. The desire to see one’s group as different
from others may underlie the tendency to view members
of outgroups as more similar to each other
(relative to ingroups), as well as the tendency to judge
members of other groups more harshly.
Another motive that may influence cognition is
terror management. According to terror management
theory, thinking about one’s own mortality can paralyze
individuals with terror. One defense against this
terror is a bolstering of one’s worldview, which offers
figurative immortality by being a part of something
that will live on even after the individual’s demise. In
conditions in which the chances of thinking about
one’s own death are high, individuals are harsher critics
of opposing worldviews.
Psychological Processes Linking
Motivation and Cognition
People do not simply ignore information inconsistent
with their motives. On the contrary, motivation seems
to instigate careful scrutiny of the information. In her
theory of motivated reasoning, Ziva Kunda argues that
motivation formulates directional hypotheses (e.g.,
“I am a good person”) that people then attempt to test
using standard cognitive (and dispassionate) strategies.
As it turns out, many such strategies are themselves
biased. People often exhibit a confirmation bias
when testing hypotheses, being more attentive to
information confirming their hypothesis than they are
to disconfirming information. They remember more
vivid and personal information than they do pallid and
impersonal information. Individuals also possess
crude statistical heuristics (or rules of thumb) they use
when making judgments and may be more likely to
draw on these heuristics when doing so is consistent
with their motives.
When given other opportunities to protect the selfconcept
(e.g., self-affirmation, or reflection on one’s
important values), people are less likely to exhibit
biases in their judgments. Nonconscious motives may
also influence cognition through the automatic activation
of concepts relevant to a given judgment. For
example, people asked to circle all cases of I in a passage
(which activates the self-concept below conscious
awareness) tend to be faster at identifying whether
they possess a given list of traits.
Implications of
Motivated Cognition
The effects of motivation on cognition are likely to be
a function of several critical psychological needs. For
example, people want to protect their limited emotional
resources and protect themselves from constant
thoughts of their own mortality. Other work suggests

that individuals who possess positive illusions—
overestimations of one’s ability, control over one’s
environment, and chances of experiencing positive
events in the future—are also more healthy (both
mentally and physically). Positive illusions may motivate
actions designed to achieve positive outcomes.
On the other hand, such beliefs could also lead to dangerous
behavior. If one is motivated to avoid threatening
information about an unhealthy behavior, the
outcome is likely to be a continuation of that behavior
followed by potential health problems. The extent to
which motivated biases in cognition are adaptive is
still a matter of debate.
See also Memory; Positive Illusions
Further Readings
William M. P. Klein
Matthew M. Monin
Dunning, D. A. (1999). A newer look: Motivated social
cognition and the schematic representation of social
concepts. Psychological Inquiry, 10, 1–11.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning.
Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480–498.
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being:
A social psychological perspective on mental health.
Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
MOTIVATED REASONING
Definition
Motivated reasoning is a form of reasoning in which
people access, construct, and evaluate arguments in a
biased fashion to arrive at or endorse a preferred conclusion.
The term motivated in motivated reasoning
refers to the fact that people use reasoning strategies
that allow them to draw the conclusions they want to
draw (i.e., are motivated to draw). Of course, people
are not always motivated to confirm their preferred
conclusions. Actually, they sometimes are motivated
to draw accurate conclusions. However, the term motivated
reasoning refers to situations in which people
want to confirm their preferred conclusion rather than
to situations in which people’s reasoning is driven by
an accuracy motivation.
Motivated Reasoning———595
The Domain of
Motivated Reasoning
Motivated reasoning may be observed in virtually any
setting. An important trigger of motivated reasoning is
the confrontation with a certain threat to the self. In the
absence of such a motivating threat, people may have
the goal of attaining the most accurate conclusion
rather than attaining a preferred conclusion. The
following example may illustrate the difference.
Someone who wants to buy a used car will try to make
the best decision possible and hence be guided by
accuracy concerns to avoid buying a lemon. After buying
a used car, however, that same person may engage
in motivated reasoning to support his belief that the
car is not a lemon when the first signs of malfunction
appear. For a less involving choice, like the choice of
cereals, people will be less motivated to engage in
thorough deliberation before the choice but will also
be less likely to engage in motivated reasoning if their
choice turns out to be bad. People’s self-esteem may
suffer much less from choosing bad cereals than from
being suckered into buying a lemon car.
Threats to the self may come in many different
forms, so different types of conclusions may trigger
motivated reasoning. A first type is conclusions
that bolster people’s self-esteem. For instance, people
attribute good test results to themselves but construct
a motivated reasoning to explain bad test results to
uphold the self-serving belief that they are intelligent
human beings. A second type is conclusions that make
people optimistic about their future. For instance,
smokers engage in motivated reasoning when they
dispel scientific evidence that suggests that smoking
is bad for one’s health. People also engage in motivated
reasoning to view future competitors as less
competent and future cooperators as more competent
than they really are. A third type is conclusions that
are consistent with strongly held beliefs or strong attitudes.
For instance, supporters of a politician might
downplay the consequences of an undesirable act
committed by the politician they support or might
attribute the behavior to situational pressures. In sum,
people construct motivated reasonings when their
self-worth, their future, or their understanding and
valuation of the world are at stake.
The Illusion of Objectivity
That motivated reasoning is not driven by an accuracy
motive does not imply that motivated reasoners

596———Motivated Reasoning
blatantly disregard the accuracy of their reasoning.
Motivated reasoners have to uphold the illusion of
objectivity: They cannot ignore the extant evidence
regarding the issue at stake. If they are exposed to
strong, compelling evidence contrary to their preferred
conclusion, they will have to concede that their
preferred conclusion is incorrect—the so-called reality
constraint. For instance, in the used car example,
when the car breaks down very often, the buyer will
no longer be able to engage in motivated reasoning to
defend his or her belief that the car is not a lemon.
The illusion of objectivity also implies that motivated
reasonings must appear logically valid to the
motivated reasoners themselves. Still, a motivated reasoning
may be compelling only for people who want
to endorse its conclusion, but possibly not for neutral
observers, and probably not for adversaries, who want
to endorse the opposite conclusion.
To uphold the illusion of objectivity, it seems necessary
that people are not aware of any bias present in
their reasoning; as such, motivated reasoning seems to
entail self-deception. The necessity to uphold the illusion
of objectivity may seem to entail that people have
little latitude in constructing motivated reasonings.
Still, to support a preferred conclusion, people may
unknowingly display a bias in any number of the
cognitive processes that underlie reasoning.
Mechanisms of
Motivated Reasoning
First, people may exhibit motivated skepticism: They
may examine information consistent with their preferred
conclusions less critically than they examine
information inconsistent with those conclusions.
Although information consistent with a preferred conclusion
is accepted at face value, people may spontaneously
try to refute information inconsistent with
that conclusion. People also view arguments as stronger
or as more persuasive if these arguments happen to be
consistent with their preferred conclusions than if the
arguments are inconsistent with the preferred conclusions.
Motivated skepticism implies that people require
less information to reach a preferred conclusion than
to reach nonpreferred conclusions.
Second, and related to motivated skepticism, people
may use statistical information in a motivated way.
For instance, people attach more value to evidence
based on a small sample size if the evidence supports
their position than if it opposes it. Consistent with the
illusion of objectivity that motivated reasoners have to
uphold, for large sample sizes, the value attached to
favorable and unfavorable evidence is rather similar.
Also, although people commonly neglect base rate
information, they may use that information if it supports
their preferred conclusions.
Third, to justify preferred conclusions, people may
need to retrieve information in memory or look for
external information. The search for information
may be biased toward retrieving or finding information
that is consistent with the preferred conclusion.
This biased (memory) search may be because people’s
preferred conclusions function as hypotheses to be
tested and that people often exhibit a confirmation
bias in hypothesis testing. This confirmation bias
implies that people may more readily come up with
supporting arguments than with arguments that are
not consistent with their preferred conclusions.
Fourth, people not only access information in a
biased way, but also apply concepts in a motivated
way. For instance, people display motivated stereotyping:
They apply stereotypes, sometimes unjustly, if
they support their preferred impressions but resist
applying these stereotypes if they run counter to their
preferred impressions.
The Case for
Motivated Reasoning
The idea that motivation may affect information processing,
including reasoning, seems intuitively plausible
and underlies classic cognitive consistency theories
as well as cognitive dissonance theory. However, the
problem with many early studies that seemed to evidence
the impact of motivation on people’s information
processing was that they were amenable to a
purely cognitive explanation. For instance, the classic
finding that people attribute their successes internally
but their failures externally may be due to people’s
motivation to see themselves in the best possible way
and therefore points toward motivated reasoning.
However, the differential attribution of failures and
successes may also be because people’s self-schema
leads them to expect to succeed and not to fail and
that they attribute expected outcomes—successes—
internally and unexpected ones—failures—externally.
Because the latter explanation does not feature any
motivation, it is a purely cognitive explanation of the
differential attribution of failure and success.

Recent studies, however, have provided unequivocal
support for the hypothesis that motivation affects information
processing. For instance, in a study on motivated
skepticism, where participants had to choose one
of two students they would have to work with on a task,
participants required less information to conclude that
the more dislikable student was the less intelligent of
the two than to decide that he was the more intelligent.
The level of knowledge of the two students was equal
in both cases, so the obtained results seem to implicate
the motivation to see the more likeable student—that is,
the one that participants wanted to work with—as the
more intelligent one.
Numerous studies have now established that
people may reason in a motivated way and have found
support for the previously described mechanisms
through which motivation may bias reasoning. In
addition, studies in motivated social cognition have
shown that people may define social concepts, such as
traits and abilities, in a self-serving way. Such selfserving
social concepts may be used in motivated
reasonings to support self-serving beliefs.
Mario Pandelaere
See also Cognitive Consistency; Cognitive Dissonance
Theory; Confirmation Bias; Motivated Cognition;
Self-Deception
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Newman, L. S. (1994). Self-regulation
of cognitive inference and decision processes. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 3–19.
Ditto, P. H., & Lopez, D. L. (1992). Motivated skepticism:
Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and
nonpreferred conclusions. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 63, 568–584.
Kunda, Z. (1987). Motivated inference: Self-serving
generation and evaluation of causal theories. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 636–647.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning.
Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480–498.
Kunda, Z., & Sinclair, L. (1999). Motivated reasoning with
stereotypes: Activation, application, and inhibition.
Psychological Inquiry, 10, 12–22.
Pyszczynski, T, & Greenberg, J. (1987). Toward an
integration of cognitive and motivational perspectives
on social inference: A biased hypothesis-testing model.
In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 297–340). San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
MUM EFFECT
MUM Effect———597
Despite the folk wisdom that “no news is good news,”
almost everyone is reluctant to communicate bad
news. For example, your best friend, Tom, has applied
for a job that he wants very badly. You learn that he
will definitely be offered the job. You can hardly wait
to tell him the good news. You will take pleasure in
letting Tom know all the details. Now, contrast this
with your feelings if you learn that Tom will definitely
not get the job he wants so much. In this case, you
probably feel awful and do not look forward to communicating
the news to Tom. You might even decide
to say nothing about what you found out. This reluctance
to communicate bad news is very strong under a
large variety of types of news, potential recipients,
and circumstances. The reluctance to communicate
bad news is so general and so robust that it has been
given its own name: the MUM effect. When it comes
to bad news, it seems that, indeed, “Mum’s the word.”
Despite its robustness, the reluctance to communicate
bad news is not universal. Anyone who has paid
attention to the news media can’t help forming the
impression that bad news is reported with alacrity. Our
experience with rumors or gossip or urban myths also
suggests that there is no bias against communicating
bad news. So, the MUM effect seems to be restricted
to situations in which the news affects the well-being
of the potential recipient. In one study, for example,
participants learned that there was a telephone message
telling another participant to call home right away
about some good news or about some bad news. When
given the opportunity to communicate the message to
the person for whom the message was intended, participants
were more likely to mention the good news
than the bad news. Interestingly, however, this difference
disappeared when the participants were given the
opportunity to communicate to a bystander. In fact,
participants were slightly more likely to mention the
bad news than the good news to a bystander. The
implication of this is sobering: The person who is
affected by the bad news is less likely to learn about it
than is a bystander!
Understanding the MUM Effect
Psychologists are rarely content with just an empirical
regularity like the MUM effect. They want to understand
why there is a reluctance to communicate bad

598———Mundane Realism
news. At least three broad concerns might affect a
communicator’s propensity to transmit a particular
message. Communicators might be concerned with
their own well-being, they might be concerned about
the potential recipient, or they might be guided by
situational norms or what they understand as “the
right thing to do.”
“Kill the messenger.” Folk wisdom suggests that
the bearer of bad news may be disliked even if he or
she is in no way responsible for the news. And, there
is experimental research demonstrating the validity
of that suggestion. Perhaps the MUM effect arises
because potential communicators fear that they would
be disliked if they were to convey the bad news.
Another explanation of the MUM effect arising from
self-concern implicates guilt. There is a pervasive tendency
to believe that the world is (or should be) fair.
Perhaps conveying bad news to another tends to make
the communicator who is not experiencing the bad
fate feel guilty. Because he or she wants to avoid feeling
guilty, bad news tends to be withheld. A third selfconcern
that might account for the MUM effect comes
from recognizing that one must adopt a somber if not
sad demeanor in conveying bad news. Perhaps potential
communicators tend to withhold bad news
because they are reluctant to adopt a negative mood.
Experimental research has provided evidence for all
three of these self-concern factors.
The reluctance to communicate bad news may
come from a concern with the recipient. When people
are asked to explain why they would or would not
communicate good or bad news they seem to focus on
the recipient. For example, compared with good news,
people are more likely to say that the reason they
would communicate bad news is because the recipient
might have to use that information in some way.
People also say that they withhold bad news because
they do not want to put the recipient in a bad mood.
Often, communicators assume that potential recipients
do not want to hear the bad news. (This assumption
is sometimes erroneous. For example, some
surveys indicate that medical professionals believe
that patients do not want to hear bad news, but patients
say they do want to hear such news.) When people are
made explicitly aware that a potential recipient wants
to hear the news, whether it is good or bad, the MUM
effect is reduced.
Finally, the MUM effect may be a result of ambiguous
norms. Conveying good news doesn’t seem to be
an issue. There are few potential costs. On the other
hand, if you give a person bad news, there are potential
personal costs such as being disliked or feeling
guilty. Or, you might upset the recipient or embarrass
him or her. Are you the appropriate person to be handling
the aftermath? You could be seen as prying or
butting in. There simply aren’t clear rules telling
people what to do with bad news. Indeed, there is a
strong positive correlation between how good a message
is and people’s willingness to relay the message.
Although people are reluctant to communicate bad
news, there is little correlation between how bad the
news is and their (un)willingness to communicate it.
More directly touching the norm issue is the agreement
among people on their likelihood to communicate
news. There is good agreement (clear norms) in the
case of good news but lower agreement (unclear norms)
regarding the transmission of bad news.
The MUM effect refers to a tendency to withhold
bad news compared with good news. This tendency is
most likely to show itself when the potential recipient
is the person for whom the news is consequential and
appears to be the result of communicators’ concern
with own well-being, recipient well-being, and unclear
norms regarding the handling of bad news.
Abraham Tesser
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Empathy; Rumor
Transmission
Further Readings
Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. (1975). The reluctance to transmit
bad news. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 8, pp. 194–232).
New York: Academic Press.
MUNDANE REALISM
Definition
Mundane realism describes the degree to which the
materials and procedures involved in an experiment
are similar to events that occur in the real world.
Therefore, mundane realism is a type of external
validity, which is the extent to which findings can generalize
from experiments to real-life settings.

History and Modern Usage
Elliot Aronson and J. Merrill Carlsmith introduced the
concept of mundane realism as a potential threat
to external validity in 1968. That is, to the extent that
procedures are artificial, it may be more difficult to
generalize the findings produced by those procedures
to the real world. Mundane realism can be contrasted
with experimental realism, which refers to whether an
experiment has psychological impact and “feels real”
to a participant. Both are important for generalizing
findings from the laboratory to the real world, but they
are independent and distinct dimensions. That is, any
particular experiment might be high or low in either
mundane or experimental realism.
For example, Muzafer Sherif’s classic Robbers
Cave experiment concerning rivalry and hostility
between groups at a summer camp is considered to
have both high mundane realism and high experimental
realism. Sherif randomly divided a group of boys
attending a summer camp into two teams. The teams
competed against each other in camp activities. This
setting closely resembles a typical summer camp experience,
so the experiment has a high level of mundane
realism. Because of the great psychological impact of
the manipulations used in the experiment, the study is
also considered to have high experimental realism.
In contrast, Solomon Asch’s classic experiment on
conformity is considered to be low in mundane realism,
but high in experimental realism. Participants
were asked to make relatively objective judgments
concerning the relative length of three lines after
hearing the answers of several of their “peers.” Those
“peers” were actually confederates of the experimenter,
and on critical trials, they were instructed to
unanimously provide incorrect answers. Participants
had stressful, realistic reactions to the conformity
pressure involved in the experiment, demonstrating its
experimental realism. However, the experiment was
low in mundane realism because it is rare in the real
world to have a majority give an incorrect answer to a
simple, objective, visual task.
At first glance, it might seem that field studies are
always high in mundane realism just because they
occur outside of the laboratory. However, because of
the potential artificiality of the manipulations that
can be used in field studies, they are just as subject to
a lack of mundane realism as are experiments conducted
in other types of settings.
Janice R. Kelly
See also Conformity; Ecological Validity; Experimental
Realism; Robbers Cave Experiment
Further Readings
Mundane Realism———599
Aronson, E. R., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1968). Experimentation
in social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.),
Handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2). Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Asch, S. E. (1956). Studies of independence and conformity:
A minority of one against a unanimous majority.
Psychological Monographs, 70 (Whole no. 416).

NAIVE CYNICISM
Definition
Naive cynicism is the tendency of laypeople to expect
other people’s judgments will have a motivational
basis and therefore will be biased in the direction
of their self-interest. We expect that others will see
things in ways that are most flattering to them, while
thinking that our own opinions and beliefs are based
on objective evidence.
Context and Importance
Naive cynicism is the counterpart to naive realism, the
belief on the part of laypeople that they see the world
as it really is. Although we often don’t believe that the
judgments we make are biased, we readily recognize
that others’ judgments may be. Naive cynicism may
even lead people to overestimate the amount of bias in
other people’s judgments. For example, husbands and
wives are known to overestimate their responsibility
for household tasks, giving individual estimates that
add up to more than 100%; it can’t be possible that
Mr. Smith washes the dishes 60% of the time while
Mrs. Smith washes them 70% of the time. A woman might
expect that her husband will overestimate how much
he should take credit for positive events and underestimate
how much he is to blame for negative events; he
might expect the same of her. However, because of the
accessibility of their own participation in both positive
and negative events, they will each tend to overestimate
how much they are responsible for both good and
bad things, meaning their partners will have cynical
N
601
views of their beliefs and vice versa. Viewing the other
person as part of your ingroup or at least as working
in cooperation with you may attenuate this belief; for
instance, the happier a married couple was, the less
likely they were to show cynical beliefs about each
other’s judgments. We may be especially likely to be
naively cynical when the other person has a vested
interest in the judgment at hand, but if that person is a
dispassionate observer, we expect that he or she will
see things the way we do (the way things “really are”),
not biased toward his or her own beliefs. Naive cynicism
extends to many of the basic heuristics and biases
studied in social psychology; people think that others
are prone to commit the fundamental attribution error,
the false consensus effect, and self-enhancement bias.
Naive cynicism is related to the norm of self-interest.
Many intellectual fields, such as classical economics
and evolutionary biology, stress how their theories indicate
that people should always act in self-interested
ways. This emphasis reflects and helps maintain
a societal license to act in one’s self-interest, and,
more importantly, to believe that others will too, even
though people are often inclined to behave in a cooperative,
empathetic, or altruistic manner.
See also Lay Epistemics; Naive Realism
Further Readings
Elanor F. Williams
Kruger, J., & Gilovich, T. (1999). Naïve cynicism in
everyday theories of responsibility assessment: On biased
assumptions of bias. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 76, 743–753.

602———Naive Realism
Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. (2004). Objectivity in the
eye of the beholder: Divergent perceptions of bias in self
versus others. Psychological Review, 111, 781–799.
NAIVE REALISM
Definition
Naive realism describes people’s tendency to believe
that they perceive the social world “as it is”—as objective
reality—rather than as a subjective construction
and interpretation of reality. This belief that one’s perceptions
are realistic, unbiased interpretations of the
social world has two important implications. First,
that other, rational people will have similar perceptions
as oneself. Second, that other people who have
different perceptions from oneself must be uninformed
(i.e., not privy to the same information as oneself),
irrational, or biased.
Context and Importance
One of psychology’s fundamental lessons is that
perception is a subjective construction of the world
rather than a direct representation of objective reality.
That is, people’s beliefs and perceptions are a function
of both the objective properties of the world and the
psychological processes that translate those objective
features into psychologically experienced features.
Take, for instance, the loving father who happens to
be a judge at his daughter’s science fair. The father’s
ranking of his daughter’s project in the 90th percentile
may result from the fact that his daughter’s project
truly was above average or from the fact that the father
interprets his daughter’s science project in a particularly
favorable light.
To be sure, people recognize that their initial
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are often subjective
and biased. The father may well recognize that his initial
inclination to award top honors to his daughter’s
model volcano is unduly influenced by his desire for
his daughter’s achievement. After carefully scrutinizing
and correcting his initial inclination, then, the
father may reign in his judgment, placing his daughter
in the 90th percentile rather than the 99th percentile,
as he was initially wont to do. In this case, like many
others, people’s attempts to correct their initially biased
judgments are often incomplete.
The important point for naive realism is that people
are seldom, if ever, aware of the degree to which their
corrective efforts fall short; people consequently infer
that their judgments are more accurate, objective, and
realistic than they really are. Thus, the loving father
truly believes that his daughter’s project deserves to be
ranked in the 90th percentile, even if a more objective
assessment places the project in the 75th percentile.
Lee Ross and his colleagues have discussed several
important implications of naive realism for social
judgment. One is that because people believe that
their perceptions are realistic, it follows that other reasonable
people who have access to the same information
will share those perceptions. This assumption is
one reason why people project their own beliefs, feelings,
and opinions on to other people. If one assumes
that a preference for 1970s over 1990s music is a consequence
of the inherent superiority of Led Zeppelin
over M. C. Hammer, it seems only natural that other
people would share that preference. By failing to see
that one’s own preference is partly the result of a particular
construal of 1970s and 1990s music, one may
fail to recognize that other people may have a different
preference arising from a different construal—for
example, construing the Village People and Nirvana
as typical bands of the 1970s and 1990s. Naive realism
tends, therefore, to produce an expectation that
others think, feel, and behave similarly as oneself.
Often, however, other people see things differently
than the self, and naive realism helps explain people’s
reactions in these situations. One reaction is that because
people’s own reactions seem rational and realistic, other
people who have different reactions seem uninformed or
irrational and biased. When a staunch Democrat learns,
for instance, that her cousin is a Republican, she may
initially assume that cousin John had not learned about
Republican positions on taxation—that John was simply
misinformed—and that providing him with the correct
information would change his stance. After learning,
however, that John knows all about Republican taxation
positions, the Democrat might infer that her cousin is
simply not a clear thinker or, worse, that he is systematically
biased in favor of taxation positions that favor his
own income tax bracket at the expense of less financially
fortunate individuals.
Because people repeatedly encounter other people
who see things differently from themselves, they may
become accustomed to thinking that other people are
irrational and biased. Over time, people may come to
expect others’ beliefs and opinions to be based on
careless reasoning and systematic bias. The staunch
Democrat may come to expect that all Republicans,
not just her cousin, are irrational and biased.

Believing the self to be rational and objective
whereas others are irrational and biased can pose a
substantial barrier to successful dispute resolution.
When parties on opposite sides of a conflict both
assume that the other side is irrational and biased,
achieving a mutually beneficial resolution is that much
more difficult. For instance, to the extent that Democrat
and Republican members of Congress both assume
that lawmakers on the other side of the aisle are selfinterested
and illogical, they are less likely to craft
beneficial and purposeful legislation.
See also Egocentric Bias; False Consensus Effect;
Lay Epistemics; Naive Cynicism
Further Readings
Leaf Van Boven
Pronin, E., Gilovich, T., & Ross, L. (2004). Objectivity in the
eye of the beholder: Divergent perceptions of bias in self
versus others. Psychological Review, 111, 781–799.
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1995). Psychological barriers to
dispute resolution. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 27, pp. 255–304).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
NAME LETTER EFFECT
Definition
The name letter effect refers to people’s tendency to
favor the letters that are included in their names more
than letters that are not in their names. In plain terms,
people like the letters in their names better than they
like the rest of the alphabet. Because the link between
name letters and the self is arbitrary, the effect implies
that anything that is associated with the self becomes
automatically endowed with positive feelings.
History
The name letter effect was discovered in the 1980s by
Belgian researcher Jozef Nuttin. Nuttin observed that
people prefer their own name letters even when they
do not consciously notice the link between name letters
and the self. The name letter effect also occurs for
infrequent alphabet letters, suggesting that it is not
because of more frequent exposure to name letters.
The name letter effect is highly robust, particularly for
initial letters. Indeed, name letter effects have been
observed in at least 15 European countries such as the
Netherlands, Poland, and Greece, and at least 3 non-
European countries, including Japan, Thailand, and
the United States. The name letter effect may thus be
universal across different languages and cultures.
Links With Implicit Self-Esteem
The name letter effect seems to be a valid marker of
implicit self-esteem, or unconscious positive feelings
that people have toward the self. For instance, the name
letter effect corresponds more with self-evaluations that
are provided very quickly and intuitively than with selfevaluations
that are provided more slowly and deliberately.
Mothers who report having been more nurturing
and less overprotective have children with stronger
name letter effects than do mothers who report having
been less nurturing and more overprotective. The name
letter effect may therefore tap into deeply rooted feelings
of self-worth that are formed in early childhood.
Consequences
The name letter effect may influence important decisions.
Indeed, Brett Pelham and associates have documented
how people gravitate toward other people,
places, and things that share their name letters. For
instance, people whose surname is Street live disproportionately
often at addresses like Lincoln Street.
People named Dennis are disproportionately likely
to become dentists, whereas people named Laura are
disproportionately likely to become lawyers. People
also tend to prefer brand names that resemble their
own names and are disproportionately likely to marry
others whose names resemble their own. Although the
influence of the name letter effect on important decisions
may seem maladaptive, most researchers believe
that the name letter effect is rooted in the adaptive tendency
to associate the self with positive qualities.
Sander Koole
See also Implicit Attitudes; Mere Ownership Effect; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Name Letter Effect———603
Koole, S. L., & DeHart, T. (in press). Self-affection without
self-reflection: Origins, representations, and consequences
of implicit self-esteem. In C. Sedikides & S. Spencer
(Eds.), The self. New York: Psychology Press.

604———Narcissism
Koole, S. L., & Pelham, B. W. (2003). On the nature of
implicit self-esteem: The case of the name letter effect.
In S. Spencer, S. Fein, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Motivated
social perception: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 9,
pp. 93–116). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pelham, B. W., Carvallo, M., & Jones, J. T. (2005). Implicit
egotism. Current Directions in Psychological Science,
14, 106–110.
NARCISSISM
Definition
Narcissism in its extreme forms is considered a personality
disorder. It is defined as a syndrome or combination
of characteristics that includes the following:
(a) a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, self-importance,
and perceived uniqueness; (b) a preoccupation with
fantasies of unlimited success and power; (c) exhibitionism
and attention seeking; (d) emotional reactivity
especially to threats to self-esteem; (e) displays of
entitlement and the expectation of special treatment
from others; and (f) an unwillingness or inability to
show empathy.
Researchers have also investigated a less-extreme
form of narcissism that is termed the narcissistic personality
type. These individuals possess most or all of
the characteristics of the narcissistic personality disorder
but are considered within the normal range of personality.
Several self-report measures of narcissistic
personality have been used to identify narcissists for
research purposes. The most widely used scale is
the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), and it
is thought to measure both narcissistic personality
disorder as well as narcissism in the normal population.
The NPI is understood to contain at least four
subscales: leadership/authority, superiority/arrogance,
self-absorption/self-admiration, and entitlement/
exploitativeness. However, an individual must score
fairly highly on each dimension to be considered a
narcissistic personality type.
Development
Clinical theories of narcissism posit that adult narcissism
has its roots in early childhood experiences.
Although Sigmund Freud originally applied the term,
Hans Kohut and Otto Kernberg are the two most influential
theorists in the area of narcissism. Both Kohut
and Kernberg focus on disturbances in early social
(parental) relationships as the genesis of adult narcissistic
personality disorder. Also, both view narcissism
at its core as a defect in the development of a healthy
self. According to Kohut, the child’s self develops and
gains maturity through interactions with others (primarily
the mother) that provide the child with opportunities
to gain approval and enhancement and to
identify with perfect and omnipotent role models.
Parents who are empathic contribute to the healthy
development of the child’s self in two ways. First,
they provide mirroring that fosters a more realistic
sense of self. Second, parents reveal limitations in
themselves that lead the child to internalize or assume
an idealized image that is realistic and possible to
attain. Problems are introduced when the parent is
unempathetic and fails to provide approval and appropriate
role models. According to Kohut, narcissism is
in effect developmental arrest in which the child’s self
remains grandiose and unrealistic. At the same time,
the child continues to idealize others to maintain selfesteem
through association.
Kernberg argues that narcissism results from the
child’s reaction to a cold and unempathetic mother.
His theory is quite the opposite of Kohut’s position.
According to Kernberg, the emotionally hungry child
is enraged by his parents’ neglect and comes to view
them as even more depriving. Narcissism in this view
is a defense reflecting the child’s attempt to take refuge
in some aspect of the self that his parents valued; a
defense that ultimately results in a grandiose and
inflated sense of self. Any perceived weaknesses in the
self are split off into a separate hidden self. Narcissists,
in Kernberg’s view, are grandiose on the outside but
vulnerable and questioning of their self-worth on the
inside. The theories of Kernberg and Kohut are different
in many important respects; however, both characterize
narcissists as individuals with a childhood
history of unsatisfactory social relationships who as
adults possess grandiose views of the self that foster a
conflicted psychological dependence on others.
Contemporary Views of Narcissism
More recent social and personality psychologists have
studied narcissism as a syndrome or collection of
traits that characterizes the narcissistic personality
type as opposed to narcissistic personality disorder.
This perspective views narcissists as people who are
preoccupied with maintaining excessively positive

self-concepts. These individuals become overly concerned
about obtaining positive, self-aggrandizing
feedback from others and react with extreme positive
or negative emotions when they succeed or fail to
receive information that others hold them in high
regard. Narcissists want positive feedback about the
self, and they actively manipulate others to solicit or
coerce admiration from them. In this view, narcissism
is thought to reflect a form of chronic interpersonal,
self-esteem regulation.
Assessment
The diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder is
usually determined through clinical evaluation of the
person. However, the narcissistic personality type is
measured through self-report questionnaires such as
the NPI. This questionnaire presents respondents with
a set of forced-choice items in which they must decide
which of two statements is most descriptive of them.
For example, a person completing the NPI would be
asked whether the statement “people always seem to
recognize my authority” or “being an authority doesn’t
mean that much to me” best describes them. People
who score high on the NPI have been shown to display
a wide variety of narcissistic behaviors such as arrogance,
superiority, and aggressiveness. In addition,
people with a clinical diagnosis of narcissistic personality
disorder score higher on the NPI than do people
with other psychiatric diagnoses or normal controls.
Relevant Research
Research findings employing the NPI describe a portrait
of narcissists as possessing inflated and grandiose
self-images. It is not surprising then that they report
having high self-esteem. However, these positive selfimages
appear to be based on biased and inflated perceptions
of their accomplishments and their distorted
views of what others think about them. For example,
they overestimate their physical attractiveness relative
to judges’ ratings of their attractiveness, and they
overestimate their intelligence relative to objective
assessments of their IQ. In one experiment, narcissistic
and nonnarcissistic men were interviewed by a
woman whose responses were completely scripted.
That is, all men received the same social feedback.
Nonetheless, narcissistic men believed that the woman
liked them better and was more romantically interested
in them than did nonnarcissistic men. Other findings
Narcissism———605
indicate that narcissists take greater credit for good
outcomes even when those outcomes occurred by luck
or chance.
Although narcissists’ self-esteem is high, it is also
fragile and insecure. This is evidenced in that their
self-esteem is much more variable, fluctuating from
moment to moment, day to day, than is the self-esteem
of less narcissistic people. Other research indicates
that narcissists are more likely to have high explicit
self-esteem and low implicit self-esteem. This finding
suggests that although narcissists describe themselves
in positive terms, their automatically accessible selffeelings
are not so positive.
Narcissists’ positive but insecure self-views lead
them to be more attentive and reactive to feedback
from other people. However, not just any response or
feedback from others is important to narcissists. They
are eager to learn that others admire and look up to
them. Narcissists value admiration and superiority
more than being liked and accepted. Studies find that
narcissists’ self-esteem waxes and wanes along with
the extent to which they feel admired. Moreover, narcissists
are not passive in their desire for admiration
from others but, rather, pursue it by attempting to
manipulate the impressions they create in others. They
make self-promoting and self-aggrandizing statements
and attempt to solicit regard and compliments
from those around them.
It follows that if narcissists are constantly seeking
positive feedback from other people then they should
react negatively when people around them fail to provide
such support. Accordingly, narcissists respond
with anger and resentment when they feel threatened
by others. They are more likely to respond aggressively
on such occasions. They will derogate those
who threaten them even when such hostile responding
jeopardizes the relationship.
Narcissists attempt to solicit admiration from those
around them, and their hostility when others fail to
respond appropriately contributes to the disturbed
interpersonal relationships that are a hallmark of the
disorder. Research has shown that people describe
their narcissistic acquaintances as trying to impress
others by bragging and putting down others. These
behaviors are initially successful in that interaction
partners find narcissists to be competent and attractive.
However, over time these partners come to view
the narcissist as arrogant and hostile.
Findings from an impressive range of studies suggest
a picture of the narcissists as people who use their

606———Narcissistic Entitlement
friends to feel good about themselves. They pander
for attention and admiration to support self-images
that are positive but easily threatened. They are constantly
on alert for even the smallest slight that they
perceive as disrespect. Perhaps most important, narcissists’
striving to self-enhance at the expense of their
friends ultimately costs them the friendships.
Frederick Rhodewalt
See also Narcissistic Entitlement; Self-Enhancement; Self-
Esteem; Self-Esteem Stability
Further Readings
Rhodewalt, F. (2005). Social motivation and object relations:
Narcissism and interpersonal self-esteem regulation.
In J. Forgas, K. Williams, & S. Laham (Eds.), Social
motivation (pp. 332–350). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Rhodewalt, F., & Morf, C. C. (2005). Reflections in troubled
waters: Narcissism and interpersonal self-esteem
regulation. In A. Tesser, J. Wood, & D. Stapel (Eds.),
On building, defending, and regulating the self
(pp. 127–151). New York: Psychology Press.
Rhodewalt, F., & Sorrow, D. (2003). Interpersonal
self-regulation: Lessons from the study of narcissism.
In M. Leary & J. P. Tangney (Eds.), Handbook of self
and identity. New York: Guilford Press.
NARCISSISTIC ENTITLEMENT
Definition
Narcissistic entitlement refers to a belief that one’s
importance, superiority, or uniqueness should result in
getting special treatment and receiving more resources
than others. For example, individuals high in narcissistic
entitlement think that they should get more
respect, more money, and more credit for doing the
same work as everyone else. Narcissistic entitlement
also includes a willingness to demand this special
treatment or extra resources.
Context and Importance
Narcissistic entitlement contains three components. At
the root of narcissistic entitlement, individuals believe
that they are uniquely superior. That is, they believe
that they are different from others in ways that make
them superior. Second, individuals with high levels of
narcissistic entitlement feel that they are more deserving
of special treatment and limited resources by virtue
of their superiority and uniqueness. Finally, they are
likely to demand the special treatment and resources to
which they believe they are entitled (e.g., receiving a
bigger handful of candy than the other children at a
holiday party or a paycheck that is larger than what
comparable individuals earn). These demands may be
in the form of verbal statements, but may also include
aggressive and even violent behavior.
Special treatment can include a wide range of
things but in general refers to an expectation of treatment
that is unique (and usually better) from how others
are treated. For example, individuals with high
levels of narcissistic entitlement might demand the
best seat at a restaurant or not to have to wait in line
when everyone else does. They might demand to be
called “Sir” or “Doctor” at all times. They might refuse
to allow other individuals to be critical of or challenge
their thoughts or ideas (a courtesy that they might not
reciprocate).
Narcissistic entitlement is traditionally measured
with a short subscale of the Narcissistic Personality
Inventory as proposed by Robert Raskin and Howard
Terry in 1988. This scale has proven to predict narcissistic
behavior very well, but also to lack in statistical
reliability. As a result, W. Keith Campbell, Angelica
M. Bonacci, Jeremy Shelton, Julie J. Exline, and Brad
J. Bushman have created other stand-alone measures
of entitlement that have greater reliability.
Narcissistic entitlement can have both positive and
negative outcomes for the entitled individual. When
individuals act in a narcissistically entitled way, they
may actually receive better treatment or greater resources
than others (and more than they deserve). For example,
the person at the airline counter who says he is a very
important business person and demands to be seated in
first class might actually end up in a first class seat.
However, acts of narcissistic entitlement are often perceived
by others as rude, selfish, and even pathetic. If
upon landing, the businessman appears lost, the other
passengers might simply ignore him rather than offering
directions. Indeed, narcissistic entitlement by individuals
often leads to scorn and replies such as, “Who
died and made you king?”
Narcissistic entitlement can be a short-term and
context-dependent state of mind. An individual might
display narcissistic entitlement in one situation but not

in others. For example, a person may display narcissistic
entitlement at home around his younger brother,
but not around his peers back at school. Narcissistic
entitlement can also be a general feature of an individual’s
personality. Some individuals display more
narcissistic entitlement than do others across most
situations and at most times. For example, a person
might insist upon special treatment from her parents
and deference from her younger sister, demand an
A from a professor in a class when she really earned a
C, and expect everyone to pay for her drinks when she
is out.
See also Narcissism; Psychological Entitlement
Further Readings
W. Keith Campbell
Joshua D. Foster
Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J.,
& Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological entitlement:
Interpersonal consequences and validation of a new
self-report measure. Journal of Personality Assessment,
83, 29–45.
Exline, J. J., Baumeister, R. F., Bushman, B. J., Campbell, W. K.,
& Finkel, E. J. (2004). Too proud to back down:
Narcissistic entitlement as a barrier to forgiveness.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
87, 894–912.
Raskin, R. N., & Terry, H. (1988). A principle components
analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and
further evidence of its construct validity. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 890–902.
NARCISSISTIC REACTANCE
THEORY OF SEXUAL COERCION
Definition
The narcissistic reactance theory of sexual coercion
and rape explains how the personality of rapists intersects
with situational factors to produce reactance.
Reactance is a psychological motive to reassert one’s
sense of freedom when freedom has been denied. In
the case of rape, some men will desire sex more after
they have experienced a sexual rejection. Rapists will
be motivated to reassert their freedom by aggressing
Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Sexual Coercion———607
against the woman who has denied them sex and
by forcing her to have sex. Reactance cannot fully
explain rape because most men do not rape when they
are refused sex. The narcissistic reactance theory of
sexual coercion asserts that men who display narcissistic
personality characteristics are more prone to
rape in the face of sexual refusal.
Reactance Results
From Sexual Refusal
The typical date rape occurs after a man and a woman
have engaged in some sexual activity short of intercourse
such as kissing or oral sex. The man wants to
continue, but the woman refuses. The rapist then uses
physical strength or psychological intimidation to
force the woman to have sexual intercourse. Theories
of psychological reactance help explain why a man
might steal sex from a woman who has refused him.
Reactance is a psychological state that results from
threats to one’s freedom. When a person’s freedom
has been limited by rejection, reactance theory predicts
that the threatened freedom will be viewed as a
forbidden fruit. Held out of reach, the forbidden fruit
is seen as more important than before. Freedom is
reasserted by aggressing against the individual who
has refused and engaging in the behavior that has been
forbidden.
Reactance theory can apply to the typical date rape
scenario. When a woman refuses a sexual advance,
a rapist may perceive this refusal as a threat to his
freedom. Then he may feel more motivated to have
sex with the woman. Some evidence on rape supports
this view. Men who are sexually aggressive believe
that when a woman “teases” and then denies a man,
rape is justified. Ex-lovers and husbands are especially
likely to rape women with whom they have had
prior sexual relations. It is possible that after the
break-up, sex with this woman becomes even more
valuable, and the ex-lover feels he must use force to
reassert the freedom that he has lost.
The Narcissistic Rapist
Narcissism as a general personality trait may help
explain how some men cross the line from sexual
rejection to rape. Narcissists are arrogant and feel
an exaggerated sense of self-importance. They harbor
delusions that they are more successful, important,

608———Need for Affiliation
intelligent, and handsome than the average person.
Because of their perceived superiority, narcissists possess
strong feelings of entitlement. They tend to be
demanding of admiration from others. They are also
exploitative and lack empathy for other people.
Narcissists also become aggressive when they have
been criticized or their egos have been threatened.
Given these characteristics, narcissists would be
especially susceptible to reactance following a sexual
rejection. The narcissist believes that he is superior
to other men in intelligence and attractiveness, and
he becomes aggressive when his self-views are challenged.
A sexual refusal would likely be the ultimate
challenge because the narcissist believes that he is
especially deserving and entitled to a woman’s admiration
and sexual compliance. This increased sense of
entitlement intensifies his desire to have sex following
a refusal and leads to an increased need to reassert his
freedom by forcing a woman to have sex.
Research on rapists supports the idea that rapists
have narcissistic qualities. Rapists tend to be arrogant
and show cognitive delusions. Rapists also tend to
demonstrate a sense of entitlement in that they are
likely to feel that they were entitled to sex with a
woman whom they had courted with effort and money
especially if she had consented to some sexual activity
in the past. Rapists often claim that their victims
were promiscuous. A narcissist would become especially
angry at a woman whom he believed was easy
for other men but refusing of him and would likely
take this refusal as a personal insult: If she has had sex
with an inferior man, she should definitely not refuse
the narcissist! Rapists also show the selective empathy
that narcissists demonstrate. Rapists are unwilling to
see the situation from their victim’s perspective. They
may report that they never thought about how the
woman was experiencing the event or that they
believed the woman actually enjoyed the rape.
Evidence for the Theory
Although ethical restraints prohibit direct laboratory
tests of this theory, some experimental evidence indicates
that narcissism and reactance combine to foster
attitudes that are supportive of date rape. Narcissists
are more likely to endorse myths about rape and show
less empathy for rape victims than are non-narcissists.
Although most men are turned off by a rape that occurs
after a couple has shown mutual affection, narcissists
find the same scenario enjoyable, entertaining, and
sexually arousing. Laboratory tests have also shown
that when a female accomplice in an experiment
refuses to read a sexually explicit passage to a narcissist,
narcissists find this personally insulting and retaliate
against her. Men who are not narcissistic do not
behave similarly. These results suggest that narcissists
support rape that occurs after they believe a man has
been led on, and they experience psychological reactance
when they undergo a sexual refusal.
Kathleen R. Catanese
See also Date Rape; Narcissism; Rape; Reactance
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Wallace, H. M. (2002).
Conquest by force: A narcissistic reactance theory of rape
and sexual coercion. Review of General Psychology,
6, 92–135.
Brehm, J. W. (1966). A theory of psychological reactance.
New York: Academic Press.
Bushman, B. J., Bonacci, A. M., Van Dijk, M., & Baumeister,
R. F. (2003). Narcissism, sexual refusal, and aggression:
Testing a narcissistic reactance model of sexual coercion.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
84, 1027–1040.
NEED FOR AFFILIATION
Definition
Human beings differ from each other in how much
they like to associate with other people. Some people
avoid being alone, put a high priority on their friendships,
and try hard to please other people. Others are
just the opposite: They are content to be alone, they
don’t put much effort into their relationships with
other people, and they aren’t very concerned about
making other people happy. Henry Murray coined the
term need for affiliation to differentiate people who
are generally friendly, outgoing, cooperative, and
eager to join groups from those who are unfriendly,
reserved, and aloof. Most people could probably be
described as having a moderate need for affiliation,
but some people have an extremely low need and others
have an extremely high need.

Murray used the term need to describe a kind of
force within a person that organizes a person’s thoughts,
feelings, and behavior. A person with a high need for
affiliation is so motivated to build and maintain relationships
with other people that many of his or her
thoughts, emotions, and actions are directed toward
fulfilling this motivation.
Nature of the Need
Having a high need for affiliation probably sounds
like an important part of a desirable personality. Many
people, after all, would rather think of themselves as
being friendly than as cold or standoffish. And there
are some advantages to having a high need for affiliation.
Murray noted that people with a high need for
affiliation try hard to make other people happy, which
probably helps them build and maintain strong relationships.
But there are also some disadvantages.
People with high need for affiliation tend to be conforming
and may even go along with unwise choices
made by people around them. Under some circumstances,
people with a high need for affiliation may
also have trouble getting their work done. They may
put such a high priority on socializing that they neglect
some of their other goals.
Murray believed that the way people express their
need for affiliation depends on other aspects of their
personality. A person who is high in the need for affiliation
and also high in need for nurturance might be
extremely kind, but a person who is high in the need
for affiliation and high in the need for deference might
be extremely compliant. In other words, a group of
people who are all high in the need for affiliation
might consist of people who are all outgoing, but they
would differ in other ways according to their unique
need profiles.
Social psychologists have recently shown much
interest in the need to belong, and it is important to
understand how this related concept is different from
the need for affiliation. The need to belong is considered
a universal human drive to establish and maintain
lasting, positive relationships with other people. Most
researchers describe the need to belong as a component
of human nature, or something that all normal
human beings possess. Much research suggests that if
people do not maintain at least a minimum quantity of
enduring, healthy relationships, their well-being will
suffer. The need for affiliation, on the other hand, is
Need for Affiliation———609
used to describe people’s personalities. People vary in
how motivated they are to socialize and establish new
contacts, and this is what is meant by the idea that
there are individual differences in the need for affiliation.
People who are high in the need for affiliation are
more motivated to form relationships than other
people are, and as a result, they may be more successful
at fulfilling their need to belong.
Research Developments
Murray conducted his research on the need for affiliation
in the mid-20th century, and researchers have
since advanced psychologists’ understanding of this
motive considerably. Early research on the need for
affiliation used the Thematic Apperception Test, which
requires respondents to interpret a number of ambiguous
pictures, to identify the strength of people’s need
for affiliation. But since that time, other tests of the
need for affiliation have emerged. For example, Douglas
Jackson designed a need for affiliation scale as part of
his comprehensive measure of personality known as
the Personality Research Form. Years later, Craig Hill
developed the Interpersonal Orientation Scale, a selfreport
questionnaire that measures several specific
components of affiliation motivation. The development
of these and other tests have made it possible for
researchers to find out how the need for affiliation
shapes people’s experiences.
Early research on the need for affiliation yielded
results that confirmed Murray’s description of the
need. Relative to people with a low need for affiliation,
people with a high need for affiliation are more
concerned about others’ acceptance, feel more empathy
for others, are more likely to initiate contacts and
friendships, and are more likely to conform to the wishes
of experts who pressure them into a decision.
Other research has made discoveries that Murray
might not have anticipated. For example, Hill’s research
shows that in some ways women have a higher need
for affiliation than men do. Compared with men,
women report that they get more pleasure from interacting
with other people and are more likely to seek
out others’company when they are upset. Hill’s research
also shows that people with a high need for affiliation
can be discriminating when they choose a conversational
partner: They prefer people who are warm and
friendly to more than reserved people. This result
makes sense in light of much social psychological

610———Need for Closure
research that shows that people tend to like others who
are similar to themselves.
People with a high need for affiliation may also be
better leaders than people with a low need for affiliation.
In a study conducted by Richard Sorrentino and
Nigel Field, students with a high need for affiliation
were described by their fellow students as more
leader-like than students with a low need for affiliation.
But the students who were considered the most
leader-like of all were students who were high in both
the need for achievement and the need for affiliation.
This research suggests that successful leaders are both
ambitious and sociable.
Paul Rose
See also Contingency Model of Leadership; Introversion;
Need to Belong; Thematic Apperception Test; Traits
Further Readings
Hill, C. A. (1987). Affiliation motivation: People who need
people ...but in different ways. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 52, 1008–1018.
Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality: A clinical
and experimental study of fifty men of college age.
New York: Oxford University Press.
NEED FOR CLOSURE
Definition
Need for cognitive closure refers to the desire or motivation
to have a definite answer or knowledge instead
of uncertainty or doubt. The need for closure is
resolved by any answer, and the answer is accepted
simply because it is available. Thus, need for closure
does not refer to knowledge or decisions regarding a
specific question, nor does it refer to the need for accuracy.
The need for closure can arise from within the
person, as a personality trait—or from the situation,
such as when it is urgent to make a decision quickly.
History and Modern Usage
Early psychologists used ideas similar to need for closure,
such as openness to experience and intolerance
of ambiguity, to refer to broad personality traits and an
often dysfunctional style of thinking. Today, need for
closure is described as a broader motivation that may
affect how a person thinks or reacts in a situation. In
addition, need for closure is described as both a stable
personality trait and as something that can be provoked
by the situation.
Situations that may trigger need for closure include
those in which failing to decide has harmful consequences,
as well as situations in which the act of
thinking about or working on the task is unpleasant.
For example, pressure to make quick decisions,
boring tasks, and uncomfortable environments (e.g.,
extreme heat or noise) tend to increase need for closure.
In contrast, individuals may avoid closure when
the task is enjoyable or the answer is obviously wrong.
In addition, individuals vary in their need for closure.
Across situations, some individuals prefer to have
firm answers quickly, whereas others are more comfortable
with uncertainty.
One consequence of need for closure is urgency, or
the desire to come to an answer quickly. Urgency
leads to a tendency to quickly seize upon the first
information that provides an answer. A second consequence
of need for closure is permanence, or the tendency
to stick to an answer. Permanence leads to a
tendency to freeze upon the answer or decision once it
is reached. Thus, need for closure may lead individuals
to focus only on the initial information provided
and to be less likely to change their answers when
confronted with new evidence.
The urgency and permanence tendencies of need
for closure have been shown to affect how individuals
consider information. Need for closure results in focusing
on initial information when forming impressions
of others, searching for fewer alternative explanations,
and using more stereotypes. Need for closure may
result in less empathy and perspective taking because
these may challenge one’s own judgment. Need for
closure may also result in being less persuaded by
other people’s arguments and a preference to interact
with people who are more susceptible to persuasion.
During group interaction, need for closure may
also result in less tolerance of group members who
disagree with the majority or who may hinder task
completion.
See also Cognitive Consistency; Mindfulness and
Mindlessness; Need for Cognition
Janice R. Kelly
Jennifer R. Spoor

Further Readings
Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1998). Cognitive
and social consequences of the need for cognitive
closure. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European
review of social psychology (pp. 133–173). Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.
NEED FOR COGNITION
Definition
Need for cognition refers to an individual’s tendency
to engage in and enjoy activities that require thinking
(e.g., brainstorming puzzles). Some individuals have
relatively little motivation for cognitively complex
tasks. These individuals are described as being low
in need for cognition. Other individuals consistently
engage in and enjoy cognitively challenging activities
and are referred to as being high in need for cognition.
An individual may fall at any point in the distribution,
however.
Background and History
The term need for cognition was originally introduced
by Arthur Cohen and his colleagues in the 1950s and
was brought back into popularity by John Cacioppo
and Richard Petty in the 1980s. In Cohen’s original
work, need for cognition was defined as the need to
make sense of the world. Therefore, greater need for
cognition was associated with preference for structure
and clarity in one’s surroundings. That approach
emphasized intolerance for ambiguity and thus
appears closer to contemporary scales that measure
need for structure or need for closure than to the current
definition of need for cognition. However,
Cacioppo and Petty retained the term need for cognition
in acknowledgment of Cohen and his colleagues’
early work.
Cacioppo and Petty conceptualized need for cognition
as a stable individual difference (i.e., a personality
trait) in the tendency to engage in and enjoy
cognitively effortful tasks across a wide variety of
domains (e.g., math, verbal, spatial). Need for cognition
is assumed to reflect a stable intrinsic motivation
that can be developed over time. In the modern way of
thinking about need for cognition, the emphasis is on
Need for Cognition———611
cognitive processing (i.e., the activity of engaging in
mentally challenging tasks) rather than on cognitive
outcomes (e.g., a structured knowledge of the world).
Importantly, need for cognition taps into differences
in motivation rather than ability. This is supported by
research showing that need for cognition is only moderately
related to measures of ability such as verbal
intelligence, ACT scores, and high school and college
GPA, and continues to predict relevant outcomes after
cognitive ability is controlled. It is a matter of whether
one likes to think, not whether one is good at thinking.
Measurement
Although the Need for Cognition scale was originally
developed as a 34-item inventory, the most commonly
used version contains 18 items that people rate on
5-point scales as being characteristic of themselves
(or not). Some examples of scale items are “I prefer
complex to simple tasks,” “The notion of thinking
abstractly appeals to me,” and “I prefer my life to be
filled with puzzles that I must solve.” The scale has
been established to have high internal consistency,
suggesting that the individual scale items tap into
the same construct. The scale also demonstrates good
validity. That is, the scale correlates with other scales
that measure individual differences that should be
independent of but related to need for cognition. For
instance, the scale correlates positively with other
scales that measure the tendency to make complex
attributions and the tendency to seek relevant information
for decision making and problem solving.
Enjoyment of Cognitive Challenges
Consistent with the definition of need for cognition
(NC), research indicates that high NC individuals
spontaneously engage in a variety of mentally effortful
tasks, whereas low NC individuals will participate
in such activities only when there are external incentives
to do so. For example, high NC individuals distinguished
between strong and weak messages in a
persuasive communication. This occurred regardless
of whether the message came from a trustworthy or
untrustworthy source or took a surprising position or
not. Low NC individuals, on the other hand, distinguished
between strong and weak arguments only
when the arguments came from an untrustworthy source
or took a surprising position. This means that low NC

612———Need for Cognition
individuals scrutinized the message only when there
were other motivations to do so (e.g., to check on
an untrustworthy source). Other special circumstances
that motivate low NC individuals to think include
unexpected arguments, an approaching deadline, and
a personally relevant topic.
This research suggests that high NC individuals
find mentally complex activities inherently enjoyable,
but low NC individuals do not. Much evidence indicates
that high NC individuals experience cognitively
demanding tasks more positively than low NC individuals
do. Several studies demonstrated that compared
with low NC individuals, high NC individuals reported
more positive affective reactions (e.g., ratings of task
enjoyment and pleasantness) and less negative ones
(e.g., frustration and tension) to mental challenges
such as math problems and complex number search
tasks. Furthermore, high NC individuals have a greater
tendency to seek information about new products and
complex issues. For example, they are more likely to
tune in to presidential debates. Such active pursuit
of information reflects high NC individuals’ intrinsic
motivation for mental activity and challenges.
Engagement in Cognitively
Effortful Tasks
Given their enjoyment of mental challenges, it is
expected that high NC individuals have a chronic tendency
to participate in cognitively effortful tasks. For
example, high NC individuals are more likely to have
an abundance of task-relevant thoughts than low NC
individuals do. Furthermore, these thoughts are more
likely to determine the attitudes of high rather than
low NC individuals. For example, in one study, participants
saw an advertisement that contained strong
arguments for an answering machine. High NC individuals
listed more positive thoughts to the strong
arguments presented than did low NC individuals. In
addition, attitudes toward the answering machine
were correlated with thoughts among high NC individuals
but not low NC individuals.
High NC individuals have more thoughts regarding
persuasive messages and other stimuli, and they are
more likely to think about their thoughts, engaging in
metacognition. When high NC individuals are confident
in their thoughts, they rely on them more than
when they lack confidence in them. For low NC individuals,
metacognitive processes are less likely. That
is, they are less likely to think about whether the few
thoughts they have are valid.
In sum, high NC individuals’ thoughts and attitudes
are influenced by their effortful assessment of the
merits of the information they receive and the perceived
validity of their thoughts. Low NC individuals,
on the other hand, are more affected by simple cues
that are contained in communications. In one study,
participants viewed an ad for a typewriter. The ad was
endorsed by either two unattractive women or two
attractive women. Although high NC individuals gave
equally positive ratings to the typewriter regardless of
endorser attractiveness, low NC individuals’ ratings
were more positive when the typewriter was endorsed
by attractive than unattractive women. Because the
attitudes of high NC individuals are more likely to be
based on effortful thought, they tend to be held more
strongly. Indeed, research has demonstrated that the
attitudes of high NC individuals, compared with low
NC individuals, are more persistent, more resistant to
attacks, and more predictive of behavior.
Besides attitude-related consequences, another
implication of high NC individuals’ tendency to process
information is that they have better memory for information
to which they have been exposed. For
instance, when students received arguments about the
implementation of senior comprehensive exams, those
high in NC recalled a greater proportion of the arguments
than did those low in NC. In addition, high NC
individuals have more knowledge on a variety of
issues. In the domain of politics, high NC individuals
listed more information about presidential candidates
and more consequences of electing various candidates
to office. In other research, high NC individuals listed
more types of birds and performed better on a trivia
test than low NC individuals did.
Biased Processing
Sometimes, variables can bias one’s processing.
Because high NC individuals tend to focus on generating
their own thoughts to information rather than relying
on simple cues, their processing of information is
more susceptible to various biases. One source of bias
is mood. In one study, positive mood made attitudes
more favorable in both high and low NC individuals.
The difference is that whereas mood had a direct
impact on attitudes in low NC individuals (i.e., mood
served as a simple cue), it influenced attitudes in high

NC individuals in a more thoughtful way (i.e., by
affecting their perception of the message arguments).
Although high NC individuals may sometimes be
biased in their processing, they are also more likely to
correct their judgments if biases are detected because
they are more likely to engage in the cognitive effort
required for such correction. When the biasing factor
is subtle and not very salient, it tends to bias the
thoughts of high NC individuals (as just described),
but when the biasing factor is more blatant, high NC
individuals tend to correct for the bias. When they
overcorrect for the bias, this can actually lead to a
reverse bias.
Need for cognition is an often-researched variable
in social psychology because of its implications for
people’s attitudes, judgments, and decision making.
This is because whether an individual is high or low in
NC influences how the individual processes information
and reacts to variables such as a source’s trustworthiness,
the individual’s own mood, and so on.
Ya Hui Michelle See
Richard E. Petty
See also Elaboration Likelihood Model; Individual
Differences; Intrinsic Motivation; Traits
Further Readings
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Feinstein, J. A., & Jarvis, W. B. G.
(1996). Dispositional differences in cognitive motivation:
The life and times of individuals varying in need for
cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 197–253.
NEED FOR POWER
Definition
Need for power is defined as the desire to control or
influence others. It is not necessarily associated with
actually having power, but instead with the desire to
have power. In 1933, Henry Murray defined a long list
of what he considered to be basic human needs. These
needs were seen as directing behavior, and people
were assumed to vary by how important each need
was to them as an individual. One of these needs was
the need for power. Some of the early empirical work
on need for power was done by David McClelland and
Need for Power———613
David Winter, who refined the definition and developed
methods of testing for people’s level of need
for power. Need for power (also called power motivation)
was seen as one of the three fundamental social
motives, along with need for achievement and need
for affiliation.
Associated Behaviors
Needs for power can be expressed in behavior in many
ways. One of these is the use of physical or psychological
aggression to force others to comply with what
one wants from them. One can also express the need
for power through gaining a reputation as an important
person. Other behaviors associated with high power
motivation include trying to affect the emotions of others.
This could be done by telling jokes, or by a musical
or dramatic performance. Finally, need for power
can be expressed through providing (often unsolicited)
advice or help. The association of helping behavior
with other expressions of power motivation is not intuitively
obvious, but the diverse set of behaviors listed
here have been tied together empirically. They are all
forms of exerting power over others. This power is
sometimes exercised for one’s own direct benefit, but
can also be done with the apparent goal of doing something
good for another person.
Some behaviors that have been found to characterize
those high in need for power include having a high
level of physical fights or verbal arguments with
others. Enjoyment of debating might be a characteristic
of someone high in need for power. Those who
express their power motivation in this way may be
very uncomfortable when others see them as powerless
or weak. For this reason, they may be seen as hostile
or chronically angry. This type of expression of
need for power is often seen in negative terms.
Another type of behavior associated with need for
power that is more socially acceptable is taking leadership
in group situations. Those high in need for
power enjoy running an organization, making decisions,
or being in charge of a group. They run for
elected office. They define what they are doing as
motivated by “service” or “duty,” but this labeling of
their behavior may be a result of the fact that American
society frowns on people openly saying they like to
have power.
Gaining a reputation is another expression of power
motivation. People may display their need for power

614———Need for Power
by making sure their names are visible on their doors,
writing letters that will be published, with their names
identified, or doing other things that stand out and
lead to other people knowing who they are. One way
of building a reputation is to have possessions that are
valued by others in the group. These prestige possessions
might be particular types of clothing, or music,
or any other objects that will impress others. When
asked to remember members of a group at a later
point, those high in power motivation are more often
remembered than are those low in power motivation.
Those high in need for power may also express this
by taking a guiding role within their close relationships.
They like to give advice to their friends and to
propose and plan joint activities. These types of
behaviors result in the high-need-for-power individual
being more dominant in the relationship. However,
when two people who are both high in power motivation
do form a relationship, they may alternate in taking
the dominant role within the relationship.
Helping behavior resulting from high need for
power can be expressed in work roles. One form of
this is mentoring, whereby one takes responsibility for
guiding a person of lower status within the organization.
Mentors motivated by need for power tend to
believe that by mentoring others, they will gain a more
positive reputation within the organization. By establishing
relationships with talented junior members of
the organization, they also build a power base that
may enable them to gain more power within the organization
as those they have mentored rise in the organizational
hierarchy.
Knowing levels of need for power provides information
that can predict job choice and performance.
People who are successful managers within large
corporations have been found to be high in need for
power. Those working in government positions, where
one is providing some type of service, or enforcing
regulations, have also been found to be high in power
motivation. Being a journalist is another powerrelated
occupation, possibly because of the link with
gaining reputation. The set of occupations known as
the helping professions are associated with high
power motivation. Thus, people who are interested in
teaching, being members of the clergy, or being psychologists
all tend to be high in need for power. In
these types of fields, although the goal is to provide
important help to other people, one is also able to
exert influence over others and to express desires for
power in a way that is socially acceptable, especially
for women, who tend to dominate in many of these
helping professions.
Although there are many ways of expressing power
motivation, those high in the motive may focus on
only one type of expression, or they may display
many of these. They may express power in one way at
one point in their lives, but in another way at a different
point. It has been suggested that more aggressive
forms of power expression are more common in
younger adults, whereas parenting and helping others
may be seen more in older adults. Social role expectations
affect power motivation expression as well. In
general, men are more able to express power through
aggression and leadership in large organizations.
Women often express power in close relationships or
the family.
Testing Methods
Need for power is considered to be an unconscious
motivation. People are not necessarily aware of their
own level of need for power. In fact, openly admitting
a desire to have power or influence is not considered
socially acceptable, and many would deny having a
high need for power. Because of this, researchers cannot
simply ask people if having power is important
to them. Instead, a variety of projective techniques are
used, where people are given some type of vaguely
defined task. One of the best known of these is the
Thematic Apperception Test. This involves showing
people a series of fuzzy pictures and asking them to
write a story about each of them. It is assumed that
they will draw details in these stories from their own
unconscious as they write these stories. Stories are
coded for the existence of specific types of themes and
given a score for need for power (or other psychological
needs). This coding system is very complex and
extensive training is needed to do this well. More
recently, power motivation has been measured
through asking about some of the behaviors mentioned
earlier that are associated with the basic need,
as determined by the earlier Thematic Apperception
Test story coding. Those who display these poweroriented
behaviors are assumed to be high in the need
for power.
Irene Hanson Frieze
See also Control; Influence; Leadership; Power; Thematic
Apperception Test

Further Readings
Frieze, I. H., & Boneva, B. S. (2001). Power motivation and
motivation to help others. In A. Y. Lee-Chai & J. A. Bargh
(Eds.), The use and abuse of power: Multiple perspectives
on the causes of corruption (pp. 75–89). Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience.
New York: Wiley.
Winter, D. G. (1973). The power motive. New York:
Macmillan.
NEED TO BELONG
Definition
The need to belong refers to the idea that humans have
a fundamental motivation to be accepted into relationships
with others and to be a part of social groups. The
fact that belongingness is a need means that human
beings must establish and maintain a minimum quantity
of enduring relationships. These relationships should
have more positivity than negativity and be meaningful
and significant to the relationship partners.
Background and History
The psychological history of a belongingness motive
has a long history, with psychologists including
Sigmund Freud recognizing that humans need to be a
part of groups and relationships. Freud believed that
the desire for relationships comes from people’s sex
drive or was connected more to bonds between
parents and children. Abraham Maslow, whose great
psychological legacy was to create a motivational
hierarchy, put belongingness needs in between satisfying
physical needs (such as being fed and getting
enough sleep) and needs for self-esteem. Thus, these
early psychologists recognized that humans strive to
be a part of relationships, but they did not place
supreme significance on this drive.
John Bowlby was probably the first psychologist to
develop the idea that belongingness is a special need
and was one of the first to perform experimental tests
on the idea. Bowlby is best known for his attachment
theory, which says that people’s early relationships
with their caregivers (e.g., parents) are the foundation
for how people will respond to others in close, intimate
relationships for the rest of their lives. Bowlby
Need to Belong———615
saw that people varied in how they behaved toward
people they were close to, and that these variations
could be observed among children and their mothers.
The most influential version of the need to belong
theory was proposed by Roy Baumeister and Mark
Leary, whose theory put relationship needs as one of
the most important needs that humans must fulfill.
They compared satisfying the need to belong to securing
necessities, such as food and shelter, which are
needed to survive. Baumeister and Leary said that satisfying
the belongingness motive requires that two
aspects of relationships be met: The first part is that
people need to have positive and pleasant, not negative,
interactions with others. The second part specifies
that these interactions cannot be random but,
rather, should take place as part of stable, lasting relationships
in which people care about each other’s
long-term health and well-being.
The reason that the need to belong is essential for
humans is that being a part of groups and intimate relationships
helped humans to survive in ancestral history.
When enemies would attack, when animals would prey,
or when it was difficult to find food or shelter, those
people who were part of a group were more likely to
survive than was the lone man or woman needing to
fend for himself or herself. Reproduction too was much
easier with another person, as is fairly obvious, and
those people who could get into and start a part of
a band of others were more likely to have offspring
and thus pass their genes onto future generations of
humans. Even if loners can create a pregnancy by having
sex during a chance encounter with one another,
those children would be less likely to survive to adulthood
than would children who grow up supported and
protected by a group. In these ways, evolution likely
favored early humans with a stronger need to belong,
and so today’s humans are mainly descended from
them—and therefore probably inherited that strong need.
Although early theories about the need to belong
emphasized one-to-one relationships, more recent
work has made clear that larger groups can satisfy the
need also. Some people (and perhaps men more than
women) can feel connected to a large group, such as a
team or company or university, and this bond can take
the place of intimate relationships to some extent.
Importance and Consequences
The importance of the need to belong was documented
by Baumeister and Leary when they detailed

616———Need to Belong
the emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of the
need to belong. One way to look at the importance of
the need to belong is to document what happens when
the need is unmet. The reason that scientists would
examine the consequences of an unsatisfied need to
belong is the same reason that scientists would need to
study what happens when people fail to get enough
food or water; not having enough of something and
seeing the negative outcomes that follow gives meaningful
scientific information that the missing piece (in
this case, relationships with others) is essential for
healthy functioning.
Support for need to belong idea was demonstrated
by research showing that social bonds are formed easily
and without the need for special circumstances or
additions. Even when people must part (such as when
graduating from college), they are often quite upset
about having to part and consequently make promises
to keep the relationships going through visits, mail,
telephone, and so on. Sometimes people who are not
going to see each other again will say “see you soon”
as a parting because the idea of not seeing someone
again is too unsettling to say aloud.
There are cognitive (mental) components to the
need to belong. For instance, people seem to categorize
information in terms of relationships, and they
readily see relationships between people, even when
they do not exist. Have you ever been at a store and
had the clerk ask if you and the person next to you in
line (a stranger) are on the same bill? This is an example
of people’s tendency to see relationships between
others. When two people are part of a couple, the cognitive
representations of the self and the partner get
clumped together in mind, making it so that information
about the partner is classified in a similar manner
as to the self. When relationships break up, people
find themselves thinking about the relationship partner
over and over again, with thoughts of the other
person intruding into other thoughts.
Emotions play a large role in the formation and dissolution
of relationships. When people make a new
friend or fall in love, they experience happiness and
joy. Getting into a desired social group, such as a
sorority or academic club, brings people happiness.
Despite the stress that comes from having a child,
people are excited about becoming a parent before it
happens, express positivity with being a parent (usually)
during the child’s years at home, and look back
on the experience as being joyful and rewarding.
Having a new relationship, especially one as central to
the person as having one’s own child, is likely responsible
for those good feelings. In fact, being happy with
one’s life is largely the result of how many relationships
one has and how satisfying those relationships
are. Although people may think that money makes
them happy, it turns out that being a part of happy,
stable relationships is a much bigger influence on
happiness.
Conversely, when people are excluded from groups
or their relationships fall apart, they feel a variety of
negative emotions. Anxiety is one of the primary
forms of negative emotions resulting from a loss of a
relationship, with children as young as 1 year old
showing separation anxiety when they must be without
their mothers for some time. Depression and sadness
too can result from not being accepted into
groups or relationships, and often depression and anxiety
go hand in hand when people feel rejected.
Jealousy is another negative feeling that is directly
related to interpersonal bonds. Jealousy is the feeling
that someone is going to (or has) taken away something
that one has and does not want to lose (such as
a special relationship partner). More than 50% of
people say they are jealous people, and the number
may be even higher than that because some people try
to hide their jealousy. Loneliness is a chronic state of
feeling that one does not have enough satisfying relationships.
Loneliness is more than not having social
contact because a person could have multiple interactions
throughout the day but still feel lonely. Feeling
lonely is an example of how interactions must take
place in the context of long-lasting relationships to
satisfy the need to belong.
Researchers have documented physical ills that
occur when people are not part of groups or relationships.
For instance, married people have better health
than single, divorced, or widowed people. Married
people live longer, have fewer physical health problems,
and have fewer mental health problems. Married
people who are diagnosed with cancer survive longer
than do single people who have similar forms of
cancer. Lonely people are especially known to have ill
health. Researchers have studied lonely people for
some time and have shown that they get more common
illnesses, such as head colds and the flu, as well
as have weakened immune systems more generally.
Women who have eating disorders are more likely to
have had troubled relationships with their mothers
when they were young. Veterans who feel they have
a lot of social support are less likely to suffer from

post-traumatic stress disorder when they return from
battle. In short, people have higher quality lives and
live longer when they feel a part of supportive, caring
relationships.
Individual Differences
People differ in how much they need to be around others
and how badly it hurts not to have other people
accept them. Mark Leary and his colleagues created
a scale, the Need to Belong Scale, to measure people’s
individual needs for acceptance. People who score
high on the Need to Belong Scale want badly to be
accepted into social interactions and react strongly to
being excluded. People who score low on the scale
desire fewer close relationships, although again a minimum
number of close ties are important for all human
beings.
Kathleen D. Vohs
See also Attachment Theory; Close Relationships;
Interdependent Self-Construals; Kin Selection; Rejection
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to
belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a
fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin,
117, 497–529.
NEGATIVE-STATE RELIEF MODEL
Definition
The negative-state relief (NSR) model is a theory
that attempts to describe how one situational factor—
sadness—relates to the willingness to help others.
Specifically, this theory predicts that at least under
certain circumstances, a temporary feeling of sadness
is likely to result in an increased willingness to help
others. For example, a person who is sad because a
close friend just cancelled a planned visit would be
more likely to help a stranger push his or her car out
of a snow bank. Why would a sad mood lead to an
increased willingness to help others? According to
this theory, this is for selfish reasons. Specifically,
people have been socialized in such a way that they
Negative-State Relief Model———617
are rewarded for helping other people. Over time,
people internalize this and find helping others rewarding.
When a person is sad, he or she is motivated to
repair that mood and anticipates that helping another
person would do so. More simply, when people are
sad, they may be more likely to help others because
they believe that doing so will make them feel better.
Significance and History
Human beings would have been unlikely to survive
their early history as a species without the existence of
helping behavior. Even in modern times, human
beings often need assistance from others. Sometimes
such assistance is provided; other times, it is not.
Knowing why people do or do not help others in particular
situations, then, is important both for a complete
understanding of human social behavior and for
informing attempts to increase helping behavior. The
study of helping behavior has a rich history in social
psychology, and the NSR model is an early theory of
such behavior.
Early studies on the association between positive
mood and helping provided unambiguous results.
Being in a positive mood is consistently associated
with a greater willingness to help others. This might
suggest that being in a negative mood ought to make
people less likely to help others, but early research on
this topic provided less clear results. Some of these
studies found that people were more likely to help
when in a negative mood whereas others found that
people were less likely to help when in a negative
mood. The NSR model was an attempt to reconcile
these inconsistent findings. This theory suggests that
people in a negative mood are more likely to help others
only when the helping behavior is not overly aversive
and when they have internalized the rewarding
nature of helping others. If helping another person is
too costly, then doing so is unlikely to improve one’s
mood. Moreover, if a person does not anticipate that
helping another person will improve one’s mood, sadness
is unlikely to result in increased helping.
Evidence
Considerable evidence indicates that helping other
people does indeed improve one’s mood. In experimental
studies, participants who were able to provide
help to another person reported that they were in
better moods than did participants who were not given

618———Neuroticism
a chance to provide help to another person. This suggests
that helping others may be a successful means of
repairing a sad mood, and that people may be aware
of this. These findings support the NSR model.
Direct evidence also shows that the induction of a
sad mood causes people to be more helpful. Pre-teen
and teenage research participants who were asked to
recall depressing events were more likely to help others
when given a chance. However, this pattern was
reversed in younger children. These findings provide
nice support for the NSR model. Older participants,
who presumably have learned that helping other
people is rewarding, were more likely to help when
they were sad. Younger participants, however, presumably
have not yet internalized the lesson that helping
others is rewarding, and therefore do not do so as
a means of improving their own mood.
Additional evidence is consistent with other aspects
of the NSR model. First, research has demonstrated
that negative moods only lead to increased helping
when the cost of such help is relatively low. This
makes sense given that incurring high costs to help
someone else is likely to offset any mood improvement
resulting from the provision of help. Second, evidence
suggests that sad people help even more when they
view their own mood as changeable. This, too, makes
sense in light of the NSR model. If a person does not
believe that his or her mood is changeable, it follows
that helping another person will not improve mood. It
makes sense, then, that they help less than do people
who do think their moods can change.
Whereas the NSR model, as originally written, was
intended to apply only to sadness, some evidence suggests
that it may apply to at least one other negative
emotion. Studies indicate that the experience of guilt
is consistently associated with a greater likelihood of
helping others. Other studies indicate that negative
emotions like anger and anxiety do not increase helping,
however.
Controversy
Despite evidence in support of the NSR model, there
are critics. Some researchers have found results that
seem to contradict the model. For example, evidence
indicates that sadness leads to increased helping even
when people anticipate that their mood will improve
for other reasons. This seems to contradict the NSR
model because it shows that sad people are more
likely to help even when they do not need to do so to
improve their moods. Moreover, an analysis of several
published studies has challenged key assumptions of
the NSR model (e.g., that the relationship between
sadness and helping increases with age). This analysis
has its own critics, however, and there is still disagreement
regarding the accuracy of the NSR model.
Regardless, the NSR model has contributed to psychologists’
understanding of conditions under which
people are more or less likely to help. It has generated
a substantial amount of research, continues to do so,
and is likely to have an enduring influence, despite
differences of opinion regarding its accuracy.
Steven M. Graham
See also Altruism; Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis; Helping
Behavior; Prosocial Behavior
Further Readings
Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Griffit, C. A., Barrientos, S.,
Brandt, J. R., Sprengelmeyer, P., et al. (1989). Negativestate
relief and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 922–933.
Cialdini, R. B., & Kenrick, D. T. (1976). Altruism as
hedonism: A social developmental perspective on the
relationship of negative mood state and helping. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 907–914.
NEUROTICISM
Definition
Neuroticism refers to a broad personality trait dimension
representing the degree to which a person experiences
the world as distressing, threatening, and unsafe.
Each individual can be positioned somewhere on this
personality dimension between extreme poles: perfect
emotional stability versus complete emotional chaos.
Highly neurotic individuals tend to be labile (which
means they have plenty of emotional reactions),
anxious, tense, and withdrawn. Individuals who are
low in neuroticism tend to be content, confident, and
stable. The latter report fewer physical and psychological
problems and less stress than do highly neurotic
individuals.
Neuroticism is associated with distress and dissatisfaction.
Neurotic individuals (i.e., those who are
high on the neuroticism dimension) tend to feel dissatisfied
with themselves and their lives. They are
more likely to report minor health problems and to

feel general discomfort in a wide range of situations.
Neurotic individuals are more prone to negative emotions
(e.g., anxiety, depression, anger, guilt). Empirical
studies suggest that extremely high levels of neuroticism
are associated with prolonged and pervasive misery
in both the neurotic individuals and those close
to them.
History
The concept of neuroticism can be traced back to
ancient Greece and the Hippocratic model of four
basic temperaments (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic,
and melancholic, the latter most closely approximating
neuroticism). In modern psychometric studies of personality
and psychopathology, neuroticism tends to
be identified as a first general factor (i.e., the variable
with the broadest power in explaining individual differences).
For example, as much as 50% of the variability
in “internalizing” forms of psychopathology
(mental illness) such as depression, anxiety, obsessivecompulsion,
phobia, and hysteria can be explained by
a general dimension of neuroticism. For this reason,
neuroticism almost always appears in modern trait
models of personality, though sometimes with slightly
different theoretical formulations or names (e.g., trait
anxiety, repression-sensitization, ego-resiliency, negative
emotionality). Hans Eysenck popularized the term
neuroticism in the 1950s by including it as a key scale
in his popular personality inventory. Neuroticism
figures prominently in the influential Big Five model
of personality disposition and in tests designed to
measure the Big Five, such as the NEO Personality
Inventory. Neuroticism is even reflected in inventories
designed for clinical psychological use, such as the
recently developed “Demoralization” scale on the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory–2.
Growing but still limited evidence suggests that
most major personality traits (including Neuroticism)
identified by Western psychology manifest universally.
Evidence of the importance of neuroticism in
individuals from diverse cultures (and who use different
languages) can be found in large-scale crosscultural
studies of personality.
Biological Basis
Accruing research data show persuasively that individual
differences in neuroticism are substantially
heritable (which means they are passed from parent to
child). Heritability estimates based on twin studies
Neuroticism———619
generally fall in the 40% to 60% range. The remaining
individual differences in neuroticism are attributed
primarily to unique (nonfamilial) environmental differences;
the shared familial environment appears to
exert virtually no reliable influence on individual differences
in neuroticism. Researchers speculate that
overreactivity of the limbic system in the brain is
associated with high levels of neuroticism, but specific
neurochemical mechanisms or neuroanatomical
loci have not yet been identified.
Costs of Extreme Levels
of Neuroticism
Highly neurotic individuals are defensive pessimists.
They experience the world as unsafe and use fundamentally
different strategies in dealing with distress
than non-neurotic people do. They are vigilant against
potential harm in their environment and constantly
scan the environment for evidence of potential harm.
They may withdraw from reality and engage in protective
behaviors when they detect danger.
Highly neurotic individuals tend to be poor problem
solvers. Because of their tendency to withdraw,
they tend to possess an impoverished repertoire of
behavioral alternatives for addressing the demands of
reality. Consequently, they tend to engage in mental
role-play (rumination and fantasy) instead of constructive
problem-solving behaviors. In contrast to
their impoverished behavioral repertoires, however,
they may possess a rich inner world. Introspective and
apt to analyze their thoughts and feelings, they are
highly invested in seeking the true nature of their
intrapsychic experiences. Successful artists (e.g.,
Woody Allen) are sometimes neurotic individuals
who have developed creative channels through which
to tap their rich, overpopulated intrapsychic worlds.
Although high neuroticism is related to a deflated
sense of well-being, high levels of neuroticism are not
always associated with unfavorable characteristics.
Neurotic behaviors may be essential for survival by
facilitating safety through the inhibition of risky
behaviors. Neurotic individuals tend to possess high
anticipatory apprehension that may orient them to pay
closer attention to contingencies previously associated
with punishments. Also, the subjective discomfort
(i.e., anxiety) regarding violations of social
convention is greater in a neurotic individual than in
others; thus, it is less likely that a neurotic individual
will become involved in antisocial activity. For
instance, adolescents with extremely low neuroticism

620———Nonconscious Emotion
have been shown to possess a higher risk of adult
criminality and to experience low levels of uncomfortable
physiological arousal over violations of social
conventions.
Keenly attuned to their inner experiences, those
high in neuroticism are also attentive to their physical
discomforts. Their health maintenance behaviors (e.g.,
consultations with a physician) are more frequent than
those of individuals with less neuroticism. Although
their complaints regarding health are more frequent,
their objectively assessed health is not poorer than
those low in neuroticism. To the contrary, their general
health is often found to be better, for example, with
less frequent diagnosis of cancer. Researchers hypothesize
that this finding is attributable to early detection
of potentially harmful symptoms associated with frequent
health maintenance behaviors.
Sangil Kwon
Nathan C. Weed
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Defensive Pessimism;
Genetic Influences on Social Behavior; Individual
Differences; Traits; Twin Studies
Further Readings
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980). Influence of
extroversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being:
Happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 38, 668–678.
Goldberg, L. R. (1993). The structure of phenotypic
personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26–34.
Watson, D., & Casillas, A. (2003). Neuroticism: Adaptive and
maladaptive features. In E. Chang & L. Sanna (Eds.), Virtue,
vice, and personality: The complexity of behavior
(pp. 145–161). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.
Wiggins, J. S. (Ed.). (1986). The five-factor model of
personality: Theoretical perspectives. New York:
Guilford Press.
NONCONSCIOUS EMOTION
It seems that people can be wrong about or unaware of
many things, but at least they can be sure about their
own emotions. Yet, psychologists challenge even that
certainty and point out that one’s emotional life can be
a mystery, even to oneself. The idea of nonconscious
emotion proposes in its strongest form that people can
be in an emotional state (as demonstrated by its impact
on behavior, physiology, and cognition) without having
any conscious awareness of being in that state.
Evidence
One source of speculation about the relation between
emotion and awareness are the works of Sigmund
Freud. Freud clearly believed that people can be wrong
about the cause of their emotion (as when a person’s
anger at his or her boss comes from the similarity of
the boss to the person’s father) or the exact nature of
their emotions (as when a person confuses love with
hate). There is little empirical support for Freud’s
most dramatic speculations. However, some evidence
indicates that people can be mistaken about some
aspects of their emotional states. For example, one
study found that in phobic individuals, negative mood
can be elicited by presenting them with fear-relevant
snakes and spiders. Another study found that positive
mood can be elevated by repeated subliminal presentation
of simple geometric figures. Many studies
demonstrated that arousal resulting from one source
(e.g., crossing a bridge) can be mistaken as deriving
from another source (e.g., romantic attraction).
Note, however, that in these studies, people were
aware of their emotions (though not of the causes).
Could an emotion itself be nonconscious? Among psychologists,
the issue is somewhat controversial. Some
researchers think that the presence of a conscious feeling
(the phenomenal component of emotion) is necessary
to call a state an emotion. Other researchers think
that conscious feeling is only one aspect of emotion,
and the presence of emotion can be detected in behavioral
and physiological changes. The latter possibility
is supported by several lines of evidence.
First, from the standpoint of evolution and neuroscience,
at least some forms of emotional reaction
should exist independently of subjective correlates.
Evolutionarily speaking, the ability to have conscious
feelings is a late achievement compared with the ability
to have behavioral affective reactions to emotional
stimuli. Basic affective reactions are widely shared by
animals, including reptiles and fish, and at least in
some species may not involve conscious awareness
comparable with that in humans. After all, the original
function of emotion was to allow the organism to react
appropriately to positive or negative events, and conscious
feelings might not always have been required.

The neurocircuitry needed for basic affective
responses, such as a positive reaction to a pleasant
sensation or a disliking reaction to a threatening stimulus,
is largely contained in emotional brain structures
that lie below the cortex, such as the nucleus accumbens,
amygdala, hypothalamus, and even lower brain
stem. These subcortical structures evolved early and
may carry out limited operations that are essentially
preconscious, compared with the elaborate human
cortex at the top of the brain, which is more involved
in conscious emotional feelings. Yet even limited subcortical
structures on their own are capable of some
basic affective reactions. A dramatic demonstration of
this point comes from affective neuroscience studies
with anencephalic human infants. The brain of such
infants is congenitally malformed, possessing only a
brain stem, and lacking nearly all structures at the top
or front of the brain, including the entire cortex. Yet
sweet tastes of sugar still elicit positive facial expressions
resembling liking from anencephalic infants,
whereas bitter tastes elicit negative facial expressions
resembling disgust.
Even in normal brains, the most effective “brain
tweaks” so far discovered for enhancing basic related
affective reactions all involve deep brain structures
below the cortex. Thus, animal studies have shown
that liking for sweetness increases after a drug that
activates opioid receptors is injected into the nucleus
accumbens (a reward-related structure at the base of
the front of the brain). Liking reactions to sugar can
even be enhanced by injecting a drug that activates
other receptors into the brain stem, which is perhaps
the most basic component of the brain. Such examples
reflect the persisting importance of early-evolved neurocircuitry
in generating behavioral emotional reactions
in modern mammalian brains. In short, evidence
from affective neuroscience suggests that basic affective
reactions are mediated largely by brain structures
deep below the cortex, raising the possibility that
these reactions might not be accessible to conscious
awareness.
However, neuroscientific evidence from animals
and brain-damaged patients by itself is only suggestive
about the idea of nonconscious emotion. Fortunately,
there are some demonstrations of nonconscious emotion
in typical individuals. One study explored nonconscious
emotion in a paradigm where participants
rated visible Chinese ideographs preceded by subliminal
happy or angry faces. Though the subliminal
faces influenced the ratings of ideographs, participants
Nonconscious Emotion———621
interviewed after the experiment denied experiencing
any changes in their conscious feelings. Furthermore,
participants’ judgments were still influenced by subliminal
faces even when they were asked not to base
their judgments of ideographs on their emotional feelings.
Even better evidence for nonconscious emotion
comes from a study showing that participants are
unable to report a conscious feeling at the same time
a consequential behavior reveals the presence of an
affective reaction. Specifically, in this study participants
were subliminally presented with a series of
happy, neutral, or angry emotional facial expressions.
Immediately after the subliminal affect induction,
some participants first rated their conscious feelings
(mood and arousal) and then poured themselves and
consumed a novel fruit drink. Other participants first
poured and consumed a drink and then rated their conscious
feelings. The results showed that, regardless of
the task order, the ratings of conscious feelings were
unaffected by subliminal faces. Yet, participants’ consumption
behavior and drink ratings were influenced
by subliminal affective stimuli, especially when participants
were thirsty. Specifically, thirsty participants
poured more drink from the pitcher and drank more
from their cups after happy, rather than after angry,
faces. In short, these results suggest a possibility of
nonconscious emotion in the strong sense—a reaction
powerful enough to alter behavior, but of which
people are simply not aware, even when attending to
their feelings.
Implications
Thus, it seems that there are situations when a person
can have an emotional reaction without any awareness
of that reaction. This phenomenon has several important
implications. For example, nonconscious emotions
are, almost by definition, hard to control, thus raising
the possibility of insidious influence by stimuli strong
enough to change behavior without influencing conscious
feelings. Clinically, the idea of unconscious
emotion is relevant to certain kinds of psychiatric disorder,
such as alexithymia, characterized by inability
to access or describe one’s own feelings. The possibility
that emotional behavior may occur without
consciousness also raises some troubling questions
whether, for example, facial or bodily emotional
expressions (including that of pain) of brain-damaged
patients reflect an activity of nonconscious emotional
programs or some minimal consciousness.

622———Nonconscious Processes
The existence of nonconscious emotional reactions
does not mean that conscious feelings are epiphenomenal—which
means an interesting but unnecessary
“icing on emotional cake” that plays little role in
controlling behavior. Clearly, conscious feelings play
an important function in what people do and deserve
a central place in emotion research and clinical practice.
However, the research suggests that many aspects
of what is called emotion may be separable from conscious
feeling, and that researchers and practitioners
of emotion science should not limit themselves to
self-reports of subjective experiences when assessing
the presence of emotion.
Several critical questions need to be addressed
by future research. First, nonconscious states might
be primarily differentiated only on a positive-negative
valence, rather than on more qualitative aspects associated
with specific emotions (fear, anger, disgust,
etc.). Some evidence indicates that subcortical circuitry
is capable of qualitative differentiation, and
studies could test whether different emotional behaviors
could be elicited without accompanying conscious
feelings. Second, the human studies discussed here
relied on simple and highly learned stimuli, such as
subliminal facial expressions. Future research should
address whether complex, culturally coded stimuli
can also elicit valenced behavioral changes without
accompanying feelings. Finally, future work should
examine what exact psychological and neural mechanisms
determine whether an emotional reaction
remains nonconscious or is accompanied by conscious
feelings. The scientific research on nonconscious
emotion has just began, and the near future is certain to
bring many exciting findings.
See also Affect; Emotion; Mere Exposure Effect;
Nonconscious Processes
Further Readings
Piotr Winkielman
Damasio, A. R. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body
and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Ohman, A., Flykt, A., & Lundqvist, D. (2000). Unconscious
emotion: Evolutionary perspectives, psychophysiological
data and neuropsychological mechanisms. In R. D. Lane,
L. Nadel, & G. Ahern (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience of
emotion (pp. 296–327). New York: Oxford University Press.
Winkielman, P., & Berridge, K. C. (2004). Unconscious emotion.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 120–123.
NONCONSCIOUS PROCESSES
Definition
Nonconscious (or unconscious) processes are all
the processes people are not consciously aware of.
As opposed to what most people think, nonconscious
processes make up most interesting psychological
processes. People are only consciously aware of a
very limited subset of psychological processes.
Analysis
There is logic behind this division of labor between
nonconscious and conscious processes whereby consciousness
is only involved in a very limited subset.
First, consciousness can generally do only one thing
at a time. You cannot simultaneously engage in two
activities that both require conscious attention (e.g.,
watching a good movie and reading a book). Second,
the amount of information consciousness can process
is very limited. In the 1950s, researchers tried to
compare the amount of information consciousness
can handle with the amount all our senses (all nonconscious
processes combined) can deal with. They
measured information in bits—the simple dichotomous
unit computers work with. They found, for
instance, that when we read, we can process about 50
bits per second (this is a fairly short sentence).
Generally, consciousness can process about 70 bits
per second. Our senses though, can deal with a stunning
amount of information: about 11.2 million bits
per second.
It is difficult to quantify the processing capacity
of humans, so one should not take these numbers too
literally—they are approximations. Still, the difference
is enormous. If we translate them to distances,
we could say that if the processing capacity of all our
senses is the height of the Empire State Building,
the processing capacity of consciousness is a tenth of
an inch. No wonder most psychological processes are
nonconscious!
Structural Versus Learned
Nonconscious Processes
Some psychological processes are nonconscious
simply because we are the way we are. Other psychological
processes are nonconscious because they are
well-learned. Initially, such processes are conscious.

It is impossible to provide an exhaustive list of the
structural nonconscious processes and the learned
nonconscious processes because there are too many.
Examples have to suffice.
An example of a structural nonconscious process is
search in memory. If I ask you, “What are the three
largest cities in the United States?,” you will be able to
come up with an answer (the correct one is New York,
Los Angeles, and Chicago). However, you do not really
have conscious insight about how this works. Your nonconscious
provides your consciousness with answers,
but how you derive the answers is a mystery to consciousness.
Memory search is a nonconscious process.
An example of a learned nonconscious process is
an increase in achievement motivation when you do
an exam. As children, we learn that we when we do an
exam or test, we have to do our best. We concentrate
hard, we think hard, and we use all our energy to do
the test the best we can. Initially, however, we have to
learn this. After having taken a few tests, the process
becomes nonconscious. The mere fact that we are facing
an exam is enough to increase our achievement
motivation.
Ap Dijksterhuis
See also Automaticity; Controlled Processes; Dual Process
Theories; Memory; Nonconscious Emotions
Further Readings
Wilson, T. D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering the
adaptive unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
NONEXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
Definition
Nonexperimental designs are research methods that
lack the hallmark features of experiments, namely
manipulation of independent variables and random
assignment to conditions. The gold standard for scientific
evidence in social psychology is the randomized
experiment; however, there are many situations in
social psychology in which randomized experiments
are not possible or would not be the preferred method
for data collection. Many social psychological variables
cannot be manipulated, or ethics would keep
one from doing so. For example, a researcher cannot
Nonexperimental Designs———623
randomly assign people to be in a relationship or not
or to stay in a relationship for a long versus short
period of time. Similarly, research participants cannot
be randomly assigned to be male or female, homosexual
or heterosexual, or Black or White. Therefore, the
impact of important variables such as relationship
status, culture, and ethnicity must be studied using
nonexperimental designs.
Characteristics of
Nonexperimental Research
Many nonexperimental studies address the same types
of research questions addressed in experiments. They
are aimed at testing whether the variable of interest
causes people to react in certain ways to social stimuli.
When this is the goal, nonexperimental studies often
measure the variable of interest, often by asking people
to report their beliefs or perceptions (such as measures
of amount of self-confidence, of commitment to
one’s relationship, or of identification with one’s ethnic
group). Statistical analyses are then used to relate
people’s ratings to measures of other variables thought
to be influenced by the initial variable. Consider a simple
example in which a researcher wants to learn
whether being committed to remaining in a romantic
relationship leads people to be happier than not being
committed to a relationship. This researcher might survey
research participants who are in relationships, asking
them to report their current level of commitment to
the relationship and their current level of general happiness.
A typical type of statistical analysis in this case
might be to correlate relationship commitment with
level of happiness. Because correlation is a common
type of analysis in these designs, many people use the
term correlational designs when they are actually referring
to nonexperimental designs. The term nonexperimental
is preferred primarily because the same
correlational analyses could be performed on either
nonexperimental or experimental data. The status of the
study is determined by the research methods, not by
the type of statistics used to analyze the data. Yet, the
reader should understand that the terms correlational
and nonexperimental are often used interchangeably.
If, in the previous example, the data show that
people currently committed to their relationships are
happier than are people not committed to their relationships,
does this mean that being committed to a
relationship makes people happier? Maybe, but maybe
not. One of the major problems with nonexperimental
designs is the result might have occurred in many

624———Nonexperimental Designs
ways. In this example, it could be that commitment to
their current relationships does make people generally
happier. However, it could be that people who are
generally happier also make more attractive mates.
People may flock to those who seem happy (and may
want to stay with them), but may shy away from
people who seem sullen and unhappy (and may want
to leave them). If commitment loves company, being
happy may also make people more likely to be committed
to a relationship, rather than relationship commitment
making people happier. It could also be that
a third variable might encourage people to be committed
to relationships and might also make people
happy. For example, if the research participants are
students, it could be that people who are doing well in
school are happier than people not doing well in
school. It could also be that people who are doing well
in school have the time for social activities that draw
them closer to their relationship partners. However, if
people are doing poorly in school, spending more
time outside of class studying to catch up (or the stress
of struggling to catch up) may pull them farther away
from their relationship partners. Third variables could
also be called confounding variables, because they
confound the original causal link that is hypothesized
to exist between the two variables of interest.
In a nonexperimental study, it can be difficult to tell
which of a variety of explanations is the best. Because
of this, researchers should include additional study
features that help determine which explanations are
best supported by the data. For instance, if our relationship
researcher is concerned that happiness might
lead to relationship commitment rather than commitment
leading to happiness, he or she might measure
people’s happiness and relationship commitment over
time. If it is true that happiness precedes commitment
to a relationship, it should be possible to see that happy
uncommitted people are more likely to become highly
committed than are unhappy uncommitted people. It
would also be possible to look at effects of relationship
commitment controlling for one’s level of happiness
before committing to the relationship. That is, even if
happier people want more to stay with their partners, it
could be that commitment to the relationship provides
an additional boost to happiness beyond the original
level of happiness. Measuring the variables over time
does not always identify the ordering of the variables
in their causal chains, but it can help.
Measuring possible third (confounding) variables can
also help in identifying the most likely causal relations
among the variables. When these third (confounding)
variables are measured, specific alternative explanations
can be tested. For example, if a researcher is
concerned that class performance influences both the
likelihood of relationship commitment and overall
happiness, then a measure of class performance can
be used to predict both of these variables. If class
performance fails to predict one of the original variables,
then it can be rejected as an explanation for the
original relation between the two. Even if good class
performance was correlated with relationship commitment
and with increased happiness, analyses could be
conducted using both relationship commitment and
class performance to predict happiness. If commitment
predicted happiness beyond class performance,
this would undermine any concerns about class performance
providing the best explanation for a relation
between commitment and happiness.
Nonexperimental research can be conducted in laboratories
or in naturalistic settings. In general, it might
be more likely to see nonexperimental designs when
research is conducted in natural (field) settings
because the natural settings themselves might make it
difficult or impossible to randomly assign people to
conditions or to manipulate variables, even though
one might still observe or measure the variables in that
setting. Yet, it is important to realize that the distinction
between experimental and nonexperimental
research is not the same as the distinction between lab
and field research. Either the laboratory or the field
may serve as settings in which to conduct nonexperimental
or experimental research.
It is equally important to realize that nonexperimental
research includes a wide variety of research
methods. Research questions similar to those described
earlier (i.e., research aimed at addressing causal relations
among variables) can use procedures other than
asking research participants to directly report their
beliefs or perceptions. For example, researchers might
use archival data or direct observation to categorize a
research participant’s gender, ethnicity, or occupation.
If so, the researcher might treat differences between
these known groups as reflecting effects of the variables
thought to differ between the groups. The problem,
of course, is that these known groups might differ
in many ways. Therefore, there are many potential
third (confounding) variables to consider and possibly
to test. Because of this, even if known groups are
identified, the study should include direct measurement
of the variables thought to differ across the
groups to account for the effects of the third (confounding)
variables.

Although many nonexperimental studies ask the
type of causal questions described earlier, there are also
other kinds of research questions. Some research asks
whether a set of measures all tap one underlying psychological
dimension. Correlational analyses of this
type are used to create many of the multi-item scales
that are used across areas of psychology. For example,
if a researcher wants to create a multi-item measure
of political affiliation, research participants might be
asked to respond to a large set of measures asking about
their liking or disliking of political figures, about political
behaviors in which they have engaged, and about
social policies they support or oppose. When determining
which of these measures best fit together to assess
overall political preferences, the research question is
not which variables cause the others but instead what
the best set of measures is to assess a person’s political
preferences. Other research questions might simply
address which variables are correlated with which other
variables or might attempt to identify what a certain
group of people does or thinks about a certain issue.
These research questions are both nonexperimental and
noncausal, though forms of these studies can also be
the building blocks for creating hypotheses about the
causal relations among the variables of interest.
See also Experimentation; Research Methods
Further Readings
Duane T. Wegener
Jason T. Reed
Pelham, B. W., & Blanton, H. (2003). Conducting research in
psychology: Measuring the weight of smoke (2nd ed.).
Toronto: Thompson/Wadsworth.
Wegener, D. T., & Fabrigar, L. R. (2000). Analysis and design
for nonexperimental data: Addressing causal and noncausal
hypotheses. In H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook
of research methods in social and personality psychology
(pp. 412–450). New York: Cambridge University Press.
NONVERBAL CUES AND
COMMUNICATION
Definition
Nonverbal cues are all potentially informative behaviors
that are not purely linguistic in content. Visible
nonverbal cues include facial expressions, head
Nonverbal Cues and Communication———625
movements, posture, body and hand movements, selfand
other-touching, leg positions and movements,
interpersonal gaze, directness of interpersonal orientation,
interpersonal distance, and synchrony or mimicry
between people. Auditory nonverbal cues include discrete
nonlinguistic vocal sounds (e.g., sighs) as well as
qualities of the voice such as pitch and pitch variation,
loudness, speed and speed variation, and tonal qualities
(e.g., nasality, breathiness). Several additional behaviors
are often included among nonverbal cues even
though they are closely related to speech: interruptions,
pauses and hesitations, listener responses (such as
“uh-huh” uttered while another is speaking), and dysfluencies
in speech. Clothing, hairstyle, and adornments,
as well as physiognomy (such as height or facial
features) are also considered to be nonverbal cues.
Psychologists’ interest in nonverbal cues focuses
on its relation to encoded meaning, relation to verbal
messages, social impact, and development, and on
differences between groups and individuals in their
nonverbal behavior or skill in using and understanding
nonverbal cues. Nonverbal behavior is ubiquitous
throughout the animal kingdom, with numerous documented
resemblances between the nonverbal behaviors
of higher primates and humans. Nonverbal behavior
is studied in many disciplines, including ethology,
anthropology, sociology, and medicine, as well as all
the subdisciplines of psychology. The content of the
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior reflects the interdisciplinary
nature of the field.
The distinction between nonverbal behavior
and nonverbal communication is important, but not
always easy to maintain in practice. Nonverbal behavior
includes behavior that might be emitted without the
awareness of the encoder (the one conveying the information),
whereas nonverbal communication refers to a
more active process whereby encoder and decoder (the
one receiving the information) emit and interpret
behaviors according to a shared meaning code.
Because it is often difficult to distinguish the two, the
terms nonverbal behavior and nonverbal communication
are used interchangeably in this entry.
Interpretations
Nonverbal cues emitted by a person are likely to be
interpreted by others, whether correctly or not, allowing
for misunderstandings to occur. The process of
drawing inferences from nonverbal cues is often not
in conscious awareness; similarly, encoders may or
may not be aware of the cues they are sending. The

626———Nonverbal Cues and Communication
unintentional conveyance of veridical information
through nonverbal cues is called leakage.
Nonverbal cues often accompany spoken words,
and when they do, the nonverbal cues can augment or
contradict the meanings of the words as well as combine
with the words to produce unique messages, as in
sarcasm, which involves the pairing of contradictory
messages through verbal and nonverbal channels.
Research has explored the impact of mixed verbal and
nonverbal messages.
Some nonverbal behaviors have distinct meanings,
most notably the hand gestures called emblems that
have direct verbal translations (such as the “A-okay”
sign or the “thumbs up” sign in North American
usage). However, most nonverbal cues have multiple
and often ambiguous meanings that depend on other
information for correct interpretation (associated
words, situational context, antecedent events, other
cues, etc.). Some nonverbal behaviors are discrete
(i.e., have distinct on-off properties), examples being
nodding, blinking, pausing, and gestural emblems.
Others are continuous, such as the fluid movements of
the hands while speaking (called speech-dependent
gestures), vocal qualities, and movement style.
The face and voice have been extensively studied
relative to emotional expression, with at least six emotions
having characteristic configurations of facial
muscle movements and a variety of acoustic correlates.
Nonverbal cues can also contribute to a person’s
emotional experience and self-regulation via physiological
feedback processes; engaging in certain
behaviors can produce the associated emotions.
Although it is commonly assumed that the main
function of nonverbal behavior is to convey emotions,
this is only one of several important purposes served by
nonverbal behavior in daily life. Nonverbal cues are
used to convey interpersonal attitudes, such as dominance,
affiliativeness, or insult. Nonverbal cues of the
face, eyes, voice, and hands are used in the regulation of
turn-taking in conversation, and also for purposes of
providing feedback regarding comprehension and interest
to a speaker. Face and hand movements serve dialogic
functions, for example, to illustrate, comment,
refer, and dramatize. Speech-dependent gestures also
contribute to fluent speech by facilitating word retrieval;
speakers lose fluency and complexity if they are constrained
from gesturing while speaking. Nonverbal cues
can also arise from cognitive activity, as when hard
thinking produces a furrowed brow or averted gaze.
The coordination of nonverbal behavior between
people helps produce and maintain desired levels of
arousal and intimacy. People (including infants) often
mimic, reciprocate, or synchronize their movements
with others. Such behavior matching can contribute to
rapport. However, behavioral compensation is also a
common occurrence; one person adjusts his or her
behavior to compensate for another’s behaviors, for
example, by gazing less at another, or backing up, if
the other is standing too close.
Another important function of nonverbal behavior
is self-presentation, that is, to represent oneself in a
desired way (as honest, nice, brave, competent, etc.).
Related to self-presentation are societal display rules,
conventions regarding what kinds of expressions are
appropriate at what times and by whom. Examples are
norms for how to behave nonverbally in different
social situations (when disappointed, at a funeral, etc.)
and norms that produce different degrees of outward
emotional expressiveness in men and women. At one
extreme of self-presentation is deliberate deception.
Nonverbal cues convey information, both intentionally
and unintentionally, about emotions, attitudes,
personality traits, intelligence, intentions, mental and
physical health, physical characteristics, social group
membership, deception, and roles, to give a few examples.
However, the effects are often small in magnitude,
indicating much variation in the predictability of
such associations.
The following is a very short list of the many associations
that have been found: Lying is associated
with blinking, hesitations, and finger movements; a
smile of true enjoyment can be distinguished from a
polite, social smile by the movement of the muscles at
the corner of the eyes; in friendly interaction, more
gaze signifies a more positive attitude; persons of
higher status or dominance engage in relatively less
gazing while listening and relatively more gazing
while speaking, and also speak louder and interrupt
more; under stress, the pitch of the voice rises; more
self-touching is associated with anxiety; women differ
from men on a wide variety of nonverbal behaviors
(including more smiling and gazing); Mediterranean,
Middle Eastern, and Latin American cultures—called
contact cultures—display more interpersonal touching
and closer interaction distances in public than do noncontact
cultures (Asia, Northern Europe); and the personality
trait of extraversion is associated with louder
and more fluent speech and heightened levels of gaze.

Of course, these are generalizations for which many
exceptions can be found.
Nonverbal cues play a role in social influence, for
example, persuasion and interpersonal expectancy
effects, also called self-fulfilling prophecies. In the latter,
one person’s beliefs or expectations for another
person can be fulfilled via nonverbal cues in a process
that can be out of awareness for both parties. Thus,
a teacher may be especially warm and nonverbally
encouraging to a student believed to be very smart, or
a new acquaintance may treat you coolly if he or she
has heard you are not a nice person. In both cases, the
expected behavior will actually be produced if the
student responds with heightened motivation and
achievement (confirming the teacher’s belief) or if you
reciprocate the other’s coolness (confirming the
acquaintance’s belief).
Individuals and groups differ in the accuracy with
which they convey information via nonverbal cues
(called encoding, or sending accuracy) and interpret
others’ nonverbal cues (called decoding, or receiving
accuracy). Researchers measure encoding accuracy
by asking expressors to imagine or pose the intended
message, by observing them in specific situations that
arouse an intended state, or by observing them displaying
their characteristic behavior styles. Accuracy
in decoding nonverbal cues is measured by asking
perceivers to watch or listen to nonverbal behaviors,
either live or recorded, and to make assessments of
the meanings of the cues (or to recall what behaviors
occurred). The measurement of accuracy requires the
establishment of a criterion for deciding what state or
trait is actually conveyed in the stimulus.
Nonverbal skills advance over childhood and are
often higher in females than in males. There is also
evidence for cultural expression “dialects” that allow
expressions of emotions to be more accurately judged
by other members of that culture, or by people with
greater exposure to that culture, than by outsiders.
Research shows that nonverbal communication skills
are higher in children and adults with healthy mental
and social functioning.
Judith A. Hall
See also Babyfaceness; Behavioral Contagion; Crowding;
Cultural Differences; Deception (Lying); Emotion;
Emotional Intelligence; Expectancy Effects; Facial
Expression of Emotion; Facial-Feedback Hypothesis;
Mimicry; Nonconscious Processes; Person Perception;
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; Thin Slices of Behavior
Further Readings
Hall, J. A., & Bernieri, F. J. (Eds.). (2001). Interpersonal
sensitivity: Theory and measurement. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Hickson, M., III, Stacks, D. W., & Moore, N. (2004).
Nonverbal communication: Studies and applications
(4th ed.). Los Angeles: Roxbury.
Knapp, M. L., & Hall, J. A. (2005). Nonverbal
communication in human interaction (6th ed.). Belmont,
CA: Wadsworth.
Manusov, V. (Ed.). (2005). The sourcebook of nonverbal
measures. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Russell, J. A., & Fernández-Dols, J. M. (Eds.). (1997). The
psychology of facial expression. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
NORMATIVE INFLUENCE
Normative Influence———627
Definition
Normative influence refers to the fact that people
sometimes change their behavior, thoughts, or values
to be liked and accepted by others. This results in conformity,
in the form of individuals altering their utterances
or demeanor to be more like what they perceive
to be the norm. At the individual level, pivotal factors
leading to normative influence are the desire to form
a good impression and the fear of embarrassment.
Normative influence is strongest when someone cares
about the group exerting the influence and when
behavior is performed in front of members of that
group. It is one of social psychology’s paradigmatic
phenomena because it epitomizes the impact of the
social world on an individual’s thoughts and actions.
Normative influence has a somewhat negative image
in Western industrialized cultures that value independent
selves and individualistic values, and where being
influenceable is seen as a character flaw. In reality, normative
influence regulates people’s daily lives much
more than they like to recognize. Most people don’t pay
close attention to the dictum of fashion magazines, yet
very few would go out dressed in ways that others
might deem inappropriate. Furthermore, social psychological
research has shown the surprising power and

628———Normative Influence
scope of normative influence: For example, it can lead
to conformity to complete strangers, it can cause people
to ignore evidence of their senses, it can effect widespread
body image issues and eating disorders because
of unrealistic ideals of beauty, and it can have disastrous
consequences in cases of bystander effect and
groupthink.
Normative Versus
Informational Influence
Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard first provided the
useful distinction between normative and informational
influence: Whereas normative influence results from
wanting to fit in regardless of accuracy, informational
influence results from believing that the group may
know better. If a person enters a room and everyone
else is whispering, he or she might start whispering too.
If the person does it because he or she assumes others
have a good reason that the person doesn’t know about
(e.g., a baby is sleeping or the roof could collapse at any
minute), the person is yielding to informational influence;
if the person does it because he or she is afraid of
the sideway glances and frowns that the person might
get for being loud, then the person is succumbing to
normative influence. As this example illustrates, the
two forms of influence are often intertwined, but this
distinction is useful in analyzing instances of conformity,
including some classics in the field. Muzafer
Sherif’s studies of conformity with the autokinetic
effect, for example, are typically interpreted as showing
primarily informational influence: Faced with the
ambiguous stimulus of an apparently moving dot of
light in a dark room, participants converged to a common
understanding of their reality when estimating
the light’s movement. In contrast, Solomon Asch’s linenaming
paradigm is often seen as demonstrating normative
influence: In deciding which stimulus line
matched the length of a template, conforming participants
chose to suppress the answer they knew to be
true to go along with the clearly wrong response
endorsed by the majority of their peers. Informational
influence is fueled by wanting to know what’s right,
whereas normative influence is motivated by wanting
to get along.
Norms That Influence
The social norms at work in normative influence can
be thought as the set of acceptable behaviors, values,
and beliefs governing a particular group or situation.
They include prescriptions (how one should act) as
well as proscriptions (what one shouldn’t do). Some
are culture-wide (e.g., one wears black at a funeral in
the United States), whereas some are more situationbound
(e.g., if everyone else is standing up at a gathering,
one might feel uncomfortable sitting down). Some
norms are explicit (e.g., announcements about turning
off one’s cell phone in a movie theater), but some are
more implicit and need to be figured out. Humans
show remarkable skill at this, enabling them to get
along in groups. One way that people discover implicit
norms is through behavioral uniformity: If everyone is
wearing a suit on a person’s first day of work, the person
realizes he or she should probably wear one too.
Another is by seeing deviants being punished: After
hearing several students making fun of a classmate for
wearing a tie at a lecture, a professor might realize that
the allegedly permissive campus actually has strong
implicit norms dictating that one shouldn’t dress formally
for class. Norms can even be inferred when
no one else is around by observing traces of other
people’s behavior in one’s environment: In a littered
street, people are more likely to litter than in a perfectly
clean one. This last example has sometimes been
used as an argument for zero-tolerance approaches to
policing, under the assumption that evidence of petty
vandalism in a neighborhood communicates a norm of
lawlessness that leads to greater crimes.
One interesting feature of normative influence is
that people conform to norms as people perceive
them, not necessarily as they really are. Because discerning
implicit norms is an imperfect inference
process, it can lead to misperceptions. And indeed
social psychology has documented such breakdowns,
leading to conformity to an illusory norm. One such
case is pluralistic ignorance, whereby a majority is
ignorant of the true attitudes of the rest of the majority.
On some college campuses, for example, most
incoming students may misperceive that binge drinking
is widely accepted, even though most students
may in reality have private misgivings about it.
Because of this misperception, normative influence
leads students to keep their discomfort to themselves,
and to boast instead about their drinking exploits. This
leads others to believe in turn that drinking is widely
accepted, a vicious cycle that ensures that the illusory
norm is maintained. This example also illustrates the
dynamic nature of normative influence more generally,
in that each individual choosing to follow the
norm publicly reinforces its grip on other individuals,
and this snowballing can be reciprocal.

Deviants and Normative Influence
The weight of normative influence is felt most strongly
by individuals who deviate from the group. Stanley
Schachter’s pioneering research suggested that groups
react to deviants by monitoring them, trying to bring
them into the fold, and if that doesn’t work, rejecting
them. Only people who have paid their dues by conforming
to the group in the past, thus amassing what
has been called idiosyncrasy credit, can express dissenting
views with relative impunity. Especially in times
of urgency or stress, when a consensus needs to be
reached and a decision needs to be made, strong pressures
to conform can lead groups to ignore doubts
and suppress dissent, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Deviants can disrupt normative influence and
instead propagate their own views when they present
those consistently and uncompromisingly, a phenomenon
called minority influence. They can also loosen the
grip of normative influence on others merely by the fact
that they exist, regardless of their own message: Studies
show that people are less likely to conform when someone
else disagrees with the majority, even if their own
position differs from the deviant’s.
How Deep Is Normative Influence?
How real are the changes brought about by normative
influence? Some researchers have argued that whereas
normative influence merely leads to compliance, a
superficial and temporary behavior change with no
accompanying change in values or beliefs, informational
influence (as well as minority influence) is more
likely to lead to conversion, a deeper reorganization of
one’s perceptions and attitudes, with longer-lasting
consequences. This is suggested because normative
influence seems to be strongest when the behavior is
performed publicly in front of members of the group
exercising the influence, and by the observation that
individuals often revert to their initial attitude or belief
once they are out of the normative influence situation.
This intuition is captured by the use of private voting
booths in democratic elections, recognizing that one’s
true attitude can be adulterated when expressed in the
presence of others, but also assuming that it can be
rekindled in isolation. By contrast, informational and
minority influence has been found to lead to changes
even in private responding, and to changes that can still
be observed long after the individual left the influence
setting.
Benoît Monin
Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive———629
See also Bystander Effect; Conformity; Deviance;
Embarrassment; Group Polarization; Groupthink;
Informational Influence; Norms, Prescriptive and
Descriptive; Pluralistic Ignorance; Risky Shift
Further Readings
Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific
American, 193(5), 31–35.
Deutsch, M., & Gerard, H. G. (1955). A study of normative
and informational social influence upon individual
judgment. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
51, 629–636.
Moscovici, S. (1985). Social influence and conformity.
In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of
social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 347–412). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Schachter, S. (1951). Deviance, rejection, and
communication. Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 46, 190–207.
Sherif, M. (1935). A study of some social factors in
perception. Archives of Psychology, 27, 187.
NORMS, PRESCRIPTIVE
AND DESCRIPTIVE
Definition
Social norms are attributes of groups that generate
expectations for the behavior of group members. Two
types of norms differ in the source of the expectations.
Descriptive norms refer to what most people in a group
think, feel, or do; prescriptive or injunctive norms refer
to what most people in a group approve of. The distinction
here is between what is true of group members
and what ought to be true of group members. In many
cases, these two types of norms overlap. For example,
wearing business suits is both a descriptive and a prescriptive
norm for executives, just as wearing jeans is
both a descriptive and a prescriptive norm for teenagers.
Liberal political views are both a descriptive and a prescriptive
norm on college campuses, just as traditional
values are both a descriptive and a prescriptive norm in
wealthy suburbs. However, sometimes descriptive and
prescriptive norms diverge. For example, healthy eating
and exercising are prescriptive norms for most adult
Americans, but less so descriptive norms. Conversely,
driving to work (as opposed to taking public transportation)
is a descriptive norm in many communities,
but certainly not a prescriptive norm.

630———Norms, Prescriptive and Descriptive
Analysis
Although both descriptive and prescriptive norms
guide behavior, they do so through different psychological
processes. Descriptive norms guide behavior
because people take them to represent the most sensible
course of action, a process known as informational
social influence. Prescriptive norms guide behavior
because people take them to represent the socially
sanctioned course of action, a process known as normative
social influence. The two types of norms also
differ in how people experience the consequences of
violating them. Specifically violating a descriptive
norm does not have quite the sting that violating a prescriptive
norm has. For example, if knowing Latin is a
descriptive norm at College X, a student who does
not know Latin may feel relatively Latin-challenged;
however, if knowing Latin is a prescriptive norm at
College X, this student may very well feel ignorant
and uneducated.
One final difference between descriptive and prescriptive
norms concerns the scope of their influence
on behavior. Descriptive norms influence behavior
only within the particular situation and group for
which the norm operates. Prescriptive norms have
more far-reaching influence; they influence behavior
across situations and populations. Thus, a descriptive
norm of not smoking at College X will lead students
to avoid smoking on campus but not off; a prescriptive
norm of not smoking at College X will lead students
to avoid smoking all together.
Deborah A. Prentice
See also Conformity; Informational Influence; Normative
Influence
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B., Kallgren, C. A., & Reno, R. R. (1991).
A focus theory of normative conduct: A theoretical
refinement and reevaluation of the role of norms in
human behavior. Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, 24, 201–234.
Miller, D. T., & Prentice, D. A. (1991). The construction
of social norms and standards. In E. T. Higgins &
A. W. Kruglanski (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of
basic principles (pp. 799–829). New York: Guilford Press.

OBJECTIFICATION THEORY
Definition
Objectification theory is a framework for understanding
the experience of being female in a culture that
sexually objectifies the female body. The theory proposes
that girls and women, more so than boys and
men, are socialized to internalize an observer’s perspective
as their primary view of their physical selves.
This perspective is referred to as self-objectification,
which leads many girls and women to habitually monitor
their bodies’ outward appearance. This, in turn,
leads to increased feelings of shame, anxiety, and
disgust toward the self, reduces opportunities for
peak motivational states, and diminishes awareness
of internal bodily states. Accumulations of these experiences
help account for a variety of mental health
risks that disproportionately affect women: depression,
eating disorders, and sexual dysfunction. The
theory also helps illuminate why changes in these mental
health risks occur alongside life-course changes in
the female body, emerging at puberty and diminishing
after menopause.
Background and History
At the beginning of the 20th century, American psychologists
explored the notion of the looking-glass
self, which says that a person’s sense of self is a social
construction and reflects how others view him or her.
This perspective is a precursor to objectification theory,
which takes the looking glass, or mirror, component
of this metaphor quite literally. The field’s earlier
O
631
notions of self disregarded the physical body as an
important component of self-concept and focused
almost exclusively on attitudes, values, motivations,
and the like. However, studies show that for women,
positive self-regard hinges on perceived physical
attractiveness, whereas for men, it hinges on physical
effectiveness. So objectification theory asks, what would
a more embodied view of the self tell us about gender
differences in mental health?
Feminist theorists have pointed a finger at Western
culture’s sexually objectifying treatment of women’s
bodies for a long time. Psychologist Karen Horney
wrote, 75 years ago, about the socially sanctioned right
of all males to sexualize all females, regardless of age
or status. More recently, Sandra Bartky defined sexual
objectification as occurring whenever a woman’s body,
body parts, or sexual functions are separated from her
person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or
regarded as if they were capable of representing her.
Furthermore, the notion that within this cultural milieu
women can adopt an outside-in perspective on their
own bodies has a fairly long history in feminist philosophy.
Simone de Beauvoir argued that when a girl
becomes a woman, she becomes doubled; so instead
of existing only within herself, she also exists outside
herself. The art historian John Berger showed that
women become their own first surveyors as a way of
anticipating their treatment in the world.
Objectification theory argues that, with the sexualization
of the female body as the cultural milieu in
which girls are raised, girls are socialized to treat
themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated for
their appearance. The external pressures that encourage
girls’ own preoccupation with their physical appearances
abound. Empirical evidence demonstrates that

632———Objectification Theory
sexy, eye-catching women receive massive rewards in
American culture. For example, compared with average
weight or thin girls, heavier girls are less likely to
be accepted to college. Physical attractiveness also
correlates more highly with popularity, dating experience,
and even marriage opportunities for girls and
women than for men. It is as if physical beauty translates
to power for girls and women. So, what Sigmund
Freud called vanity in women, objectification theory
explores as a survival strategy in a sexually objectifying
culture; a survival strategy that may bring immediate
rewards, but carries significant psychological and
health consequences.
Importance and Consequences
of Self-Objectification
Self-objectification functions as both a trait and
a state. That is, some people are simply more likely
to define themselves in ways that highlight a third
person’s, or observer’s view, of their bodies. These
people are high self-objectifiers. Studies show that,
in general, women score higher than men in trait
self-objectification. Situations can also call attention
to the body as observed by others, and this is when
self-objectification is a state. Imagine receiving a catcall
or whistle while jogging.
A great deal of research has been conducted on
the theorized consequences of self-objectification.
The first, and perhaps most insidious, consequence of
self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness.
The chronic attention to physical appearance that girls
and women can engage in leaves fewer cognitive
resources available for other mental activities. One
study demonstrated this fragmenting quite vividly. In
it, college students were asked to try on and evaluate,
alone in a dressing room, either a swimsuit or a
sweater. While they waited for 10 minutes in the garment,
they completed a math test. The results revealed
that young women in swimsuits performed significantly
worse on the math problems than did those
wearing sweaters. No differences were found for the
young men. In other words, thinking about the body,
comparing it with sexualized cultural ideals, disrupts
women’s mental capacity.
Other work has demonstrated physical as well as
mental capacity can be disrupted by self-objectification.
One study showed girls whose bodily self-concepts
were more appearance-oriented threw a softball with
a less-effective shoulder and humerus swing than
did girls with a more competence-based view of their
bodily selves. The widely scorned phenomenon of
“throwing like a girl,” in other words, might better be
phrased, “throwing like a self-objectified person.”
Studies show that the constant monitoring of
appearance that accompanies self-objectification leads
to increased feelings of shame and anxiety about one’s
body. Shame is an emotion that occurs when one
perceives one’s failure to meet cultural standards of
conduct. The chronic comparison of one’s own body
with the impossible cultural standards of attractive,
sexy appearance is a recipe for shame. Most girls and
women can never win. Numerous studies have shown
stronger body shame, appearance anxiety, and feelings
of self-disgust in young women who internalize a
sexualized view of self, and also in young women after
viewing media portrayals of idealized women’s bodies,
or even being exposed to sexualizing words that
commonly appear on magazine covers such as sexy or
shapely.
These cognitive and emotional consequences
can compound to create even more profound mental
health risks. Studies have demonstrated a link
between the feelings of shame engendered by selfobjectification
and eating disorders as well as depression
in women. Other work has explored the ways in
which the mental preoccupation of self-objectification
diminishes women’s flow, or ability to fully absorb
themselves in enjoyable activities, and their sexual
satisfaction.
Janet Shibley Hyde recently conducted a massive
exploration of gender differences in psychological
traits and attitudes. She found that there are actually
very few such differences, despite the media’s emphasis
on women and men being from entirely different
planets. Men and women are far more alike than
different. Self-objectification appears to be one exceptional
area. Here researchers do find significant and
important differences between men and women. The
work of objectification theory helps researchers see
the ways that the cultural milieu of sexual objectification
diminishes girls’ and women’s well-being, and
limits their potential.
Tomi-Ann Roberts
Barbara L. Fredrickson
See also Gender Differences; Looking-Glass Self

Further Readings
Berger, J. (1973). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Roberts, T.-A. (1997). Objectification
theory: Toward understanding women’s lived experiences
and mental health risks. Psychology of Women Quarterly,
21, 173–206.
Fredrickson, B. L., Roberts, T.-A., Noll, S. M., Quinn, D. M.,
& Twenge, J. M. (1998). That swimsuit becomes you:
Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating,
and math performance. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 75, 269–284.
McKinley, N. M., & Hyde, J. S. (1996). The objectified body
consciousness scale. Psychology of Women Quarterly,
20, 181–215.
OMISSION NEGLECT
Definition
Omission neglect refers to insensitivity to missing
information of all types—including unmentioned or
unknown options, alternatives, features, properties,
characteristics, possibilities, and events. When people
fail to think about what they do not know, they underestimate
the importance of missing information, and
this leads people to form strong opinions even when
the available evidence is weak. This can lead to bad
decisions that people later regret.
History and Background
It is often surprisingly difficult to notice that important
information is missing. For example, in the story,
“The Silver Blaze,” Sherlock Holmes asked Inspector
Gregory to consider a curious incident involving a dog.
Gregory replied that nothing happened, and Holmes
proclaimed, “That was the curious incident.” This clue
enabled Holmes to deduce that the culprit must have
been someone familiar to the victim’s dog. Most people
would miss this important clue because most people,
like Gregory, pay little attention to nonevents.
Other types of omissions are also important. It took
scientists hundreds of years to discover the importance
of using a control group, or a condition involving
the omission or the absence of a cause, in their
experiments. In fact, scientists failed to recognize the
critical importance of a control group until relatively
Omission Neglect———633
recently in the history of science (following the publication
of A System of Logic by John Stuart Mill in
1848). Even scientists are surprisingly insensitive
to the absence of a property, such as the absence of a
cause. Similarly, it took early mathematicians thousands
of years to discover the crucial concept of zero,
the number that represents nothingness or the absence
of quantity.
Omission Neglect in Everyday Life
In everyday life, people typically receive limited
information about just about everything—such as political
candidates, public policies, job applicants, defendants,
potential dating partners, business deals,
consumer goods and services, health care products,
medical procedures, and other important topics. News
reports, advertisements, conversations, and other
sources of information typically provide only limited
information about a topic. When people overlook
important missing information, even a little information
can seem like a lot. Ideally, people should form
stronger beliefs when a large amount of information is
available than when only a small amount is available.
However, when people are insensitive to omissions,
they form strong beliefs regardless of how much or how
little is known about a topic. Furthermore, in rare
instances in which a large amount of information is
available, forgetting occurs over time and insensitivity
to information loss from memory, another type of omission,
leads people to form stronger beliefs over time.
For example, consumers should form more favorable
evaluations of a new camera when the camera
performs well on eight attributes rather than only four
attributes. However, research shows that consumers
form equally favorable evaluations of the camera
regardless of how much attribute information was presented.
The amount of information presented matters
only when consumers were warned that information
might be missing. This warning increased sensitivity
to omissions and lead consumers to form more favorable
evaluations of the camera described by a greater
amount of information.
Similar results are observed in inferences, or judgments
that go beyond the information given. Consumers
received a brief description of a new 10-speed
bicycle and were asked to rate its durability even
though no information about durability was provided.
When consumers inferred durability immediately after

634———Omission Neglect
reading the description, they realized that no information
about durability was presented and they formed
moderately favorable inferences about durability. However,
when consumers inferred durability one week
after reading the description, extremely favorable and
confidently held inferences were formed. This result
was observed even though memory tests showed that
people forgot most of the information that was presented
after the one-week delay. Hence, people’s inferences
were stronger when they remembered a little than
when they remembered a lot. In other words, omission
neglect leads people to form less accurate opinions
and, at the same time, leads people to hold these opinions
with greater confidence.
Why Does Omission
Neglect Happen?
Omission neglect occurs for several reasons. First,
missing information is not attention drawing: out of
sight, out of mind. Second, people often focus on one
object at a time rather than comparing many objects.
This makes it difficult to determine whether enough
information is available. It also makes it difficult to
determine how much better or worse one option is
relative to another. Third, thinking about presented
information can inhibit or prevent people from thinking
about nonpresented information.
Fortunately, people are not always insensitive to
omissions. People are less likely to overlook missing
information when they are highly knowledgeable
about a topic or when they are encouraged to compare
objects or issues described by different amounts
of information. Under these special circumstances,
people are less likely to underestimate the importance
of missing information, less likely to overestimate the
importance of readily available information, and less
likely to make bad decisions.
Omission Neglect in Judgments
and Decision Making
Although judgments and decisions are often more reasonable
when people are sensitive to omissions, people
frequently and typically neglect omissions. Research
on the feature-positive effect, or the tendency to learn
more quickly when a distinguishing feature or symbol
(e.g., a letter, number, or geometric figure) is present
versus absent, has shown that people find it very difficult
to learn that the absence of a feature is informative
when people try to categorize a new object.
A fault tree is a list of possible reasons why an
object might fail to perform properly, such as why a
car will not start. Many people think that a fault tree
will help them to determine the cause of a problem
more quickly. However, when using fault trees, people
typically underestimate the likelihood that an unmentioned
alternative could be the cause of a problem.
This result is observed regardless of how many or how
few alternatives are presented in the fault tree. This
result is also similar to previous research results showing
that people form strong beliefs regardless of how
much or how little is known about a topic.
Missing information is also neglected in the
Ellsberg paradox, which is the name given to the
fact that people prefer to bet on known probabilities
rather than on unknown probabilities. Most people
are indifferent between red and black when betting on
whether a red or black marble will be drawn from a
jar containing 50% red and 50% black marbles. Most
people are also indifferent between red and black
when betting on whether a red or black marble will be
drawn from a jar of red and black marbles with an
unknown distribution. When given a choice between
the two jars, however, most people prefer to bet on
the jar with the 50–50 distribution rather than the jar
with the unknown distribution. Hence, making comparisons
can help people to notice important omissions
and can help people to form better judgments
and decisions.
Evolutionary forces may have played a role in
the development of omission neglect. The presence
of a dangerous predator is a relatively rare event that
requires immediate action. However, the absence of a
predator is a commonplace event that does not raise a
call to action. Because infrequently encountered objects
are more informative than frequently encountered
objects, it may be more efficient to focus on objects
that are encountered rather than not encountered.
People have become accustomed to making judgments
and decisions based on whatever information
they happen to encounter. Sometimes judgments are
based on a relatively large amount of information, and
sometimes they are based on a relatively small amount.
Regardless of the quality or the quantity of the information
that is encountered, omission neglect is common
because missing information is not attention
drawing, presented information seems more important
than it actually is, and presented information interferes
with the ability to think about missing information.
Frequently, people would be better off if they
stopped to think about what they do not know rather

than taking whatever information is readily available
and running with it.
Frank R. Kardes
See also Attention; Availability Heuristic; Base Rate Fallacy;
Decision Making
Further Readings
Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., Silvera, D. H., Cronley,
M. L., Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Schertzer, S., et al. (2006).
Debiasing omission neglect. Journal of Business
Research, 59, 786–792.
Kardes, F. R., & Sanbonmatsu, D. M. (2003). Omission
neglect: The importance of missing information. Skeptical
Inquirer, 27, 42–46.
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Houghton, D. C., Ho,
E. A., & Posavac, S. S. (2003). Overestimating the
importance of the given information in multiattribute
consumer judgment. Journal of Consumer Psychology,
13, 289–300.
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., Posavac, S. S., &
Houghton, D. C. (1997). Contextual influences on
judgment based on limited information. Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 69, 251–264.
Sanbonmatsu, D. M., Kardes, F. R., & Sansone, C. (1991).
Remembering less and inferring more: The effects of
the timing of judgment on inferences about unknown
attributes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
61, 546–554.
OPERATIONALIZATION
Definition
Operationalization is the process by which a researcher
defines how a concept is measured, observed, or manipulated
within a particular study. This process translates
the theoretical, conceptual variable of interest into a set
of specific operations or procedures that define the
variable’s meaning in a specific study. In traditional
models of science, operationalization provides the bridge
between theoretically based hypotheses and the methods
used to examine these predictions.
Examples of Operational Definitions
Imagine a researcher who is interested in helping curb
aggression in schools by exploring if aggression is a
Operationalization———635
response to frustration. To answer the question, the
researcher must first define “aggression” and “frustration,”
both conceptually and procedurally. In the
example of frustration, the conceptual definition may
be obstruction of goal-oriented behavior, but this
definition is rarely specific enough for research.
Therefore, an operational definition is needed that
identifies how frustration and aggression will be measured
or manipulated. In this example, frustration can
be operationally defined in terms of responses to the
question: How frustrated are you at this moment?
The response options can be (a) not at all, (b) slightly,
(c) moderately, and (d) very. The researcher could
then classify people as frustrated if they answered
“moderately” or “very” on the scale.
The researcher must also operationalize aggression
in this particular study. However, one challenge of
developing an operational definition is turning abstract
concepts into observable (measurable) parts. For
example, most people will agree that punching another
person in the face with the goal of causing pain counts
as an act of aggression, but people may differ on
whether teasing counts as aggression. The ambiguity
about the exact meaning of a concept is what makes
operationalization essential for precise communication
of methodological procedures within a study. In this
particular example, aggression could be operationalized
as the number of times a student physically hits
another person with intention to harm. Thus, having
operationally defined the theoretical concepts, the
relation between frustration and aggression can be
investigated.
The Pros and Cons of Using
Operational Definitions
Operationalization is an essential component in a
theoretically centered science because it provides the
means of specifying exactly how a concept is being
measured or produced in a particular study. A precise
operational definition helps ensure consistency in
interpretation and collection of data, and thereby aids
in replication and extension of the study. However,
because most concepts can be operationally defined in
many ways, researchers often disagree about the correspondence
between the methods used in a particular
study and the theoretical concept. In addition, when
definitions become too specific, they are not always
applicable or meaningful.
Jeni L. Burnette

636———Opponent Process Theory of Emotions
See also Experimentation; Logical Positivism; Research
Methods
Further Readings
Emilio, R. (2003). What is defined in operational definitions?
The case of operant psychology. Behavior and
Philosophy, 31, 111–126.
Underwood, B. J. (1957). Psychological research. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
OPPONENT PROCESS
THEORY OF EMOTIONS
Definition
Richard L. Solomon’s opponent process theory of
emotions—also commonly referred to as the opponent
process theory of acquired motivation—contends
that the primary or initial reaction to an emotional
event (State A) will be followed by an opposite secondary
emotional state (State B). In other words, a
stimulus that initially inspires displeasure will likely
be followed by a pleasurable after-feeling and vice
versa. The second important aspect of this theory is
that after repeated exposure to the same emotional
event, the State A reaction will begin to weaken,
whereas the State B reaction will strengthen in intensity
and duration. Thus, over time, the after-feeling
can become the prevailing emotional experience associated
with a particular stimulus event. One example
of this phenomenon is how, for some people, an initial
unpleasant fear aroused by a good roller-coaster ride
becomes, over time, an enjoyable and much soughtafter
experience.
Explanation
According to this theory, a primary a-process—
directly activated by an emotional event—is followed
by an opponent process, the secondary b-process,
which gives rise to the opposite emotional state. In the
first few exposures to an emotion-eliciting event, such
an opponent process can act to return an organism to a
state of emotional homeostasis or neutrality following
an intensely emotional episode. After repeated exposures,
however, the State A response weakens and the
State B response strengthens. Because these states
change over time, the later acquired effects are often
referred to as States A′ and B′ to indicate change over
time. Thus, an initially positive emotional experience
(e.g., love or interpersonal stimulation or drug use) can
eventually give rise to a prevailing negative emotional
experience (e.g., grief or withdrawal), whereas an initially
negative emotional experience (e.g., giving blood
or parachuting) can eventually give way to a prevailing
positive experience (e.g., warm-glow effect or exhilaration).
As such, this theory has been commonly used
to help explain the somewhat puzzling behavioral tendencies
associated with addictive behavior.
Background and Significance
Solomon supported his theory by drawing on numerous
examples of opponent process effects in the literature.
Four such examples are described in some
detail: (1) love/interpersonal stimulation, (2) drug use,
(3) parachuting, (4) donating blood. The first two of
these represent events that give rise to initially positive
emotional states; the others initially create negative
emotional states. In each of these examples, two
core aspects of the theory are evident: (1) The emotional
value of the primary a-process and opponent
b-process are always contrasting, and (2) repeated
exposures to the same emotion-eliciting event lead the
a-process to weaken and the b-process to strengthen.
In the first example, the initial happiness elicited by
a loving relationship may eventually give rise to a negative
emotional state. A common anecdote used to illustrate
this point is that of a couple engaged in the height
of sexual passion (highly positive), which is then
abruptly interrupted, giving rise to contrasting irritability,
loneliness, perhaps craving in its absence (highly
negative). The opponent process has also been used to
help explain more general separation anxiety in interpersonal
relationships as well (e.g., in infant attachment
when a parent leaves the room, and even in ducklings
when the object of their imprinting is removed).
In the second example, the intense euphoria
induced by a drug wears off over time leaving a user
with a prevailing negative withdrawal reaction, making
it difficult for him or her to ever return to the original
high state first experienced. The acquired nature
of this response may also help explain occurrences of
accidental overdose. If the b-process becomes tied to
environmental cues (e.g., when and where the drug is

generally taken), and the drug is then taken in a different
context, the acquired b-process may then not be
powerful enough to counteract the initial a-process,
resulting in a stronger drug reaction than anticipated.
In the third example, beginning parachuters often
report experiencing absolute terror when jumping
out of a plane and plummeting to the earth, and are
reported to be in a stunned state once they land, gradually
returning to neutrality. After many jumps (for
those that dare try it again), however, most jumpers
cease to be terrified. Instead, they often become
expectant, eagerly anticipating the next jump, and feel
a strong sense of exhilaration that can last for many
hours after the jump is completed. This acquired
and intensely positive experience causes some people
to continue jumping to recapture the rewarding
after-feeling.
The fourth example similarly shows how when
people first give blood, they often report feeling anxious
during the experience but relief once it is done.
Over time, however, most people report experiencing
reduced or no anxiety when giving blood but instead
report an increasing warm-glow sensation that keeps
them returning to donate more.
Implications
Here very different types of effects are explained by
a single, simple mechanism, thereby demonstrating the
utility of this theory. From this theory, psychologists
learn that the initial emotional response elicited by a
stimulus event might not necessarily explain the subsequent
long-term behavioral tendencies related to that
event. In the case of love, for example, which produces
intensely euphoric responses initially, the opponent
process theory suggests that over time people may
become motivated to stay in the love relationship perhaps
more in an attempt to avoid feeling lonely or grief
stricken than to sustain the loving feeling. Similarly,
drug addicts may take drugs in increasingly large
doses not to chase the initial high so much as to avoid
the increasing feelings of withdrawal. On the other
hand, the very events that initially give rise to negative
emotional states (e.g., fear or anxiety), such as parachuting
or giving blood, over time may be sought after
in an attempt to attain the rewarding effects of the
after-feelings associated with them. In this way, it
becomes apparent how, eventually, initial pleasure can
ironically give rise to behavioral tendencies governed
by avoidance motivation, and initial negative emotions
such as fear by approach motivation.
Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Emotion; Learning
Theory; Love
Further Readings
Optimal Distinctiveness Theory———637
Solomon, R. L. (1980). The opponent-process theory of
acquired motivation: The costs of pleasure and benefits
of pain. American Psychologist, 35, 691–712.
Solomon, R. L., & Corbit, J. D. (1974). An opponent-process
theory of motivation: I. Temporal dynamics of affect.
Psychological Review, 81, 119–145.
OPTIMAL DISTINCTIVENESS THEORY
Definition
“Everyone needs to belong.” “Everyone needs to be
unique.” That both of these statements are true is the
basis for Marilynn Brewer’s theory of optimal distinctiveness,
which helps explain why people join social
groups and become so attached to the social categories
they are part of. Optimal distinctiveness theory is about
social identity—how people come to define themselves
in terms of their social group memberships.
According to the optimal distinctiveness model,
social identities derive from a fundamental tension
between two competing social needs—the need for
inclusion and a countervailing need for uniqueness
and individuation. People seek social inclusion to alleviate
or avoid the isolation, vulnerability, or stigmatization
that may arise from being highly individuated.
Researchers studying the effects of tokenism and solo
status have generally found that individuals are both
uncomfortable and cognitively disadvantaged in situations
in which they feel too dissimilar from others,
or too much like outsiders. On the other hand, too
much similarity or excessive deindividuation provides
no basis for self-definition, and hence, individuals are
uncomfortable in situations in which they lack distinctiveness.
Being just a number in a large, undifferentiated
mass of people is just as unpleasant as being too
alone.

638———Optimal Distinctiveness Theory
Because of these opposing social needs, social
identities are selected to achieve a balance between
needs for inclusion and for differentiation in a given
social context. Optimal identities are those that satisfy
the need for inclusion within one’s own group and
simultaneously serve the need for differentiation
through distinctions between one’s own group and
other groups. In effect, optimal social identities
involve shared distinctiveness. (Think of adolescents’
trends in clothes and hairstyles; all teenagers are
anxious to be as much like others of their age group
as possible, while differentiating themselves from the
older generation.) To satisfy both needs, individuals
will select group identities that are inclusive enough
that they have a sense of being part of a larger collective
but exclusive enough that they provide some basis
for distinctiveness from others.
Importance and Implications
Optimal distinctiveness theory has direct implications
for self-concept at the individual level and for intergroup
relations at the group level. If individuals are
motivated to sustain identification with optimally
distinct social groups, then the self-concept should
be adapted to fit the normative requirements of such
group memberships. Achieving optimal social identities
should be associated with a secure and stable
self-concept in which one’s own characteristics are
congruent with being a good and typical group member.
Conversely, if optimal identity is challenged or
threatened, the individual should react to restore
congruence between the self-concept and the group
representation. Optimal identity can be restored either
by adjusting individual self-concept to be more consistent
with the group norms, or by shifting social
identification to a group that is more congruent with
the self.
Self-stereotyping is one mechanism for matching
the self-concept to characteristics that are distinctively
representative of particular group memberships.
People stereotype themselves and others in terms
of salient social categorizations, and this stereotyping
leads to an enhanced perceptual similarity between
self and one’s own group members and an enhanced
contrast between one’s own group and other groups.
Consistent with the assumptions of optimal distinctiveness
theory, research has found that members
of distinctive minority groups exhibit more selfstereotyping
than do members of large majority
groups. In addition, people tend to self-stereotype
more when the distinctiveness of their group has been
challenged.
Optimal identities (belonging to distinctive groups)
are also important for achieving and maintaining positive
self-worth. Group identity may play a particularly
important role in enhancing self-worth and subjective
well-being for individuals who have stigmatizing
characteristics or belong to disadvantaged social categories.
In effect, some of the potential negative effects
of belonging to a social minority may be offset by the
identity value of secure inclusion in a distinctive social
group. Results of survey research have revealed a positive
relationship between strength of ethnic identity
and self-worth among minority group members, and
some experimental studies have demonstrated that
self-esteem can be enhanced by being classified in a
distinctive, minority social category.
Finally, because distinctive group identities are so
important to one’s sense of self, people are very motivated
to maintain group boundaries—to protect the
distinctiveness of their groups by enhancing differences
with other groups and limiting membership to
“people like us.” Being restrictive and excluding
others from the group may serve an important function
for group members. In effect, exclusion may be
one way that individuals are able to enhance their own
feelings of group inclusion. Those who are the least
secure in their membership status (e.g., new members
of a group or marginalized members) are sometimes
the most likely to adhere to the group’s standards and
discriminate against members of other groups. For
example, new pledges to a sorority house are often
more likely than the more senior sorority members to
wear clothing with sorority letters and to attend functions
held by the sorority. Ironically, these noncentral
group members may be even more likely than those
who truly embody the group attributes to notice and
punish others for violating the norms and standards
of the group. When given the power, marginal group
members may also be more discriminating in determining
who should belong in the group and who
should be excluded—for example, when it comes time
to decide on the next group of new pledges.
In experimental studies, it has been demonstrated
that when individuals are made to feel that they are
marginal (atypical) group members, they become
more stringent about requirements for group membership
and more likely to exclude strangers from their
group. Similarly, when group identity is under threat

(e.g., the fear of being absorbed or assimilated into
some larger group), members tend to become more
exclusionary. Thus, the upside of social identity
processes is that secure group identity enhances wellbeing
and motivates positive social behavior. The
downside is that insecure group identity motivates
exclusion, intolerance, and possibly intergroup hatred.
Marilynn B. Brewer
See also Group Identity; Need to Belong; Rejection;
Self-Concept; Self-Stereotyping; Social Identity Theory;
Token Effects; Uniqueness
Further Readings
Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same
and different at the same time. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475–482.
ORDER EFFECTS
Definition
Order effects refer to differences in research participants’
responses that result from the order (e.g., first,
second, third) in which the experimental materials are
presented to them. Order effects can occur in any kind
of research. In survey research, for example, people
may answer questions differently depending on the
order in which the questions are asked. However,
order effects are of special concern in within-subject
designs; that is, when the same participants are in
all conditions and the researcher wants to compare
responses between conditions. The problem is that the
order in which the conditions are presented may affect
the outcome of the study.
Types of Order Effects
Order effects occur for many reasons. Practice effects
occur when participants warm up or improve their
performance over time. In reaction time studies, for
example, participants usually respond faster as a result
of practice with the task.
Participants may also perform differently at the end
of an experiment or survey because they are bored or
tired. These fatigue effects are more likely when
the procedure is lengthy and the task is repetitive or
uninteresting.
Carryover effects occur when the effect of an
experimental condition carries over, influencing performance
in a subsequent condition. These effects are
more likely when the experimental conditions follow
each other quickly. They also depend on the particular
sequence of conditions. For example, people’s estimates
of height may be lower after they have been
exposed to professional basketball players than after
they have been exposed to professional jockeys.
Interference effects occur when previous responses
disrupt performance on a subsequent task. They are
more likely when the second task quickly follows the
first and the response required in the second task conflicts
with the response required in the first task.
Ways to Control
Order Effects
Order Effects———639
Researchers use a variety of methods to reduce or
control order effects so that they do not affect the study
outcome. The choice depends on the types of effects
that are expected. Practice effects can be reduced by
providing a warm-up exercise before the experiment
begins. Fatigue effects can be reduced by shortening
the procedures and making the task more interesting.
Carryover and interference effects can be reduced by
increasing the amount of time between conditions.
Researchers also reduce order effects by systematically
varying the order of conditions so that each
condition is presented equally often in each ordinal
position. This procedure is known as counterbalancing.
For example, with two conditions, half of the participants
would receive condition A first followed by
condition B; the other half would receive condition B
first followed by condition A.
Sometimes there are so many possible orders that
it is not practical to include all of them in a study.
Researchers may then present the conditions in a different
random order for each participant, or they may
include a subset of the possible orders.
Carey S. Ryan
Kelvin L. Van Manen
See also Control Condition; Experimental Condition;
Experimentation; Research Methods

640———Organizational Behavior
Further Readings
Shaughnessy, J. J., Zechmeister, E. B., & Zechmeister, J. S.
(2006). Research methods in psychology. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR
Organizational behavior (OB) defines a field of
applied social science that has two complementary
objectives related to the fact that the term organization
refers both (a) to an entity (e.g., a corporation or
business) in which people’s behavior is coordinated
and regulated, and (b) to the outcome of that coordination
and regulation. The first objective is to understand
the behavior and experience of people who
participate in organizational life. What motivates them
to work hard? How can they be influenced and led?
What produces effective communication and decision
making? How do group affiliations and power affect
people’s perceptions and interaction? The second
objective is to understand how organizations themselves
function as a consequence of the social and
contextual elements they contain and that impinge on
them. How is an organization’s performance affected
by the knowledge, skills, and abilities of the individuals
within it; by group dynamics; and by the economic
and political conditions in which it operates? How
does the organization respond to change in these
elements, and how does it produce it?
To answer such questions, OB draws on insights
from a range of disciplines: multiple branches of psychology
(e.g., social, personality, cognitive, health,
clinical) as well as sociology, anthropology, politics,
administration and public policy, management, business,
and economics. One consequence of this enormous
breadth is that the study of OB is characterized
by work that differs greatly in its level of analysis. At
a macro-level (broad focus), work focuses on more
abstract features of organizations (e.g., their culture,
climate, ethics, and design), whereas at a micro-level
(narrow, individual focus), attention is paid to more
concrete organizational elements (e.g., the personality
of employees, the structure of tasks, the nature of
rewards). Intermediate levels of analysis focus on
the nature of the processes and dynamics that occur
within and between different groups and networks
(which themselves are defined at more or less inclusive
levels, e.g., the work team, the department, the professional
body).
Organizations are a common and important element
of social life, and the capacity to analyze them—with
a view to understanding both how they work and how
they might be improved—is a fundamental human
capacity. For this reason, contemplations on the nature
of OB are a key component of the earliest human texts
on religion and philosophy (a notable early example
being Plato’s The Republic). Nevertheless, formal OB
theorizing dates back only about 100 years and is typically
traced to Frederick Taylor’s writings on scientific
management. Taylor sought to identify the one
best way to maximize organizational efficiency and
placed an emphasis on principles of hierarchical command
and control. Critically, these ideas were backed
up by experimental research that demonstrated that
productivity could be enhanced through the implementation
of systems (e.g., of financial reward and task
structure) that regularized all aspects of individuals’
organizational activity. This work was soon complemented
by Hugo Munsterberg’s development of personnel
selection methods, the purpose of which was to
identify the one best worker. These methods emphasized
the value of breaking tasks into their constituent
parts and then recruiting workers on the basis of their
possession of the clearly defined and measurable skills
that were associated with superior performance in these
discrete areas.
In the 1930s, however, widespread dissatisfaction
with individual-level analyses and the philosophy of the
one best way led to the growth of the human relations
movement. The experimental work on which this was
based (notably the Hawthorne studies) pointed to the
role played by the informal workgroup (and its norms
and values) in determining organizational outcomes.
Led by Elton Mayo and later developed by researchers
such as Douglas McGregor and Frederick Herzberg,
the movement as a whole placed an emphasis on the
value of teams, and on processes and practices that recognized,
valued, and enriched their experience.
After World War II, there was an explosion of
interest in OB as a field, fuelled by the desire to drive
and maintain economic performance in a world that
was increasingly globalized and appeared to be everchanging.
The massive amount of work that this led to
paralleled major developments in OB’s various feeder
disciplines. Indeed, although the methods of the field
have remained avowedly scientific, there is scarcely
a significant intellectual development in the last

century—from cybernetics and chaos theory to semiotics
and post-structuralism—that has not somehow
been fed into attempts to understand and improve OB.
Nevertheless, the tension between individual- and
group-level approaches continues to be a major defining
feature of the field. Moreover, social psychology
has played an increasingly important role in the study
of OB—largely because its methods and theories are
so pertinent to this central debate and to the practices
it informs. Typically, this tension is resolved through
the development of contingency models that argue that
individuals’ performance in any domain (e.g., leadership,
motivation, decision making, communication,
negotiation) is the result of an interaction between their
personality (e.g., as measured by personality instruments)
and features of the social and organizational
context in which they operate. However, although such
models remain very popular (not least because they are
often translated into lucrative commercial products),
they tend to lack predictive ability and fail to account
for the capacity (first observed by Mayo) for organizational
context to transform individual psychology.
Moreover, by breaking down the study of OB into a
series of discrete topics, such approaches contribute to
a lack of joined up thinking. This means that important
connections between topics (e.g., leadership motivation,
communication) are not made and that there is
a piecemeal quality to both theory and practice.
Accordingly, in recent years, social psychologists have
led a move toward more integrative approaches (e.g.,
informed by principles of social cognition and/or
social identity) that attempt to address these concerns.
Finally, although OB tends to be concerned primarily
with behavior that occurs in the workplace, an
organization can be defined more generally as any
internally differentiated and purposeful social group
that has a psychological impact on its members. In
these terms, sporting teams, clubs, societies, churches,
and families are all organizations. People do perform
work in all these groups, but they are also a locus for
leisure and recreation. OB’s relation to this breadth of
human experience and activity gives it such relevance
to people’s lives, which in turn makes attempts to
understand its social and psychological dimensions so
important, so complex and ultimately so interesting.
S. Alexander Haslam
See also Decision Making; Group Dynamics; Group Identity;
Group Performance and Group Productivity; Influence;
Leadership
Further Readings
Haslam, S. A. (2004). Psychology in organizations: The
social identity approach (2nd ed.). London: Sage.
Thompson, P., & McHugh, D. (2002). Work organizations:
A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Houndmills, UK:
Macmillan.
OSTRACISM
Definition
Ostracism refers to the act of ignoring and excluding
individuals. It is differentiated from social exclusion
in that ostracism generally requires ignoring or lack of
attention in addition to social exclusion. Ostracism is
distinguishable from overt acts of rejection and bullying
because rather than combining acts of exclusion
with verbal or physical abuse, ostracism involves giving
no or little attention to the individual or groups.
Context and Importance
Ostracism———641
Ostracism is a powerful and universal social phenomenon.
Individuals and groups ostracize and are ostracized.
A variety of species other than humans have
been observed using ostracism, usually to strengthen
the group (by eliminating weaker or nonconforming
members). Ostracism among humans was first known
to be occurring in Athens more than 2,000 years ago,
where citizens voted to expel individuals by writing
the nominated individual on ostraca—shards of pottery.
Nations and tribes, in religious, penal, and educational
institutions, and among informal groups, use
ostracism. In small groups or dyads, interpersonal
ostracism—often referred to as the silent treatment—
is common, even in close relationships and among
family members.
Humans are social creatures who rely on bonds
with others to fulfill fundamental social, psychological,
and survival needs. Even when strangers in a
minimal interaction context ostracize individuals for a
very short time, ostracized individuals show signs of
distress and report that their needs have been thwarted.
The negative reactions to being ostracized are immediate
and robust. The instant unpleasant reaction to
even the most minor forms of ostracism indicate that
detection of ostracism is a functionally adaptive
response. With less than five minutes of exposure to

642———Ostracism
ostracism, individuals report lower satisfaction levels
of four fundamental needs—belonging, self-esteem,
control, and meaningful existence—and higher levels
of sadness and anger. Ostracism appears to be unique
in threatening all four of these four basic human needs
simultaneously.
Reflexive Reactions
Evidence
The reflexive reaction to ostracism is characterized
by immediate and precognitive responses to being
ostracized. The same region of the brain that detects
physical pain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is
similarly activated during a brief episode of minimal
ostracism, in which individuals believe others are not
including them in a virtual ball-toss game. Researchers
propose that social pain and physical pain detection
architectures and mechanisms are related to emotional
reactions indicative of increased caution and defensiveness
such as anxiety, anger, and depression.
Essentially, the current thinking is that people have a
built-in mechanism that automatically detects social
exclusion, registers it as pain, and then triggers coping
responses to combat the pain of ostracism.
This effect is argued to be precognitive in the sense
that factors that should minimize its distress appear
to have no effect as the ostracism occurs. Thus, distress,
subjective pain, and thwarted needs are reported
whether or not the ostracizers are friends, rivals, or
despised others, or even if it is clear to the individuals
that they are being ostracized by the computer.
Reflective Responses
The reflective response to ostracism is characterized
by deliberate and thoughtful reactions following
the social pain reaction to being ostracized. Coping
with ostracism is aimed at recovering or fortifying
the threatened needs. Because fortifying these needs
may result in conflict responses, coping responses are
more likely to be variable across situations and people.
Thus, one can fortify a loss to belonging or self-esteem
by trying to behave in ways that will meet the group’s
approval, by joining a new group, or even by thinking
of strong ties in other realms of one’s life. Fortifying
control and existence needs, however, might lead to exerting
social control over others, provoking recognition
and reactions in others, and even aggression and
violence.
The collected findings suggest that with reflection,
people can presumably cope with meaningless or
inconsequential forms of ostracism, despite the fact
that these forms of ostracism are initially detected as
painful. Given time to consider the circumstances,
individual tendencies for coping and the consideration
of relevant situational factors ought to moderate
ostracism’s negative impact. For example, researchers
found that although immediate reactions to ostracism
were similarly negative for individuals low and high
on social anxiety, only individuals high in social anxiety
continued to feel less need satisfaction 45 minutes
later. Other research also alludes to the importance of
time when it comes to responses to social exclusion.
Methods to Experimentally
Induce Ostracism
A variety of interesting and efficient methods have
induced ostracism. These include being told that after
a group get-acquainted interaction, no one wished
to work with the individual, receiving a personality
prognosis of living a life alone, and being ignored and
excluded in a conversation, ball-toss game, Internet
ball-toss game (Cyberball), a chat room, or text messaging
on cell phones. Each method has advantages
and disadvantages and is likely to contribute to the
variety of coping responses that have been observed.
Implications
Ostracism, in all its many forms, permeates almost
every aspect of an individual’s life. One form of
short-term ostracism, time-out, is used routinely in
schools and homes, and a majority of individuals
report having it used on them by loved ones, and
using it on loved ones. Research indicates that on
average, individuals report experiencing one act of
ostracism a day. Research into the nature and interpersonal
and intrapersonal costs of this ubiquitous
phenomenon continues. Current research focuses on
the conditions under which ostracism leads to generally
prosocial responses and when it leads to antisocial,
even violent responses.
Kipling D. Williams
Adrienne R. Carter-Sowell

See also Need to Belong; Rejection; Social Exclusion
Further Readings
Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D.
(2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social
exclusion. Science, 302, 290–292.
Williams, K. D. (2001). Ostracism: The power of silence.
New York: Guilford Press.
Williams, K. D., Forgas, J. P., & von Hippel, W. (Eds.).
(2005). The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion,
rejection, and bullying. New York: Psychology Press.
OTHER–TOTAL RATIO
Part of understanding how groups operate is understanding
how the individual within the group looks
at the group he or she belongs to. Once dividing the
larger group into subgroups, one usually becomes more
attached to one subgroup and sees the people in other
groups as less distinct from one another. For example,
at a party on a college campus with psychology majors
and English majors in attendance, the psychology student
sees the larger group of students as being made up
of two subgroups. That person will feel more attached
to the other psychology students and also find the
English majors as more similar to each other relative to
how varied the group of psychology students.
One way to examine this process comes from selfattention
theory. Other–total ratio characterizes what it
is like for a person to be part of a group. Specifically,
the ratio is the number of Other people divided by the
Total number of people in the group. As this number
increases, the Others outnumber the people in an individual’s
own group in relation to the Total number of
people. Consequently, the individual focuses more
attention on his or her own subgroup and then perceives
that subgroup to have salient characteristics.
Then, by comparison, the Other group seems to be
more similar then the group that the person is in. Using
the previous example, if there were 75 English majors
out of 100 people at the party, there would be a ratio of
.75. Such a high ratio would predict that the psychology
major would pay more attention to the subgroup
members than if the ratio were a lower number.
This conceptualization of groups has implications
for understanding the individual experience of members
of minority groups who are part of a larger group.
Comprehending how that individual is identifying
with certain group members over others can perhaps
be applied to how those groups can be brought into
greater harmony with each other, perhaps by creating
groups with a lower Other–total ratio.
Relatively little empirical work has fully explored
this concept, which has been overwhelmed by other
theories that address the basic fact that people see
other people’s groups as homogenous but their own
groups as more varied. In a recent overview, the available
evidence indicated that the impact of this type of
perception is pretty small. It was more important that
the other group truly be more variable and that existing
groups were studied rather than groups created in
the laboratory.
Jennifer R. Daniels
See also Optimal Distinctiveness Theory; Outgroup
Homogeneity; Self-Awareness
Further Readings
Outgroup Homogeneity———643
Mullen, B. (1983). Operationalizing the effect of the group
on the individual: A self-attention perspective. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 19, 295–322.
Mullen, B., & Hu, L. (1989). Perceptions of ingroup and
outgroup variability: A meta-analytic integration. Basic
and Applied Social Psychology, 10(3), 233–252.
OUTGROUP HOMOGENEITY
Definition
Outgroup homogeneity is the tendency for members
of a group to see themselves as more diverse and
heterogeneous than they are seen by an outgroup.
Thus, for example, whereas Italians see themselves as
quite diverse and different from one another, Americans
view Italians as more similar to each other, or more
alike. Democrats see themselves as more diverse than
they are viewed by Republicans; Southerners see
themselves as more heterogeneous than they are
viewed by the rest of U.S. residents, and so on. In
examining outgroup homogeneity, it is important to
keep the target group constant (e.g., Southerners) and
compare the perceptions of two different judge groups

644———Outgroup Homogeneity
(e.g., the judgments of Southerners themselves versus
the rest of the country), rather than comparing a single
judge group’s perceptions of two different targets
(e.g., Southerners’ judgments of their own group variability
relative to their judgments of how variable the
rest of the country is). This is because there are differences
in how variable groups are, and by holding the
target group constant, researchers can control
for these.
History and Context
In some of the earliest research on this topic,
Bernadette Park and Myron Rothbart explored a number
of aspects of outgroup homogeneity. They asked
men and women to estimate the percentage of each
group that would agree with attitude statements that
were chosen to be stereotypic or counterstereotypic of
each group, such as, “What percentage of women would
agree with the statement, I would rather drink wine than
beer.” Each group of judges said that a larger percentage
of the outgroup would agree with stereotypic
statements, and a smaller percentage would agree with
counterstereotypic statements, than members of the
group themselves said. In another study, young women
who belonged to various sororities each said members
of their own sorority were more diverse and heterogeneous
than they were seen by women who belonged to
other sororities. When rating males and females with
various college majors, the ingroup ratings were more
likely to take into account the college major, whereas
ratings made by outgroup members relied simply on
the gender category. Thus, a female dance major and a
female physics major were seen as relatively more similar
to one another by male judges (“they are both
women”) than by female judges. Finally, when reading
about a specific individual, members of the ingroup
were more likely to remember specific details about the
person (specifically, the person’s job category) than
were members of the outgroup.
A conceptually similar effect known as outgroup
polarization has been demonstrated by Patricia
Linville and E. Edward Jones. Here, outgroup members
are rated in a more extreme or polarized manner
than ingroup members. For example, when judging
the quality of a law school applicant, White participants
rate a strong Black candidate as even better than
a comparably strong White candidate, and they rate a
weak Black candidate as even worse than a comparably
weak White candidate. These researchers suggest
this is because people have a more simplified mental
representation of outgroup members; that is, people
have many more dimensions along which they think
about and evaluate members of their own groups
than members of the outgroups. This results in more
extreme good-bad judgments of the outgroup. Thus,
in outgroup homogeneity, outgroups are viewed in an
all-or-none fashion, such that nearly all group members
possess an attribute or almost none do. In outgroup
polarization, individual outgroup members are
similarly judged in an all-or-none fashion.
One possible explanation for this effect is that
people are more familiar with members of their own
groups than with outgroups, and this causes them to
see and appreciate the diversity within their ingroups.
Although undoubtedly differences in familiarity
do exist, this does not appear to be the whole story.
Outgroup homogeneity has been demonstrated even
with minimal groups. These are artificial groups created
in a laboratory setting using some arbitrary
means for categorization, such as whether a subject
tends to overestimate or underestimate the number of
dots in a scatter image of dots. Here, subjects don’t
know anyone, either ingroup or outgroup members,
and yet still they evidence outgroup homogeneity in
their judgments. Others have suggested that special
knowledge about oneself, who by definition is always
a member of the ingroup, leads to perceptions of
greater diversity and heterogeneity. Again, although
people have more detailed and intricate knowledge of
themselves, empirically how one perceives oneself
does not account for differences in perceived variability
of ingroups and outgroups. A final suggested
mechanism is that information about ingroups tends to
be organized in a more complex and articulated manner
than for outgroups. Specifically, people tend to
think about ingroups not as an undifferentiated mass
but, rather, as a collection of meaningful subgroups.
Thus, women might bring to mind subgroups that are
part of the larger group, such as mothers, professional
women, college girls, female athletes, and so on.
Research has shown that people are able to generate
a larger number of such meaningful subgroups for
ingroups than for outgroups. Importantly, when one
statistically controls for differences in the number of
subgroups that are generated, differences in perceived
group variability (that is, outgroup homogeneity) go
away. When subjects are asked to learn about a group
by organizing members into meaningful subgroups,
this results in the perception of greater diversity and

variability among group members, than when no such
study instructions are given.
Bernadette Park
See also Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Minimal Group Paradigm;
Person Perception
Further Readings
Park, B., & Rothbart, M. (1982). Perception of out-group
homogeneity and levels of social categorization: Memory
for the subordinate attributes of in-group and out-group
members. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
42, 1051–1068.
OVERCONFIDENCE
Definition
Overconfidence refers to the phenomenon that
people’s confidence in their judgments and knowledge
is higher than the accuracy of these judgments.
To investigate this effect, the subjective judgment
of confidence in the correctness of a set of answers
is compared with the objective accuracy of these
answers. In a typical study on overconfidence, participants
solve a number of two-choice questions, such
as “Which of these cities has more inhabitants:
(a) Islamabad or (b) Hyderabad?” Participants answer
each question and then indicate on a scale from 50%
to 100% how confident they are that their answer is
correct. The overconfidence effect occurs when the
confidence ratings are larger than the percentage of
correct responses. For example, typically only 75% of
the answers, for which a participant indicates a level
of confidence of 90%, are correct. Normatively, however,
nine out of ten answers should be correct. Thus,
the judge is overly confident because the subjective
confidence exceeds the actual accuracy.
Theoretical Explanations
The overconfidence effect has been explained by two
classes of explanations: biases in information processing
and effects of judgmental error. The first class of
explanations considers the overconfidence effect as a
result of biases in information processing. According
to this line of research, a judgmental process starts
Overconfidence———645
with a tentative answer to a given question. Then,
when estimating the confidence range, test persons
selectively search for evidence that the chosen answer
is correct but neglect to search for disconfirming
pieces of information. Moreover, because of the associative
network structure of the brain, confirming
pieces of information come to mind more easily than
do disconfirming pieces of information. In addition,
people often have reasons why they want a particular
answer to be true. For example, if they want to appear
knowledgeable, this can also contribute to their biased
search for confirming information. All these processes
combined often lead to an overrepresentation of confirming
information. The judges are not aware that the
search for information was biased, so they regard the
result of this information search process as support
for their initial answer and thus express a high level
of confidence.
The second class of explanations purports that
judgmental errors can occur even if information
processing is unbiased. According to this line of
research, overconfidence may, for example, be the
result of selected item sampling. When confronted
with questions such as “Which city is larger, A or B?”
participants in an experiment look for a cue that distinguishes
these two cities (e.g., “Only city A has an
airport. Normally, only large cities have airports.”),
and decide accordingly (“City A is larger.”). When
asked for the level of confidence, they estimate the
validity of the cue (“In 90% of the cases, the city with
an airport is larger than the city without an airport.”)
and report this value as confidence judgment. If the
questions are harder than normal, the cue leads in the
wrong direction more frequently than it normally does
(e.g., in an experimental sample of questions, only
60% of the cities with an airport are actually larger).
This means that for the sample at hand, the validity of
the cue is lower than normal. However, the participants
have no reason to assume that the sample is not
representative (i.e., that the set of questions is harder
than normal), and are therefore entitled to report their
initial estimation of cue validity as confidence judgment.
They thus appear to be overconfident but the
apparent overconfidence is the result of selected item
sampling on behalf of the experimenter.
Boundary Conditions
Research has shown that the overconfidence effect does
not always occur but is subject to boundary conditions.

646———Overjustification Effect
First, the size of the overconfidence effect depends
on the type of question that has been asked. For twochoice
questions, the effect is weaker than for confidence
range questions, where participants are asked to
estimate a number (e.g., the number of inhabitants of
Hyderabad). Instead of estimating the exact number,
they have to give a range such that there is a 90%
chance that the correct number lies somewhere in the
range. Confidence range questions are more prone to
effects of biased information processing because there
are no explicit alternatives as in the case of two-choice
questions. Participants start with guessing a number
(e.g., “50,000 inhabitants”) that might be far from right
and then search for confirming pieces of information.
Second, the degree of overconfidence depends on
the domain of questions. For some domains, the effect
is stronger than for others. This effect can be attributed
to the difficulty of the set of questions. For hard
sets of questions, most answers are wrong, whereas
for easy sets, most answers are correct. The overconfidence
effect is stronger for harder sets of questions,
whereas easy sets tend to produce an underconfidence
effect.
Third, individual differences contribute to differences
in the degree of overconfidence. Some people
express more confidence than others do regardless of
the domain of questions. Overconfidence is correlated
positively with confidence, but negatively with accuracy
of judgment. This means that people who are
most overconfident are more confident and less accurate
in their judgment then are other people.
Fourth, the degree of overconfidence depends on
the level of expertise. People who frequently give
judgments of the same type display little or no overconfidence
effect. They are well calibrated. This effect
is restricted to the area of expertise: When confronted
with questions from other domains, their calibration is
the same as everybody else’s.
Implications
The overconfidence effect is not limited to laboratory
situations but has been demonstrated in many areas of
professional life such as investment banking, clinical
psychology, medicine, and others. Unwarranted confidence
in one’s own knowledge and competence
can yield reckless behavior and lack of openness for
disconfirming information, and thus lead to poor
performance and severe mistakes. On the other hand,
displaying high levels of confidence can also be
beneficial for two reasons. First, competence cannot
always be measured. Therefore, others might not find
out that a confident person is actually overconfident.
Second, overconfidence in one’s competence encourages
actions that one wouldn’t undertake if one were
less confident, but which may nevertheless be
successful.
Svenja K. Schattka
Patrick A. Müller
See also Confirmation Bias; Positive Illusions; Self-Serving
Bias
Further Readings
Hoffrage, U. (2004). Overconfidence. In R. Pohl (Ed.),
Cognitive illusions: A handbook on fallacies and biases in
thinking, judgment, and memory (pp. 235–254). Hove,
UK: Psychology Press.
OVERJUSTIFICATION EFFECT
Definition
Overjustification occurs when play becomes work
as a result of payment or other reward. More formally,
it is the process by which intrinsic interest in some
activity or behavior is supplanted through the presentation
of an extrinsic reward. An activity that was once
interesting in and of itself becomes less interesting
and less attractive after a person is rewarded for completing
the activity. This leads to the ironic and surprising
result that rewarding a behavior can inhibit
future repetitions of that behavior.
The overjustification effect occurs when internalized
motives are supplanted by external motives. It
occurs because people do not have perfect access to
the preferences and motives that guide their decisionmaking
processes. These preferences are often inferred
from observation of their own behavior, and sometimes
people get it wrong. When two motives exist for
a given behavior—both internal and external—people
often assume that the more obvious external justification
is the cause of their behavior. This observation
leads to a permanent change in how people think about
the given activity, and it can lead to a loss of the internalized
motives for the behavior. Thus, large rewards

can extinguish the inherent joy of some positive activity,
and large punishments can extinguish the moral
inhibitions against some negative activity.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Reward
Some activities, such as eating, drinking, learning,
and socializing, are intrinsically interesting, and people
pursue them with little encouragement. Other activities
are usually performed only to gain an external
reward. For instance, people typically go to work only
because they are paid, and children make their beds
or take out the trash for praise or an allowance. These
behaviors are rewarded by extrinsic sources, and
when the rewards stop, so too do the behaviors. Thus,
some behaviors are intrinsically rewarding, and some
are extrinsically rewarding. In all cases, the rewards
lead to an increased likelihood of repeating the given
behavior.
However, something strange occurs when extrinsic
rewards are given for activities that are already intrinsically
interesting. At first, as long as both rewards are
present, the person continues the activity. But when
the extrinsic rewards are removed, the person stops
performing the activity, as if his or her intrinsic interest
had been wiped away.
Consider the classic experiment among nursery
school students conducted by Mark Lepper and his
colleagues. These students were given the opportunity
to draw pictures with an attractive set of Magic
Markers during their free play time. Hidden observers
recorded their behavior and learned, not surprisingly,
that children needed little encouragement to play with
the markers. Several weeks later, these same students
were given another opportunity to play with the markers.
But this time some of the students learned that they
would receive a very special “good player” award with
a ribbon and gold star if they were willing to draw
some pictures; others were simply invited to draw for
fun. Thus, the experiment had two groups of students
involved in an activity with high intrinsic interest: one
that received a reward for playing, and one that did not.
Several weeks later, the students were again monitored
when the markers were brought out during playtime.
The results were very clear: Children who had been
given an extrinsic reward showed far less interest in
playing with the markers than did the children who
were not offered the reward. Something about the
reward had reduced the children’s desire to play with
the markers.
Overjustification Effect———647
These findings are best explained through selfperception
theory, which states that people learn about
their likes and dislikes by observing their own behavior,
and then making inferences from those observations.
In this example, the children in the reward
condition observed that they had chosen to play with
the markers, but they also observed that they were
rewarded for that behavior. They concluded, in retrospect,
that the reward was the primary reason they
had played with the markers. Because no reward was
offered for drawing during the subsequent free play
period, they chose not to play with the markers. The
other students, however, who had not received a
reward, saw the scene differently. They observed their
previous decision to play with the markers but lacked
any obvious explanation for that behavior. In the
absence of any other reason, they concluded (correctly)
that they must have played with the markers
because they enjoyed playing with markers.
This experiment, and the hundreds like it, indicate
that human preferences are somewhat more fragile
than people expect. When people are given two good
explanations for their own behavior (e.g., an external
reward and intrinsic interest), they tend to assume that
the more obvious and salient explanation is correct.
The external reward is generally more obvious and
salient than the intrinsic interest is.
Applications
The importance of the overjustification effect lies in
its broad application to everyday life. Most people’s
intuition follows the logic that if one wants to encourage
a person to perform an activity, one should offer
rewards for doing so. This logic is correct when the
activity is inherently unpleasant or unattractive, but
not when the activity possesses intrinsic interest. For
example, children naturally require little encouragement
to learn about their environment and how their
world works. This natural curiosity fades in school,
and the typical student finds classes and schoolwork
downright onerous. There are, no doubt, many reasons
for this change, but the fundamental structure of the
American educational system and reliance on grading
is responsible for a significant part of the decline.
Although learning about history or mathematics can
be inherently interesting, most students quickly come
to believe that their only motivation for learning the
material stems from the promise of a reward (an A),
or the threat of a punishment (an F). Educational

648———Overjustification Effect
programs that have successfully removed or reduced
the importance of grading have shown subsequent
increases in intrinsic interest in the topics.
A similar dynamic has been observed when
students are rewarded for reading books, completing
assignments, or achieving good grades. Parents and
teachers with good intentions unwittingly damage the
very motivation they are trying to nurture. Beyond
school, the effects of overjustification can be equally
powerful. Many people choose a career based on their
love of the activity, whether as a teacher, a lawyer, a
wilderness guide, or a doctor. When the profession
pays poorly and there is no overjustification, the original
reason for joining the profession (intrinsic interest)
remains salient. As a consequence, the person
continues to love his or her work. But when the salary
increases and provides its own justification, it tends
to crowd out the original internal reason, and in so
doing, permanently changes the nature of the job for
that individual. The person comes to love the paycheck,
not the work. Financially, it is always a boon to
receive a raise; psychologically, there may be a cost
associated with such good fortune.
Punishment
Thus far, the examples have revolved around the effect
of external rewards. However, the same conceptual
process also applies to punishments and the inhibition
of behavior. Imagine, for example, that you are taking
an important test and are quite concerned about your
performance. You have the opportunity to cheat and
thus assure yourself of an excellent score, but choose
not to do so. When you later ask yourself “Why didn’t
I cheat?” your conclusion will likely be “it’s wrong to
cheat.” In fact, the easier it was to cheat, the more
strongly you would conclude that you believe cheating
is wrong. Now imagine that there were several proctors
closely watching the exam, and that you had been
warned of severe consequences for any signs of cheating.
When you ask yourself why you refrained from
cheating, the salient explanation is “because I would
have been caught.” As a result, you fail to internalize
the belief that cheating is wrong, and you are less
likely to conclude that you behaved in line with your
moral beliefs. Thus, as the threat of punishment
increases, the likelihood that a person will internalize
the proscription against the behavior decreases.
This is not to say that punishment doesn’t work. It
works extremely well, but only when the punishment
is certain and swift. If you want to permanently inhibit
a person’s negative behaviors without providing constant
supervision (a goal of all parents and all societies),
then it is necessary for that person to internalize
the justification for his or her behavior (or, in the present
case, the lack of behavior). Thus, the proper
amount of punishment should be just sufficient to
inhibit the targeted behavior, but not so severe as to
provide an overwhelming external justification to the
individual.
Kevin M. Carlsmith
See also Attribution Theory; Cognitive Dissonance Theory;
Self-Perception Theory
Further Readings
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and
self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
Lepper, M. R., Green, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973).
Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic
rewards: A test of the overjustification hypothesis. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 28, 129–137.

PATH ANALYSIS
Definition
Path analysis is a statistical technique that is used to
examine and test purported causal relationships among
a set of variables. A causal relationship is directional in
character, and occurs when one variable (e.g., amount
of exercise) causes changes in another variable (e.g.,
physical fitness). The researcher specifies these relationships
according to a theoretical model that is of
interest to the researcher. The resulting path model
and the results of the path analysis are usually then
presented together in the form of a path diagram.
Although a path analysis makes causal inferences
about how variables are related, correlational data are
actually used to conduct the path analysis. In many
instances, the results of the analysis provide information
about the plausibility of the researcher’s
hypothesized model. But even if this information is not
available, the path analysis provides estimates of the
relative strengths of the causal effects and other associations
among the variables in the model. These estimates
are more useful to the extent that the researcher’s
specified model actually represents how the variables
are truly related in the population of interest.
Variables in Path Analysis
Path analysis is a member of a more general type of
statistical analysis known as structural equation modeling.
The feature of path analysis that separates it
from general structural equation modeling is that path
P
649
analysis is limited to variables that are measured or
observed, rather than latent. This means that each
variable in a path analysis consists of a single set of
numbers in a straightforward way. For example, extraversion
would be considered a measured or observed
variable if each person’s level of extraversion was represented
by a single number for that person, perhaps
that person’s score on an extraversion questionnaire.
So the variable of extraversion as a whole would
consist of one number for each person in the sample.
Through certain statistical techniques, extraversion
could be treated as a latent variable in a structural
equation model by using several different measures
simultaneously to represent each person’s level of
extraversion. But by definition, path analysis does not
use latent variables.
Model Specification
The researcher must begin a path analysis by specifying
the ways in which the variables of interest are
thought to relate to one another. This is done based
on theory and reasoning, and it is critical that the
researcher specify the model thoughtfully. A key aspect
of this process is deciding which particular variables
causally affect other particular variables. A model in
which exercise causes good health has a very different
meaning than a model in which good health causes
exercise. But in many instances, the numeric results
of such alternative path analyses will reveal little or
nothing about which model is closer to the truth.
Because of this, there is no substitute for the researcher
having a sound rationale for the form of the path model.

650———Path Analysis
Path Diagrams
The path diagram is a visual display of the path model
and the results of the path analysis. In path diagrams,
measured variables are usually represented as squares
or rectangles. A single-headed arrow (also known as
a path or direct effect) drawn from one variable to
another (say, from anxiety to attention seeking; see the
standardized path diagram shown in Figure 1) means
that a change in the value of anxiety is thought to tend
to cause a change in the value of attention seeking
(rather than vice versa). It is not necessary for the
researcher to specify in advance whether increases in
the first variable are thought to cause increases or
decreases in the second variable. Mathematical algorithms
will estimate both the magnitude of the effect
and its positivity or negativity.
A double-headed arrow (sometimes known as a
correlation in standardized path diagrams, or a covariance
in unstandardized diagrams) means that the two
connected variables are assumed to be associated with
one another (again, either positively or negatively),
but with no particular cause assumed (as with income
and anxiety). This type of relationship is sometimes
referred to as an unanalyzed association because the
path model does not address why these two variables
are associated. They are simply allowed to associate
freely.
Data
Once the researcher has specified the path model, it is
necessary to have data available to perform the analysis.
The variables in the entirely fictional example of
Figure 1 are income (annual income in dollars), anxiety
(a score from a psychometric anxiety questionnaire),
attention seeking (also a questionnaire score),
and impressiveness of jewelry (say, a rating of each
−.24
Income
Anxiety
−.35
+.32
Attention-
Seeking
Figure 1 Example Path Analysis Based on Entirely Fictional Data
person’s jewelry done by a trained coder). What is
required is a sample of data in which each of these
variables has been measured for each case in the sample.
So the researcher would need a sufficiently large
group of people for whom values of each of these four
variables are available.
The primary inputs to path analysis software are
numbers that indicate the strength and the sign (either
positive or negative) of the association between each
pair of variables. There is one such number for every
unique pair of variables. Depending on the form of
the analysis, these associations may be referred to
as either correlations or covariances. Regardless, a
defining feature of this input information is that no
causality among the variables is actually implied in
these data themselves. They simply index the strength
of the association for each pair of variables in the
model, and whether it is positive or negative.
Model Fit
The number of variables used in the path analysis
imposes a limit on the complexity of the path model. In
most instances, a model is as complex as possible if it
has as many paths and correlations as there are unique
pairs of variables. Models such as these are known as
just-identified models. This is not, however, to imply
that more complex models are necessarily more desirable;
more complex models are less parsimonious.
In Figure 1, there are four variables and thus
4(4–1)/2 = 6 unique pairs of variables. Because there
are fewer paths and correlations in Figure 1 than unique
pairs of variables, this model is not just-identified.
Models such as this are known as overidentified models.
A desirable property of overidentified models is
that the path analysis can typically provide information
about model fit. The most basic piece of this information
is known as the chi-square statistic. To the extent
that the probability value associated
with this statistic is relatively low, it is
Jewelry improbable that the researcher has
specified a path model that is correct in
the population from which the sample
data came. In other words, the researcher
+.34 is confronted with evidence that the
specified model is untenable as a representation
of what is really happening in
the population.
Indices of model appropriateness
besides the chi-square statistic are

available and are commonly used. This is partly
because many researchers regard the chi-square statistic
as too stringent a test for structural equation
models in general. Use of these alternative fit indices
is associated with a lower likelihood of rejecting a
researcher-specified model. The extent to which fit
information from the chi-square statistic should counterbalance
the generally more lenient criteria of other
indices is a controversial issue. Regardless of how a
researcher chooses to emphasize each type of fit information,
it is important to know that they are only
available for overidentified models. Furthermore, it is
important to understand that even though poor model
fit means that the model specified by the researcher
is likely inaccurate, good fit in no way guarantees the
correctness of the model. For example, the researcher
could have omitted important variables or misspecified
the direction of one or more causal arrows, yet
still possibly have good fit.
Path Coefficients
All path analyses provide estimates of the values of the
paths and correlations that connect the observed variables.
Though the researcher specifies the presence or
absence of particular paths and correlations, the specific
values of these coefficients are entirely calculated
by the mathematical algorithms of path analysis acting
on the sample data. They are mathematical best available
estimates of what the coefficients would be if the
entire population were available for analysis. These
values are typically displayed in the diagram next to
the appropriate path (see Figure 1).
Standardized (as opposed to unstandardized)
coefficients are typically presented in path diagrams.
The use of standardized coefficients attempts to allow
comparisons of the relative strengths of the paths
and correlations even though the variables involved
may have very different scales of measurement. These
standardized coefficients can range in value from
–1.00 to +1.00. Greater absolute values indicate
stronger relationships, and the sign (+ or –) indicates
whether an increase in a causal variable results in a
predicted increase (+) or decrease (–) in a caused variable
or whether a correlation is positive or negative.
Changing the direction of an arrow, eliminating it,
replacing it with a correlation, or changing the variables
included in the model can result in different values
for the strength of that path and can affect other
paths in the model in unpredictable ways. Relatedly,
in a path analysis with three or more variables, a path
from variable X to variable Y might have a very different
strength or even a different sign (+ versus −) than
what might be expected from looking at the
simple association between X and Y alone. For these
reasons, path analysis can be a very informative technique.
But whether it is informative or misleading
depends on the soundness of the researcher’s model
and the representativeness of the sample data.
In Figure 1, the correlation of income and anxiety
is –.24, meaning that higher incomes are associated
with lower levels of anxiety in these sample data. The
value of +.32 for the path from income to jewelry
means that increasing income is predicted to directly
cause increases in the impressiveness of people’s jewelry.
Importantly, this model asserts that income can
be thought to relate to the impressiveness of people’s
jewelry in two separate ways. Although income exerts
a direct effect (+.32) on jewelry, it is also spuriously
associated with jewelry via its correlation with anxiety
because anxiety causes changes in attention seeking,
which in turn causes changes in jewelry. The path
analysis has decomposed the original, singular sample
association between income and jewelry into these
two conceptually distinct parts based on the researcher’s
theoretical model and the sample data. Theory-based
decompositional inferences such as this are the essence
of path analysis.
Note also that anxiety is not directly linked to jewelry
in this model. Thus, this model asserts that the
association between these variables in the population
can be entirely accounted for via income and attention
seeking. To the extent that this theoretical assertion
had been wrong, indices of model fit would tend to be
worse.
Phillip W. Vaughan
See also LISREL; Nonexperimental Designs;
Operationalization; Research Methods; Structural
Equation Modeling
Further Readings
Path Analysis———651
Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S. G., & Aiken, L. S. (2003).
Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the
behavioral sciences. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Keith, T. Z. (2006). Multiple regression and beyond: A
conceptual introduction to multiple regression,
confirmatory factor analysis, and structural equation
modeling. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

652———Peace Psychology
Kline, R. B. (1998). Principles and practice of structural
equation modeling. New York: Guilford Press.
Wonnacott, T. H., & Wonnacott, R. J (1981). Regression:
A second course in statistics. New York: Wiley.
PEACE PSYCHOLOGY
Peace psychology seeks to develop theory and practices
that prevent and mitigate both direct violence
and structural violence. Direct violence injures or kills
people quickly and dramatically, whereas structural
violence is much more widespread and kills far more
people, by depriving them of basic need satisfaction.
When people starve, for example, even though there’s
enough food for everyone, the distribution system is
creating structural violence.
Roots of Peace Psychology
The roots of peace psychology are often traced to
William James and a speech he gave at Stanford
University in 1906. With World War I on the horizon,
James talked about his belief that war satisfied a deeply
felt human need for virtues such as loyalty, discipline,
conformity, group cohesiveness, and duty. He also
observed that individuals who belong to a group,
whether military or otherwise, experience a boost in selfpride
when they are proud of their group. Most importantly,
he argued that war was not likely to be eliminated
until humans created a moral equivalent of war, such as
public service that allowed people to experience the
virtues that were connected with war making.
Many other psychologists and philosophers wrote
about the psychology of peace. A partial list includes
Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, Jeremy Bentham, James
McKeen Cattell, Mary Whiton Calkins, Sigmund Freud,
William McDougall, Charles Osgood, Ivan Pavlov,
and Edward Tolman. Even Pythagoras would qualify,
because of his writings on nonviolence and appreciation
for the more insidious form of violence called
structural violence, which kills people slowly by depriving
them of basic need satisfaction (e.g., poverty).
Throughout the 20th century, a recurrent theme
among peace psychologists has been that war is built,
not born, and the related idea that war is biologically
possible but not inevitable. These ideas are captured
in a number of manifestos issued by psychologists.
One statement was signed by almost 4,000 psychologists
after World War II. More recently, the Seville
Statement was issued in 1986 by 20 highly respected
scientists during the United Nations International Year
of Peace.
Because war is built or constructed, a great deal of
research in peace psychology has sought to identify
environmental conditions that are linked to violence
and peaceful behavior. For instance, during the civil
rights era in the United States, Floyd Allport’s landmark
study on the nature of prejudice proposed that
contact between conflicted groups (i.e., Blacks and
Whites) could improve relations if certain conditions
were met, such as cooperative interdependence, equal
status, support from authorities. Although integrated
schools have not exactly delivered on the promises of
the contact hypothesis, numerous studies continue
to demonstrate that intergroup contact does improve
intergroup attitudes, but only if implemented in accordance
with the conditions Allport specified.
Peace Psychology
and the Cold War
Peace psychology was given a significant boost during
the Cold War when the conflict between the
United States and Soviet Union heated up and the
threat of nuclear annihilation seemed imminent. At
times, the threat of nuclear war was the top fear, even
among children in the Soviet Union and United States.
These fears were normal responses to the threatening
situation.
Why were the superpowers at the brink of nuclear
war? Human psychology, and the critical role of emotions
and perceptions, provided some insights into the
nuclear arms race and the enemy images that dominated
U.S.–Soviet relations. Fear was thought to be a
key motive: Each side developed and deployed more
and more nuclear missiles in an effort to reduce fear
and build security, but paradoxically created a security
dilemma in which each side responded to the threat of
the other side by building more weapons and ultimately
becoming even more insecure. Misperception
was also a problem. One side would see its actions as
defensive (e.g., building more weapons), but the other
side would see the same actions as offensive. Mirror
images occurred with both sides seeing each other
as expansionistic and aggressive. Mutually distorted
perceptions, destructive communication patterns, and

competition for allies fuelled mistrust. The malignant
relationship was reflected in rhetoric, such as
President Ronald Reagan’s reference to the Soviet
Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world.”
Some psychologists argued that the policy of deterrence
was the main problem. Deterrence is based on the
premise that one country, say country A, can deter an
attack by country B, if country A has enough retaliatory
force. Therefore, decision makers in country B would
decide not to attack because the losses for initiating war
would outweigh the gains. Psychologists noted that
deterrence often breaks down, as it did in 1982, when
Argentina launched an offense on Great Britain (over the
Falkland Islands) that was quickly put down. Besides,
the policy of deterrence culminated in mutually assured
destruction whereby both superpowers had so many
weapons that both would be destroyed if a nuclear war
were started by either side. Some psychologists even
wrote about the madness of mutually assured destruction
because both sides were behaving irrationally.
Some peace psychologists argued that the only way
to improve the relationship was to realize there could
be no security for either side unless there was mutual
security. Another prescription was for each side to rely
less on deterring and more on reassuring each other.
A peace-promoting proposal that was widely endorsed
was the GRIT Tension Reduction Strategy. To begin
GRIT, one of the parties in the conflict unilaterally
initiates a cooperative move; the move is announced
and reciprocity is invited. If the other side reciprocates,
then the cycle would be started and both sides
would take turns with tiny steps that deescalate the
tension in the relationship.
GRIT was used by President John F. Kennedy in
1963 when he gave a speech at American University
and asked all Americans to reexamine their attitudes
toward the Soviet Union. He also announced an end to
U.S. nuclear tests in the atmosphere as long as the
Soviets stopped testing. His speech was followed by a
reciprocal initiative by the Soviets—they stopped testing,
and soon thereafter, both sides took several more
reciprocal steps that led to the Limited Test Ban
Treaty, which allowed testing only underground.
Post–Cold War Peace Psychology
The Cold War ended with dramatic events in 1989,
most notably the fall of the Berlin Wall that separated
the Soviet and U.S. spheres of influence. But the Cold
War had given peace psychology a major boost as
psychologists created concepts to better understand intergroup
conflict and its resolution. Also important was
the establishment of the 48th division of the American
Psychological Association, called Peace Psychology.
Shortly thereafter, a journal was established, Peace and
Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, and even more
recently, doctoral-level training programs in peace psychology
have begun to spring up around the world.
Peace psychology is now global in scope. It recognizes
that violence can be cultural, which occurs when
beliefs are used to justify either direct or structural
violence. For example, when a person justifies the
deaths of starving people by blaming them for their
situation (called blaming the victim), that person is
engaging in cultural violence. Direct violence is supported
by the culturally violent notion of just war theory,
which argues that under certain conditions, it’s
acceptable to kill others (e.g., defense of the homeland,
using war as a last resort). From the perspective
of the United States, one of the main challenges for
peace psychology is to deepen understanding of the
structural and cultural roots of violence, a problem
that is particularly important when security concerns
revolve around the prevention of terrorism.
Basically, today, the peace tools of peace psychologists
fall into six categories: (1) strengthening relationships
that are cooperative already; (2) detecting and
responding to early warning signs of cultural violence
(e.g., one group beginning to dehumanize another
group) before the conflict escalates; (3) using conflict
resolution to resolve conflicts and disagreements
before they turn violent; (4) organizing antiviolence
movements when violence breaks out; (5) mopping up
after large-scale violence has occurred, by treating
victims and perpetrators of violence and assisting in
community development; and (6) building socially just
societies and cultures of peace through nonviolent
means (e.g., dissent, protest, nonviolent resistance).
Daniel J. Christie
Thomas E. Cooper
See also Contact Hypothesis; GRIT Tension Reduction
Strategy; Terrorism, Psychology of
Further Readings
Peace Psychology———653
Blumberg, H. H., Hare, A. P., & Costin, A. (2007). Peace
psychology: A comprehensive introduction. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.

654———Personalities and Behavior Patterns, Type A and Type B
Christie, D. J. (2006). Post–Cold War peace psychology:
More differentiated, contextualized, and systemic.
Journal of Social Issues, 62, 1.
Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology (any
articles)
Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence: Peace
Psychology Division of the American Psychological
Association. Retrieved from http://www.webster.edu/
peacepsychology
Wessells, M. G. (1996). A history of Division 48 (Peace
Psychology). In D. A. Dewsbury (Ed.), Unification
through division: Histories of the divisions of the
American Psychological Association, 1 (pp. 265–298).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
PERSONALITIES AND BEHAVIOR
PATTERNS, TYPE A AND TYPE B
Definition
The type A personality is a collection of behaviors
that include impatience and a sense of urgency about
accomplishing most tasks; aggressiveness and sometimes
hostility toward others, especially those who
“get in the way”; and a desire for achievement that
leads to exaggerated competitiveness and striving for
success. Type A personalities lead fast-paced lives;
they speak quickly, walk quickly, eat quickly—all in
an attempt to accomplish as much as possible in as
little time as possible. By comparison, type B personalities
are relaxed and easygoing, less concerned with
the pressures of success (but are not lazy), and generally
lead less hectic lives.
History and Importance
Interest in type A behavior first arose in the 1950s
when two cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray
Rosenman, noticed that patients with coronary problems
seemed to behave differently from noncoronary
patients. Careful observation led Friedman and
Rosenman to describe the type A behavior pattern as
“an action-emotion complex that can be observed in
any person who is aggressively involved in a chronic,
incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less
and less time, and if required to do so, against the
opposing efforts of other things and other persons.”
Subsequent research sought to validate speculation
that the type A pattern made a person prone to coronary
disease. In one of the most famous early studies,
the Western Collaborative Group Study (WCGS),
more than 3,000 middle-aged men were followed for
8½ years beginning in 1960–1961. All the men were
free from coronary disease at the beginning of the
study. When data collection was terminated in 1969,
nearly twice as many type A personalities as type B
personalities had developed coronary heart disease. At
the time, type A behavior appeared to be a personality
or lifestyle predictor of coronary disease on par with
traditional and well-known risk factors such as smoking,
high cholesterol, and hypertension.
Other medical research soon followed and with
it came mixed results and controversy. Some studies
replicated the WCGS, but others (including longerterm
follow-ups of the WCGS sample) did not, and
the results for women and various ethnic groups were
not always consistent. Much of the confusion could be
traced to the way type A behavior was measured in
research. The original method for identifying type A
behavior is called the structured interview (SI). It
is time-consuming and requires special training to
administer. Alternative questionnaire measures, the
most well-known being the Jenkins Activity Survey,
were developed to allow faster and more efficient
assessment. Unfortunately, the questionnaires mimic
the content of the SI but do not include the challenges
that are part of the interview nor do they capture the
speech style and nonverbal cues that are crucial to
identifying type A behavior during the SI. Not surprisingly,
research conducted with the two forms of
assessment does not always arrive at similar conclusions
because different features of type A behavior are
being emphasized. In some ways, this problem was a
blessing in disguise because it prompted researchers
to explore how particular facets of type A behavior are
related to coronary risk.
The key problem with questionnaire measures of
type A behavior is that they do not provide direct
behavioral evidence for impatience, anger, and hostility.
This proved to be crucial because later research
found anger and hostility to be more strongly related
to coronary heart disease risk than are the other parts
of the type A pattern. Questionnaires such as the
Jenkins Activity Survey are perhaps best thought of as
measures of self-reported job involvement, competitive
achievement striving, and time urgency. These are
important parts of the type A pattern and can have
health-related consequences, but hostility appears to

e especially important in the development of coronary
disease.
Underlying Motive
Later research, primarily by psychologists, extended
the early work by searching for the motives that give
rise to type A behavior. This research showed that type
A personalities differ from type B personalities in
having a higher need to control their lives and desiring
a clear appraisal of their skills. According to this
perspective, type A behavior can best be thought of
as a tactic for demonstrating control and talent. Situations
that are uncontrollable, unpredictable, or create
uncertainty about ability are stressful for those with
type A personality. Ironically, through their exaggerated
attempts to maintain control and achieve success,
type A personalities probably create much of the stress
that they experience.
Current Status
Other research has shown that type A personalities’
fast-paced, stress-filled lives make them susceptible to
other health problems. Type A personalities tend to
focus their attention on their work to ensure success,
but in doing so they ignore other potentially important
cues such as physical symptoms that can signal a
health problem needing attention. The type A pattern
has been of particular interest to organizational psychologists.
The behaviors of people with type A personality
have obvious and important implications in
the work world (e.g., they do not delegate responsibility
easily), and their work habits have important implications
for their relations with others.
Behavioral Changes
If the type A pattern is related to health problems, it
might seem sensible that type A personalities would
want to change their ways. Type A personalities are
not always aware of their behavioral excesses, however,
and even when they are aware, they probably do
not see much reason to alter their behaviors. After all,
their lifestyle is consistent with American values that
emphasize hard work, striving for lofty goals, and
competition. Indeed, type A behavior, except for the
hostility component, is a recipe for success in Western
culture. Yet the health problems do lead some people
Personality and Social Behavior———655
with type A personality to seek help, and their behavior
can be modified to lessen the problematic features
while maintaining the aspects that have made them
successful.
Michael J. Strube
See also Personality and Social Behavior; Stress and Coping;
Traits
Further Readings
Friedman, M. (1996). Type A behavior: Its diagnosis and
treatment. New York: Springer.
Friedman, M., & Rosenman, R. (1974). Type A behavior and
your heart. New York: Knopf.
Glass, D. C. (1977). Behavior patterns, stress, and coronary
disease. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Strube, M. J., Hanson, J. S., & Newman, L. (2003). The
virtues and vices of personal control. In E. Chang &
L. Sanna (Eds.), Virtue, vice, and personality: The
complexity of behavior. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Definitions
Personality is an individual’s typical way of feeling,
thinking, and acting. Given that personality is typical,
it is fairly stable over time. Social behavior refers to
a person’s feelings, thoughts, or actions as he or she
relates to other people. These two definitions have a
very close relationship. Knowing something about an
individual’s personality should allow psychologists to
predict his or her social behavior. Similarly, knowing
about a person’s social behavior should give clues to
aspects of his or her personality. In other words, an
individual’s personality and social behavior influence
each other, and knowledge of one allows the inference
of information about the other.
History and Background
People tend to describe others in terms of personality
characteristics. Almost 20,000 English words can be
used to describe a person. For example, people can be
described as outgoing or shy, dominant or submissive,
conscientious or careless, and so forth. People possess

656———Personality and Social Behavior
different personality characteristics; therefore, it is
possible to group people based on these characteristics.
The history of psychologists’ study of personality
has involved several attempts at developing systems
that would be helpful in classifying people by their
personalities. The ancient Greeks first attempted to
broadly describe personality with types. There were
four types of personalities (based on which of their
body fluids was predominant): cheerful, irritable,
depressed, and unemotional. In the past century, personality
has also been classified based on three different
body types: The endomorph was plump, jolly, and
relaxed; the ectomorph was thin, anxious, and unsocial;
and the mesomorph was muscular, confident, and
active.
More recently, Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality
Factors (16 PF) offered a way to classify people
based on 16 personality dimensions. The 16 PF
includes measures of warmth, reasoning (intelligence),
emotional stability, dominance, liveliness,
rule-consciousness, social boldness, sensitivity, vigilance
(suspiciousness), abstractedness (imaginativeness),
privateness, apprehension, openness to change,
self-reliance, perfectionism, and tension. To fully
describe an individual’s personality, the person would
be given a rating on how much of each personality
factor he or she possesses. However, the most common
way of thinking about personality is in terms of
the Big Five personality traits. These personality traits
are similar to the 16 PF, but they are combined into
fewer categories. These traits include Extraversion,
Neuroticism (emotional instability), Conscientiousness,
Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience
(open-mindedness). Describing a person on each of
these five dimensions is thought to be enough to give
another person a good understanding about what type
of person he or she is. Personality traits influence
people’s behavior. Therefore, if people are described
as extraverted, they would be expected to be sociable
in groups. If people are conscientious, they would be
expected to be hard workers. If people are neurotic,
they have the tendency to be anxious.
Identifying Personality Variables
Contemporary personality classification systems (e.g.,
Big Five, 16 PF) were created by first identifying
all the words that people use to describe each other.
Next, the researchers created categories by sorting the
individual words based on common characteristics.
The categories that resulted from this process were
called personality traits or factors. For example, the
category of Extraversion would have related words like
outgoing, sociable, loud, confident, talkative, friendly,
and so forth. The category of Neuroticism would
contain words like anxious, tense, insecure, paranoid,
unstable, and so on. The Extraversion category would
also contain words such as quiet, shy, unconfident, and
so on because someone can be low on Extraversion.
Similarly, the Neuroticism category would also contain
descriptive words like stable, calm, and secure
because people can also rate low on Neuroticism.
The categories can further be grouped with the use
of a statistical technique called factor analysis.
Basically, this analysis looks for similarities among categories,
and combines multiple categories into a single
category if they appear to be describing the same personality
dimension. This technique has been used on
the 16 PF. For example, the 16 PF categories of liveliness,
social boldness, and privateness may be combined
to form the Big Five category of Extraversion, and the
16 PF categories of tension, apprehension, and (low)
emotional stability may be combined to form the Big
Five category of Neuroticism. This process of grouping
the personality descriptors is useful because it gives a
more simplistic way of describing people. Instead of
describing people in terms of 20,000 words, people can
be described on the basis of 16, or just 5.
Measuring Personality
To assess personality, people are asked to answer questions
about themselves relating to the personality traits
of interest. Personality questionnaires or inventories
include questions about the person’s feelings, preferences,
and behaviors. Usually, individuals are asked
to respond to questions about themselves and their
personality characteristics. However, sometimes people
who know the individual, such as work supervisors,
friends, or family members, are asked to respond to
questions about that individual’s personality.
These questionnaires are created by first identifying
two groups that are known to differ on the personality
trait of interest, administering questions to them
regarding their feelings, preferences, and behaviors,
and observing which questions the two groups
respond differently to. Whichever questions are found
to discriminate between those two groups are included

in the personality inventory. For example, if the personality
inventory is supposed to measure a person’s
enjoyment of thinking, the researchers may give the
questionnaire to university professors and high-school
dropouts. It is expected that these two groups would
differ on the personality characteristic of interest
(enjoyment of thinking), so researchers would identify
which questions the two groups respond to differently
and include these questions on the personality
inventory. Personality inventories can measure any
number of personality traits, and they contain a separate
scale for each personality trait they are meant
to measure. Accurate personality measurement is
important, in part, because it is necessary for accurate
behavioral prediction. Without quality measures of
personality, the influence of personality on social
behavior will tend to be underestimated.
Influence of Personality on
Important Social Behaviors
Assessing an individual’s personality traits is thought
to be helpful in predicting his or her future behavior.
To assess whether personality influences social
behavior, the person’s responses on the personality
inventory are compared with that person’s observed
social behavior. If the personality responses on the
questionnaire and the social behavior are related, the
person’s score on the personality inventory should
be able to predict the individual’s future behavior.
Personality variables have been found to influence
various social behaviors like helping, conformity, obedience,
aggression, and prejudice. In fact, there are
personality scales that measure people’s tendencies
toward aggressiveness, conformity, altruism (an indication
of helping behavior), and authoritarianism (an
indication of a prejudiced personality), to name a few.
For example, in looking at the 16 PF categories
mentioned earlier, the category of apprehension could
be used as an indication of a person’s tendency toward
conformity. People are more likely to conform to others’
decisions if they are insecure in their own decisionmaking
abilities. The 16 PF categories of openness to
change and dominance may be used as an indication
of a tendency toward prejudiced personality. People
who want to dominate others and are not open to
breaking with traditional ideas are more likely to
exhibit prejudice. The 16 PF categories of warmth and
sensitivity may be used to indicate tendency toward
Personality and Social Behavior———657
helping behavior. Helping others is most likely to
come from people who are attentive to others and
are sensitive. Many different measures of personality
variables can be used to predict social behavior (to
some extent).
Importance of the Situation
Versus Personality
Although personality is supposed to allow the prediction
of a person’s behavior, it does not allow perfect
prediction in every situation. Unfortunately, research
shows that people’s behavior is frequently inconsistent.
The situation the person is in can also influence
behavior. A two-decade-long debate called the
person-situation controversy involved discussion of
when personality or the situation can better predict
behavior. Basically, as will be discussed, personality
is likely to influence behavior when the situation does
not create strong pressures for the person to behave a
certain way, when the person is exhibiting dominant personality
characteristics, when that person does not care
about fitting his or her behavior to situational requirements,
and when the person’s behavior is observed
across a variety of situations over time.
Types of Situations
Not surprisingly, when people are in unfamiliar
situations or situations that require more formal
behavior (at church or on a job interview), their personalities
influence their behavior less than do the
situational requirements. On the other hand, when
people are in familiar, comfortable situations (with
friends or family) their personalities are more likely to
influence behavior. For example, if an individual
reports having a shy personality, that information may
be able to be used to accurately predict behavior in
classroom settings or around new, unfamiliar people.
However, the information that the person has a shy
personality might not be able to be used to accurately
predict that his or her behavior will be shy when with
close friends. Perhaps the person is a friendly, outgoing
person after becoming comfortable with people.
Similarly, although some people tend to be helpful,
obedient, aggressive, or conformist just because they
have that type of personality tendency, the situation
can also influence people’s behavior, making that
personality tendency more or less pronounced. For

658———Personality and Social Behavior
example, even a very passive person may become
aggressive if sufficiently provoked.
The importance of the situation in predicting
behavior is determined by carefully controlled experimental
research. The researcher creates two or more
different situations, exposes each participant to one
of the situations, and then measures each participant’s
reaction or behavior. The difference in participants’
behaviors in the two situations is an indication of how
much the situation influences behavior. In other
words, if the researcher observes the participants (as a
group) in one situation behave in a different way from
that of participants exposed to a different situation, it
is assumed that this difference in behavior is due to
the situation rather to than the participants’ personalities.
In addition, the researcher could both measure
personality using an inventory and manipulate the situation
to see whether the individual’s personality or
the situation better predicts behavior.
Types of People and
Personality Characteristics
Just as some (strong) situations influence people’s
behavior more than do others, some people are more
influenced by situations in general than are others.
Some people consistently monitor and adjust their
own behavior to ensure that it fits with the situation
(high self-monitors). These people are more likely,
for example, to behave differently around different
groups of friends. On the other hand, people who do
not care about monitoring their behavior to fit in with
the social situation (low self-monitors) are more likely
to behave consistently with their personalities across
situations. They will act the same way, for example,
around different groups of friends.
Some personality characteristics are also more
dominant for a given person than are other characteristics,
and these characteristics are more likely to
influence the person’s behavior across situations. A
person may be extremely neurotic and mildly outgoing.
One might expect such a person to be anxious
much of the time, regardless of the situation, but only
friendly some of the time. Similarly, some personality
traits tend to be strong across individuals. For example,
expressive traits come out in a person’s speech,
gestures, and mannerisms. Individuals who have very
animated personalities, no matter where they are, will
speak loudly with exaggerated hand gestures. Weak
personality traits depend on the situation. For example,
some people are more concerned about creating a
positive impression than are others. These people
might behave differently around people they want to
impress (like on a first date) than around people they
do not care about impressing.
Types of Behaviors
Furthermore, personality may be a better predictor
of how people will usually act (across situations) than
in a particular situation. So, instead of looking at a
person’s behavior in one situation, one should measure
the person’s behavior averaged across many situations
to examine the relationship between personality
and behavior. For example, a person who is dishonest
may not cheat on a particular exam at school, but that
person will tend to engage in more dishonest behaviors
across situations (cheating at school, cheating on
taxes, lying, etc.) than will someone who is honest.
In general, it is important to have good measures of
behavior. Such measures of behavior should be
obtained through ratings by multiple raters who know
the individual well, should be directly observable and
related to the personality characteristic of interest, and
should be obtained for several situations across time.
Implications
It turns out that the relationship between personality
and behavior is very similar in strength to the relationship
between the situation and behavior. The relationship
between personality and behavior (or between the
situation and behavior) allows researchers to predict a
person’s behavior correctly about 70% of the time.
Therefore, personality and situations are both important
for predicting behavior.
It is more appropriate to use personality to predict
how an individual will usually act in most situations,
rather than how individuals will act in specific situations.
This is because the situation itself often varies
and will influence how the individual acts. Sometimes
behavior can be predicted mostly from personality.
Personality is likely to influence behavior more in situations
when the person is exhibiting dominant personality
characteristics, when that person does not
care about fitting his or her behavior to the situational
requirements, or when the situation is weak (no set
social rules). On the other hand, the situation will play
a bigger role in behavior if the situation is strong
(clear social requirements) or if the person cares about
keeping his or her behavior consistent with the situational
requirements.

Finally, although situations often influence people’s
behavior, people also choose and influence the situations
in which they find themselves. People’s personalities
influence the types of situations they enter. This
increases the likelihood that they will exhibit certain
behaviors. For example, people who are outgoing are
likely to attend more parties than shy people. This
party attendance gives them more opportunities to
exhibit outgoing behavior and may actually increase
this behavior over time. In turn, the person’s behavior
may influence the atmosphere of the party itself (the
situation).
Laura A. Brannon
Valerie K. Pilling
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Genetic Influences on
Social Behavior; Individual Differences; Personality
Judgments, Accuracy of; Traits
Further Readings
Kenrick, D. T., & Funder, D. C. (1988). Profiting from
controversy: Lessons from the person-situation debate.
American Psychologist, 3, 23–34.
Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. New York:
Wiley.
Snyder, M., & Cantor, N. (1998). Understanding personality
and social behavior: A functionalist strategy. In S. Fiske
& D. T. Gilbert (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology
(4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 635–679). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Snyder, M., & Ickes, W. (1985). Personality and social
behavior. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The
handbook of social psychology (3rd ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 883–948). New York: Random House.
PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS,
ACCURACY OF
Definition
The accuracy of personality judgments refers to an
area of research in which people evaluate the thoughts,
feelings, and behavior of themselves or others and
the correctness of their evaluations are determined. The
determination of accuracy, or correctness, is a constant
challenge for researchers because it is often unclear
what to use as the standard for truth. It is straightforward
to verify people’s estimates of height and weight
Personality Judgments, Accuracy of———659
by using a tape measure and scale, but accuracy
researchers must determine, for example, if a person’s
friendliness rating of a coworker is accurate. The absence
of a friendliness “tape measure” requires researchers to
use a variety of measurement techniques that together
provide a close approximation of the personality characteristic
under investigation. Accuracy researchers
typically compare a person’s friendliness rating to the
coworker’s observed behavior or to personality ratings
of the coworker by close acquaintances. If the person’s
friendliness ratings predict the coworker’s behavior
and agree with the close acquaintances’ ratings, the
friendliness rating is likely to be accurate.
Context and Importance
People make judgments about personality every day
and in numerous settings. Clinical psychologists diagnose
their clients, human resource managers evaluate
prospective employees, and teachers assess the capabilities
of their students. In these settings, the judgments
that professionals make can either help or harm
an individual’s life. The judgments that lay people
make are equally life affecting, such as the decision to
approach or to avoid a stranger. A faulty decision to
trust a stranger may lead to physical harm. The misjudgment
of a close friend may lead to unpleasant
conflict or dissolution of the friendship. The personality
judgments that people make of themselves and
others can affect their own psychological and physical
well-being.
Evidence
Research on the accuracy of personality judgments
began by trying to identify the good judge of personality.
This research focus represented a mix of theoretical
interest and pragmatic concern. Researchers were
curious why some people might be better than others
at judging personality. From a pragmatic perspective,
it was believed that being a good judge of personality
was a prerequisite to being a successful clinical psychologist,
personnel interviewer, or school counselor.
The research evidence is inconsistent regarding the
good judge of personality with one exception. Women
tend to outperform men when judging the personality
characteristics of others.
Despite these inconsistent findings, accuracy
researchers continue to search for the good judge of
personality and have broadened their research interests
to include five additional factors that influence

660———Personal Space
the accuracy and inaccuracy of personality judgments.
Each factor will be discussed in turn.
First, judgability refers to how accurately people’s
personalities can be judged by others. Individuals who
are high on judgability are like open books, their personalities
are easy to read, and they are accurately
judged. Those who are low on judgability are closed
and enigmatic, and are inaccurately judged by others.
Research demonstrates that judgable people tend to
score higher on measures of psychological adjustment
than do less judgable people.
Second, increased acquaintance produces greater
accuracy. Although this might seem fairly intuitive,
only recently have researchers provided evidence to
support this factor. Considerable evidence now indicates
that longer acquaintance leads to greater accuracy
because acquainted individuals share more
plentiful and intimate information than do people less
acquainted.
Third, some personality traits are more accurately
judged than other traits. In terms of the Five Factor
model of personality (i.e., Neuroticism, Extraversion,
Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness),
research consistently points to Extraversion
as the most accurately judged trait. Neuroticism is
often the most difficult trait to judge. The difference
in trait accuracy is due to observability indicating that
traits that are easy to see tend to be most accurately
judged. Extraverted behaviors such as talking and
socializing are easy to see by observers whereas neurotic
behaviors such as worrying and feeling anxious
are much less observable and more difficult to judge.
Fourth, self-enhancement refers to the tendency for
some individuals to hold unrealistically positive selfviews.
There is currently considerable debate about the
topic of self-enhancement. One group of researchers
believes that possessing an unrealistically positive selfview
is unhealthy. These researchers argue that people
should be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses,
and only by acknowledging weaknesses can
individuals correct them. The other group believes that
holding unrealistically positive self-views is mentally
healthy. This group argues that these positive beliefs,
albeit unrealistic, protect the self-esteem of individuals
when negative events occur and motivate individuals to
be highly productive. The debate is forcing researchers
to carefully consider the nature of mental health and
psychopathology.
Fifth, accurate self-knowledge refers to the accuracy
of people’s beliefs about their own personality
and behavior. Despite the belief by many that they
possess keen self-insight, Sigmund Freud demonstrated
long ago that people do not always know the
truth about themselves. Research on accurate selfknowledge
indicates that individuals who know themselves
well possess positive self-esteem, social skill,
and good coping skills. These results are similar to
those found for judgability and suggest that to be
known by others, a person must also be known to
himself or herself.
Implications
Researchers have considerable knowledge about
whom and what will be accurately judged, when it
will occur, and who will make accurate personality
judgments. This information has real-world implications
for professionals and lay people alike. A goal of
future accuracy research will be to put this knowledge
to use. Research-based training may help clinicians
better diagnose their patients, teach married couples
to communicate more effectively, and help single
people to select compatible dating partners.
C. Randall Colvin
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Close Relationships;
Individual Differences; Personality and Social Behavior;
Person Perception; Self-Enhancement
Further Readings
Funder, D. C. (1999). Personality judgment: A realistic
approach to person perception. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
Funder, D. C., & Colvin, C. R. (1997). Congruence of others’
and self-judgments of personality. In R. Hogan, J. Johnson,
& S. Briggs (Eds.), Handbook of personality psychology
(pp. 617–647). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Kenny, D. A. (1994). Interpersonal perception: A social
relations analysis. New York: Guilford Press.
PERSONAL SPACE
Definition
Personal space refers to the physical area surrounding
an individual that is considered personal or private.
Typically, when another person intrudes in this area,
the individual experiences discomfort. A related concept,
interpersonal distance, refers to the area that people

keep between themselves and the interaction partner.
As an individual’s personal space increases, interpersonal
distances will increase as well. The size of
personal space largely depends on individual and situational
differences. The shape of personal space does not
completely follow the lines of a circle or bubble, as the
preferred distances at the front of a person are generally
found to be larger compared with the rear.
Physical interpersonal spacing behavior serves
important functions. Distancing oneself from others
promotes control and maintains autonomy. In this case,
the influence of others is reduced. Conversely, proximity
fosters interpersonal communication and cooperative
behavior, smoothes interactions, and increases
interpersonal liking.
Determinants of
Interpersonal Distance
Personal space should not be considered a static
construct because it varies across individuals and
situations. Predominantly, interpersonal distance is
influenced by the nature of the relationship between
the two interacting individuals. Edward Hall distinguished
four typical types of interaction distances
observed in Western societies: intimate distance (0–18
inches, e.g., two individuals making love); personal
distance (18–48 inches, e.g., distance between close
friends), social distance (4–12 feet, e.g., personal business);
and public distance meetings (12–25 or more
feet, e.g., formal interactions like teaching).
Interpersonal distance may also be influenced by a
person’s mind-set or goals. If an individual adopts the
goal to affiliate with another person, he or she may be
more likely to sit close to that person. Likewise, a
strong need to belong to others also results in a tendency
to sit closer to other people. On the other hand,
when people focus on personal goals, uniqueness, and
autonomy, they are likely to need more distance from
others.
Furthermore, individual differences have been
linked with proximity behavior. Various studies have
provided evidence for personal space to be influenced
by sex, showing that two interacting men require more
personal space than do two interacting females. Also,
personal space seems to increase from childhood to
adolescence.
Interpersonal distance also varies across cultures.
Members of collectivistic countries prefer stronger
interpersonal proximity compared with members of
individualistic countries. Interestingly, several studies
Personal Space———661
have shown that members of collectivistic cultures are
characterized with a relatively high need to harmonize
with others and to have a sense of belonging, whereas
members of individualistic cultures have a relatively
strong need to distinguish themselves from others
and strive for personal achievement. Therefore, these
cultural differences in interpersonal distance may be
partly explained by cultural differences in goals.
Finally, some aspects of the environment have been
shown to influence personal distance. For example,
people prefer greater distances when they are in stressful
situations, in rooms with low ceilings, or in crowded
places.
Compensation for Closeness
Several authors have argued that people strive for
balance between several approach/avoidance forces
during interaction. Therefore, when the situation forces
people to intrude each other’s personal space (e.g.,
standing in a crowded elevator), the decreased interpersonal
distance may be compensated for by other
psychological mechanisms that are related to intimacy,
such as eye contact and topic intimacy. For
example, people standing in a crowded elevator avoid
making eye contact, look at the elevator doors, and
discuss the weather.
Measuring Interpersonal Distance
Interpersonal spacing behavior has been studied using
two different kinds of distance measures. Some
researchers used projective measures in which individuals
are asked to indicate the preferred distance
to an imagined other (using miniature figures, dolls,
or paper and pencil drawings). These projective
measures may be contrasted with real-life measures,
including unobtrusive observations of actual spacing
and placements or selections of chairs. A popular and
efficient measure is to ask a person to take a chair and
place it in the vicinity of another person. The distance
between the chairs is indicated as the interpersonal
distance. As interpersonal spacing behavior is mostly
regulated in an automatic fashion, individuals are
generally unaware of the distance that they keep from
others. As a result, people may find it difficult to
explicitly indicate their preferred interpersonal distances.
Indeed, projective measures show low correspondence
with actual interpersonal behavioral
measures and are considered to be less useful in
studying personal space.

662———Person Perception
Benefiting from technical progress, several
researchers have recently studied interpersonal spacing
behavior using immersive virtual environment
technology (virtual reality) in which participants
approach virtual other people. People seem to keep
distance from these virtual persons quite naturally, as
if they approach real individuals. Virtual reality is a
potentially useful tool to enlarge researchers’ understanding
of personal space.
Implications
The implications of personal space can be far-reaching
because it can have a strong impact on the quality
of the interactions and therefore on the quality of
interpersonal relations. The interaction of two persons
with different sizes of personal space may result in
misunderstanding and become problematic. For
example, if a member of an individualistic country (a
U.S. citizen) who has large preferred interpersonal
distances interacts with a member of a collectivistic
country (an India citizen), the latter may stand too
close for the American, whereas the Indian person
may become irritated because the American stands too
far away for conversation. From an applied perspective,
the growing body of knowledge in the area of
personal space and proximity behavior provides
opportunities to adjust spacing behavior and train
people to stand closer to or further away from others
in specific situations. This may help smooth interactions
and reduce psychological discomfort.
Rob W. Holland
See also Close Relationships; Collectivistic Cultures;
Cultural Differences; Gender Differences; Need to
Belong; Nonconscious Processes; Nonverbal Cues and
Communication; Propinquity
Further Readings
Bailenson, J. N., Blascovich, J., Beall, A. C., & Loomis, J. M.
(2003). Interpersonal distance in immersive virtual
environment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
29, 819–833.
Hayduk, L. (1983). Personal space: Where we now stand.
Psychological Bulletin, 94, 293–335.
Holland, R. W., Roeder, U., van Baaren, R. B., Brandt, A.,
& Hannover, B. (2004). Don’t stand so close to me:
Self-construal and interpersonal closeness. Psychological
Science, 15, 237–242.
PERSON PERCEPTION
Definition
Person perception refers to a general tendency to form
impressions of other people. Some forms of person
perception occur indirectly and require inferring
information about a person based on observations
of behaviors or based on second-hand information.
Other forms of person perception occur more directly
and require little more than seeing another person.
Both of these types of person perception provide a
foundation from which subsequent judgments are
formed and subsequent interactions are shaped.
History and Background
In social psychology, the phrase person perception
has historically referred to the perception of others
that leads to judgments of traits and dispositions.
Given that Bill kicked a dog, what kind of impression
is an observer likely to form? Much of the early
research investigating such impressions had roots in
attribution theory. Fritz Heider proposed that people
can attribute the behaviors of others to factors that
are internal (personality, dispositions, etc.) or external
(situational constraints), but that people are prone to
make internal attributions. These basic observations
affected decades of research and provided an important
foundation for two related theories, in particular.
Harold Kelley’s covariation model, for example,
described how people discern the attitudes of others
based on simple factors surrounding observed behaviors.
Similarly, Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis’s
theory of correspondent inferences described why
people infer that behaviors reveal personality. Thus,
the early research in this area investigated when and
how people infer traits from behaviors.
Indirect Person Perception
Many of the personal attributes that observers may
want to know about another person (e.g., whether the
person is loyal, honest, or contemptible) are not directly
observable. Instead, these attributes or traits must be
discerned—either from observing the person’s actions
(actually watching the person behave in a loyal or
honest manner) or from interpreting information provided
by a third party (e.g., what a roommate conveys

about Jill or what the experimenter reveals). In each
case, the general perception of a person is the product
of inference, and the attribution theories that were
proposed a half a century ago remain valid in understanding
how such perceptions occur.
Observers watch what people do, and they make
judgments about others based on those observations.
When a psychology professor is seen responding to an
upset student in a dismissive way, for example, one
may infer that this occurred because of some aspect of
the professor’s disposition or because of unfortunate
circumstances of the interaction. Classic studies in
social psychology attempted to bring similar scenarios
into the laboratory. Participants in these studies judged
the attitude of a hypothetical person who was described
in a vignette as advocating an unpopular political position.
Sometimes this action was described to have been
voluntary; other times, this action was described to
have been compelled (e.g., an experimenter asked the
person to advocate a specific position). Across all such
studies, participants reported that the target’s behavior
revealed his or her true attitude, even when that behavior
had been coerced by the situation. Thus, observers
tend to assume that behaviors convey attitudes and
dispositions, and this occurs even when compelling
situational grounds for that behavior are present.
When perceiving the dismissive professor, therefore,
observers are apt to conclude that the professor is callous,
and not that the response was compelled by the
situation (e.g., the next class that was already streaming
into the classroom). These perceptions are called
correspondent inferences, and the tendency to attribute
actions to dispositional factors has been called the
correspondence bias and the fundamental attribution
error.
Following the initial insights, many researchers tried
to understand precisely what leads to such inferences,
and three factors emerged. Harold Kelley, for example,
documented that dispositional inferences are especially
likely when a particular behavior is (a) distinctive (most
professors don’t actually respond in a dismissive manner);
(b) consistent (this particular professor responds
this way in and out of class); and (c) consensual (others
have also observed this behavior). Jones and Davis
stressed that such inferences are particularly likely
when a particular behavior is unexpected (e.g., a known
conservative endorsing a liberal position).
More recently, researchers have examined the psychological
processes that permit these inferences. Two
processes appear to be involved. The initial process is
relatively reflexive and leads to dispositional inferences
under most circumstances. The second process
is considerably more reflective and tends to correct for
the constraints imposed by a situation.
Other recent research has explored the extent to
which dispositional inferences are ubiquitous. The
tendency is so strong that it occurs even when people
have no intention to form an impression of others and
in the absence of observing actual behaviors. Indeed,
much of the research in social psychology has
exploited this by presenting research participants with
sentences that describe a behavior. Reading about an
individual who purportedly solved a mystery novel
halfway through a book, for example, might lead an
observer to infer that the individual is clever. These
rapid judgments that imply enduring traits are typically
called spontaneous trait inferences.
The attribution approach to the study of person
perception revealed much about how impressions
of others may emerge from observations. Yet person
perception also refers to judgments that occur more
directly.
Direct Person Perception
Many of the personal attributes that observers notice
about another person need not be inferred because
they are directly observable and are therefore noted
immediately. Some of these attributes include categorical
judgments about other people such as their sex,
race, and age. Some researchers have argued that
noticing certain personal characteristics is unavoidable,
and that observers automatically categorize
people according to their group membership. What
sex? What race? and How old? are likely to be among
the first impressions that observers form of others.
Because these particular categorical judgments are
made so readily and rapidly, they have been described
as obligatory. Two of these obligatory categorical
judgments, sex and race, have received considerable
attention in social psychology.
Perceiving Sex
Person Perception———663
In general, observers have little difficulty categorizing
others to be men or women. This basic categorization
occurs effortlessly, partly because so many
individual features differ reliably between men and
women. Even apart from primary and secondary
sexual characteristics, which are generally not readily

664———Person-Positivity Heuristic
visible to observers, men’s and women’s faces and
bodies differ in both absolute and relative measures
and in personal grooming, both of which are easily
seen. Thus, categorizing individuals by their sex
occurs with great facility, and such perceptions are
informed by many physical cues.
Perceiving the sex of an individual affects a broad
range of other social perceptions and judgments, as
well. Many evaluative social judgments, for example,
rely heavily on the content of gender stereotypes and
role expectations. Exhibiting gender-typical traits and
behaviors leads to favorable evaluations; exhibiting
gender atypical traits and behaviors, in contrast, leads
to unfavorable evaluations. This can pose challenges
for certain individuals. Professional women, for example,
frequently hold positions that demand characteristics
that are stereotypically associated with men. By
exhibiting such characteristics, these women are perceived
to be competent, but they are not liked.
Perceiving Race
Observers also have little difficulty categorizing
the race of others. Much of the research in this area
has focused on how race affects observers’ recognition
or memory of others. Although people are generally
quite adept at recognizing the faces of others who
they have seen previously, doing so is considerably
more difficult for faces of other-race individuals. This
tendency has been called the own-race bias.
Regardless of whether a particular individual is
recognized or not, perceiving a target’s race permits
racial stereotypes to affect a broad range of social
perceptions and judgments, even in the absence of
explicit prejudice. In some laboratory studies, for
example, participants have been asked to make simple
judgments—such as whether a target is holding a gun
or a tool—that are objectively unrelated to the target’s
race. In other studies, participants have been charged
with deciding whether or not to “pull the trigger” on
a target who is holding either a weapon or another
object. In both cases, the race of the target affects the
speed and accuracy of judgments.
The facility to perceive others accurately from visual
cues alone extends beyond the perception of sex and
race. Based on only brief exposures to degraded video
images of an individual, observers can accurately
judge a range of personal characteristics. These include
social categories such as sex, race, and sexual orientation
and dispositional characteristics such as teaching
effectiveness. Thus, even from these thin slices, person
perception can be remarkably accurate.
Whether person perception occurs by inferring
traits from behaviors or by merely perceiving the
physical appearance of another, this is the foundation
for how people respond to and evaluate others. Given
this far-reaching impact, research investigating various
aspects of person perception will continue to be
an important area in social psychology for years to
come.
Kerri L. Johnson
See also Correspondence Bias; Fundamental Attribution
Error; Personality Judgments, Accuracy of; Spontaneous
Trait Inferences; Thin Slices of Behavior
Further Readings
Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of
expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal
consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin,
111, 256–274.
Gilbert, D. T. (1998). Ordinary personology. In D. T. Gilbert,
S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 89–150). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Jones, E. E. (1990). Interpersonal perception. New York:
Freeman.
Ross, L., & Nisbett, R. E. (1991). The person and the
situation: Perspectives of social psychology. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
PERSON-POSITIVITY HEURISTIC
Definition
The person-positivity heuristic is a tendency to evaluate
individual people more positively than the groups
to which they belong. Psychologist David Sears
coined the phrase in 1983 because he noticed that
results of political polls typically show that although
respondents hold political institutions such as the
U.S. Congress in low regard, they often have positive
impressions of the individuals (senators and representatives)
who make up those institutions. The personpositivity
heuristic also occurs in evaluations of other
types of political figures (governors, mayors), in college
students’ evaluations of their professors, and even

in people’s evaluations of small groups of physically
attractive and unattractive women.
Application
One explanation of the person-positivity heuristic is
that people are predisposed to perceive themselves as
similar to other people, and consequently, the closer
something is to being a “person,” the more positively it
will be evaluated. For example, student course evaluations
show that courses generally are not liked as
well as the professors who teach them. Courses do not
exemplify the concept of personhood as well as professors
do, and thus students perceive more in common
between themselves and professors than between
themselves and courses. Groups of individuals or an
institution are less like a person than an individual person
is. However, because groups and institutions are
composed of individual people, they have more personhood
than do objects (for example, a car), abstractions
(for example, gravity), or an individual person’s
possessions (for example, a professor’s office) or products
(for example, the course a professor teaches).
Consequently, groups and institutions are liked less
than the individuals who compose them, but are liked
more than inanimate objects, abstractions, or possessions.
For example, Sandra Day O’Connor, who was
an individual member of the U.S. Supreme Court, is
higher on personhood than her decisions are, and the
Court itself falls between Justice O’Connor and her
decisions in personhood. The Court as an institution
should therefore be liked less than Justice O’Connor,
but liked more than her decisions are.
Exceptions and Importance of the
Person-Positivity Heuristic
Person-positivity effects are not likely to occur
when people evaluate individuals who are members of
highly regarded groups. In these cases, the positivity
bonus that otherwise accrues to individuals disappears.
For example, the U.S. presidency is held in high
regard but the U.S. Congress is not. Surveys show that
individual presidents of the United States are not
evaluated more positively than the office they hold,
whereas individual members of Congress are evaluated
more positively than Congress itself is. Physically
attractive individuals also do not seem to benefit
from the person-positivity heuristic as much as their
less attractive counterparts do.
The person-positivity heuristic has been important
in understanding political attitudes and voting behavior.
People hate politicians, but have such high regard
for individual politicians that it is usually difficult to
unseat an incumbent office-holder. This heuristic also
sheds light on how people can have negative stereotypes
about a group, but at the same time have positive
impressions, and sometimes even close ties with,
individual members of the disliked group.
Susan E. Varni
Carol T. Miller
See also Heuristic Processing; Positive–Negative
Asymmetry; Similarity-Attraction Effect; Stereotypes
and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Granberg, D., & Holmberg, S. (1990). The person positivity
and principle actor hypotheses. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology, 20, 1879–1901.
Miller, C. T., & Felicio, D. M. (1990). Person-positivity bias:
Are people liked better than groups? Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 408–420.
Sears, D. O. (1983). The person-positivity bias. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 233–250.
PERSUASION
Definition
Persuasion———665
Persuasion is a method of changing a person’s cognitions,
feelings, behaviors, or general evaluations (attitudes)
toward some object, issue, or person. Although
any change technique is sometimes referred to as persuasion
regardless of the target of influence, the term
more commonly refers to a method of change in which
a person is deliberately presented with a message containing
information intended to alter some general
evaluative judgment (e.g., capital punishment is bad).
Self-persuasion can occur when people generate their
own messages in favor of or against something.
Persuasive communication is readily used by advertisers,
salespeople, politicians, ministers, attorneys, and
people in everyday situations to produce change in others.
In democratic societies, persuasion has replaced
coercion as the primary means of influence.

666———Persuasion
History and Background
The power and prevalence of persuasion have led to
a great deal of scientific research investigating the
factors that make a persuasive appeal effective. In
the 1950s, Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale
University conducted the first systematic analysis of
persuasion in what was known as the Yale Communication
Project. The Yale group determined that four
elements are present in all persuasion settings: (1) a
source who delivers the persuasive message, (2) the
message itself, (3) a target person or audience who
receives the message (recipient), and (4) some context
in which the message is received. Adopting an
information-processing approach to persuasion, the
researchers proposed that for a persuasive appeal to
work, the message recipient must pay attention to,
comprehend, learn, accept, and retain the message and
its conclusion in memory. People’s degree of engagement
in these steps was thought to be determined by
various characteristics of the source, message, recipient,
and persuasive context. For example, a highly
complex message might be too difficult to comprehend
and therefore, unable to be learned, accepted, or
retained.
Later research showed, however, that persuasion
often does not depend on the specific arguments in a
message that people learn and remember but, rather,
on what unique cognitive (mental) reactions they have
in response to those arguments. That is, what matters
most when people are actively processing the message
is not learning what is in the message but what people
think about the message. According to this cognitive
response approach, persuasion is more likely when
the recipient has favorable thoughts toward the message
and less likely when the recipient’s thoughts
about the message are unfavorable. For example, two
individuals may both learn the same details of a proposal
to increase the interstate speed limit and yet
have wildly different thoughts (e.g., “I’ll be able to
get to work faster” versus “It will make driving more
dangerous”).
Current Theories
The learning and cognitive response approaches to
persuasion focused on attitude change through active,
effortful thinking. However, research has also shown
that sometimes people are persuaded to change their
attitudes when they are not thinking much about the
information in the message. Instead, they base their
attitudes on simple associative or heuristic processes
that require less cognitive effort. Incorporating these
different ideas, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo’s
elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and Shelly
Chaiken’s heuristic-systematic model (HSM) are two
similar theories introduced in the 1980s that propose
that both effortful and non-effortful processes can
produce attitude change in different situations.
According to these models, when people are motivated
and able to evaluate all the information relevant
to the message’s position (high elaboration), they will
follow the central or systematic route to persuasion.
This corresponds to the cognitive response approach,
whereby people’s favorable or unfavorable thoughts
about the message and their confidence in them determine
the degree of attitude change. In contrast, when
people are not thinking carefully about the merits of
the message (low elaboration), they can still be influenced
by processes requiring less cognitive effort. For
example, people can rely on mental shortcuts (e.g.,
“The package is impressive—it must be a good toothpaste.”)
to decide if they agree with or like something.
In these cases, people are said to be taking the peripheral
or heuristic route to persuasion. In this case, the
models claim that individuals will use the central (systematic)
route when they are both motivated and able
to consider the contents of the message thoughtfully.
If for any reason, they are unwilling or unable to
engage in effortful thinking, they will follow the
peripheral (heuristic) route to persuasion.
Research using the information-processing and
cognitive response approaches identified a number of
source, message, recipient, and contextual variables
that affect persuasion. Nevertheless, it was not clear
from those studies exactly when and how each variable
would affect attitude change. For example, in
some studies a highly credible source enhanced persuasion,
but in others the source inhibited persuasion.
However, the two different routes to persuasion outlined
in the ELM and HSM provide a valuable framework
for determining when and how these variables
will lead to attitude change. In particular, the ELM
holds that any variable within the persuasion setting
may play one of several roles. First, when people are
not thinking carefully about the message, the variable
is processed as a simple cue that influences attitudes
by rudimentary association or heuristic processes.
Second, when people are thoroughly considering the
merits of the message, the variable will be scrutinized

as an argument, bias ongoing processing of the message,
or affect confidence in the thoughts generated.
Finally, when thinking is not constrained to be high
or low by other factors, the variable may affect how
much processing occurs by acting as an indicator of
whether or not it is worth putting effort into evaluating
the message. The multiple roles for variables as
explained by the ELM provide the basis for how different
source, message, recipient, and context factors
affect persuasion.
Source Variables
The source is the person or entity who delivers the
persuasive appeal, and a number of source characteristics
have been shown to influence attitude change.
Two of the most commonly studied source variables
are credibility and attractiveness. Credibility refers to
the source’s (a) expertise and (b) trustworthiness. An
expert source is one who has relevant knowledge or
experience regarding the topic of the persuasive message.
A trustworthy source is one who lacks ulterior
motives and expresses honest opinions based on the
information as he or she sees it. You may consider a
physician (expert) and your best friend (trustworthy)
to be credible sources. Attractiveness refers to how
physically or socially appealing and likable the source
is. For example, television commercials often use fashion
models and charismatic celebrities to get people to
like their products. In general (but not always), credible
and attractive sources are more persuasive than are
noncredible and unattractive sources.
Consistent with the ELM’s multiple roles hypothesis,
source variables have been shown to influence
persuasion in several different ways in different situations.
Consider, for example, an advertisement for a
brand of shampoo that features an attractive person
using the product. People often associate attractiveness
with positive feelings, and under low elaboration
conditions, when there is little effortful thinking about
the message, they may decide that they like the shampoo
simply because the source makes them feel good.
Under high elaboration conditions, when thinking is
extensive, people may use the attractiveness of the
source as evidence that the product gives them beautiful
hair. Or, the source might bias their thinking so
that positive thoughts selectively come to mind. Or,
they might have more confidence in the thoughts they
have if they think that attractive sources know what
they are talking about. And if people are not sure how
much to think about the message, the beauty of the
source may induce them to pay more attention to the
advertisement and its message. This would increase
persuasion if what the source says is compelling, but
if the message is not very compelling, thinking more
about it could lead to less persuasion. Other source
variables affect persuasion by the same mechanisms.
Researchers have also documented a delayed persuasion
phenomenon that frequently involves source
variables. Generally, the effect of an initially compelling
persuasive appeal decreases over time as
information about the message decays in memory.
However, it has been shown that messages associated
with a cue that discounts or weakens the initial impact
of a message containing strong arguments, such as a
noncredible or untrustworthy source, may not change
attitudes initially but can lead to persuasion at later.
This is called the sleeper effect. It happens because the
discounting cue decays in memory faster than do
thoughts about the message itself, which allows the
message to affect attitudes free from the influence of
the discounting cue.
Message Variables
Persuasion———667
The message refers to all aspects of the persuasive
appeal itself such as its length, complexity, language,
and so forth. One of the central characteristics of the
message is the quality of the arguments it contains.
The effect of argument quality on persuasion depends
on how much the recipient is thinking about the message.
When people are unwilling or unable to effortfully
process the message, they are influenced by
peripheral cues or heuristics rather than by their
analysis of the strength or weakness of the evidence
presented. Thus, under low processing conditions, a
weak message may be persuasive if it is paired with
certain factors, such as a credible source. In contrast,
when people are motivated and able to think carefully
about the message, they will base their attitudes on the
analysis of the merits of the evidence. Thus, under
high processing conditions, a weak message will be
low in persuasiveness even in the presence of a highly
credible or likable source. Self-generated arguments
(in role-playing, for example) are especially strong
because individuals tend to be less resistant to their
own thoughts and ideas.
When thinking is high, the message generally
becomes more persuasive as argument strength
increases. However, if people feel too pressured to

668———Persuasion
change their attitudes, they might respond unfavorably
to the message despite the strength of the reasons
for change. Also, fear appeals (such as those designed
to curb unhealthy behaviors) that are too anxiety
arousing can lead people to defensively avoid thinking
about the message. In fact, research has shown that
fear appeals are most successful when the message is
personally relevant, the fear aroused is moderate, and
a clear, attainable solution to the problem is presented.
As with source variables, the ELM’s multiple roles
hypothesis holds that message variables can influence
persuasion in several different ways. For example,
messages that have been tailored to match the basis of
the recipient’s attitude are generally more persuasive
than messages that mismatch. For example, religious
types are more persuaded by messages framed in a
religious manner. Also, attitudes based on feelings or
affect tend to be more influenced by affectively based
messages, whereas attitudes based on thoughts and
cognitions tend to be affected more by cognitively
based messages. How does matching work? Under
low processing conditions, matching may lead to persuasion
through a heuristic that messages that match
are good. Under high processing conditions, however,
matching positively biases processing of the message.
That is, strong arguments that match elicit more favorable
thoughts than do arguments that mismatch. When
the amount of thinking is not constrained to be either
high or low, matching increases scrutiny of the message,
which leads to persuasion if the arguments in the
message are compelling. However, if a matched message
is not strong enough to overcome the original
attitude, a mismatched message that directs recipients
to think about the attitude object in a new way may be
more persuasive. Other message variables influence
persuasion in a similar manner.
Recipient Variables
The recipient is the target person or audience who
receives the persuasive message. As with the source
and message, a number of recipient characteristics
have been found to influence attitude change. Many of
these recipient factors have been shown to follow the
multiple roles hypothesis of the ELM and can affect
persuasion in several different ways. For example,
when effortful thinking is low, a person’s mood serves
as a simple peripheral cue (“I feel good, so I must
agree with the message”). When effortful thinking is
high, however, mood has been shown to serve in other
roles. For example, under high thinking conditions,
mood has biased the recipient’s thoughts. That is, positive
mood facilitates the retrieval of other positive
thoughts or inhibits the retrieval of negative thoughts.
Thinking more positive thoughts will then lead to more
favorable attitudes. Under high thinking conditions, a
person’s mood has also been analyzed as an argument
and affected the confidence in people’s thoughts.
When the amount of thinking was not constrained
to be high or low, mood influenced the amount of
processing. Specifically, people in positive moods
tend not to engage in effortful thinking, presumably
because they want to maintain their good moods.
However, those in positive moods will think carefully
about a message if it is expected to advocate something
pleasant. People in negative moods have been shown
to engage in effortful processing of the message,
regardless of whether it is expected to be pleasant or
unpleasant. One explanation for this is that people in
bad moods are in a problem-solving frame of mind,
and thinking is associated with problem solving.
Some recipient variables influence persuasion by
affecting people’s motivation to process the message
thoughtfully. Need for cognition is an individual difference
that refers to how much people engage in and
enjoy thinking. Those high in need for cognition tend
to like thinking and seek out tasks and activities that
are cognitively engaging. In general, these individuals
are more likely to carefully consider the merits of the
message even when it is not personally relevant. As
such, they will base their attitudes on the strength of
the evidence. Those low in need for cognition, however,
do not enjoy thinking as much and tend to avoid
tasks that require extensive thinking. Consequently,
they are more likely to form their attitudes based on
simple associations and heuristics rather than on
effortful assessments of the evidence. Those low in
need for cognition can be motivated to process the
message carefully, but they require greater incentive
to do so.
Context Variables
Contextual factors such as the manner and circumstances
in which the message is given can also influence
persuasion. That is, how the message is
presented can be as important as what is presented.
For example, a persuasive appeal that is introduced in

a written format (e.g., in a newspaper) is generally
easier to process than is one in an audio format (e.g.,
on radio) because people can slow the pace of their
reading or reread to make sure they understand the
arguments. If people are distracted by some variable
(e.g., loud noise in the room), they may be unable
to think critically about the message and will instead
follow the peripheral route to persuasion. In addition,
merely associating the message with something positive
(e.g., a nice meal) or simply repeating it several
times can be used to make the attitude object seem
more positive with little or no effortful thinking.
Attitude Strength and Persuasion
As just described, there are a number of ways that
source, message, recipient, and context variables can
lead to persuasion. Although there are many avenues
to attitude change, not all produce equally impactful
attitudes. Regardless of the influencing variable, persuasion
through effortful (central route) processing
generally results in stronger, more durable, and longerlasting
attitudes than does persuasion through less
effortful (peripheral route) processing.
Michael McCaslin
Richard E. Petty
See also Attitude Change; Attitudes; Elaboration Likelihood
Model; Influence; Metacognition; Need for Cognition;
Reactance
Further Readings
Briñol, P., & Petty, R. E. (2005). Individual differences in
attitude change. In D. Albarracín, B. T. Johnson, &
M. P. Zanna (Eds.). Handbook of attitudes and attitude
change (pp. 575–615). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Petty, R. E. (1995). Attitude change. In A. Tesser (Ed.).
Advanced social psychology (pp. 195–255). New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Petty, R. E., Rucker, D., Bizer, G., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004).
The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In J. S.
Seiter & G. H. Gass (Eds.), Perspectives on persuasion,
social influence and compliance gaining (pp. 65–89).
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Petty, R. E., Wheeler, S. C., & Tormala, Z. L. (2003).
Persuasion and attitude change. In T. Millon & M. J. Lerner
(Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Vol. 5. Personality and
social psychology (pp. 353–382). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
PHENOMENAL SELF
Phenomenal Self———669
Definition
The phenomenal self reflects information about oneself
that is in a person’s awareness at the present time.
This salient self-knowledge influences people’s
thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The phenomenal
self at any given moment is only a portion of all of the
self-relevant information an individual has stored in
memory. The reason for this is the amount of knowledge
that people have about themselves is so vast that
it is impossible and impractical for everything that one
knows about himself or herself to be in awareness
at one time. Thus, the phenomenal self represents that
subset of self-knowledge—including beliefs, values,
attitudes, self-ascribed traits, feelings of self-worth,
autobiographical memories, interpersonal relationship
knowledge, and goals and plans—that is currently in
consciousness. The concept also recognizes the possibility
that on occasion the phenomenal self is not part
of one’s immediate experience, that is to say, sometimes
people are not self-aware. Related constructs in
social psychology include terms such as working selfconcept,
spontaneous self-concept, relational self, and
possible selves, which are similar to the phenomenal
self in that they imply that the content of self-awareness
is limited and changes across situation and time.
Background
The self is one of the central constructs in personality
and social psychology and has generated a great
amount of research. The widely accepted view of the
self is that it is a set of linked memories that include
people’s knowledge about who they are, their values,
preferences, goals, past experiences, and self-ascribed
dispositions and traits. When in awareness, these
memories serve as guides for behavior. For example,
a person who is made self-aware by being placed
before a mirror is more likely to behave in ways that
are consistent with his or her traits than if he or she
were not self-aware.
A survey of the vast amount of research on the self
provides two contradictory pictures. One view is that
the self is stable and consistent across time and situations.
This view is supported by research that demonstrates
that the self is a complex but highly integrated

670———Placebo Effect
mental representation or set of memories. Moreover,
people are motivated to maintain stable, consistent
knowledge of who they are through their interactions
with others as well as their tendencies to filter and
distort information that would challenge their selfconceptions.
The second view is that the self is somewhat
in flux and changes subtly across time and situations.
This view is supported by research that finds
even minor changes in context can have pronounced
effects on how people think about themselves. For example,
asking people to present themselves to another
individual as competent or extraverted versus incompetent
or introverted, leads to changes in how people
think about themselves and behave toward others in
terms of competence or introversion–extraversion.
This finding has been termed the carryover effect in
that it reflects the carryover or influence of public,
social behavior on people’s private views of self.
The phenomenal self implies a view of self that
allows the self to be stable in general while fluctuating
in response to changes in social context, behavior,
motivations, and moods. If available self-knowledge
is too vast to fit into consciousness at one time, then
the phenomenal self represents a summary statement
of self-knowledge that is currently accessible from
the potentially vast array of available self-knowledge
stored in memory. Social context and current moods
and motivations are like a spotlight on the self that
illuminates certain pieces of information and makes
them more accessible and in awareness than are other
pieces of information. As contexts, moods, and motivations
change, the spotlight shifts and different information
is illuminated and attended to. In technical
terms, context, mood, and motivation can lead the
individual to a biased scanning of self-knowledge so
that relevant information is in awareness while less
pertinent information remains outside of awareness.
Thus, contexts, moods, and motivations produce
moment-to-moment shifts in the phenomenal self, but
the underlying available self-knowledge is believed to
be relatively stable.
Implications
The demonstration of contextual and motivational
influences on shifts in the phenomenal self has relevance
to issues such as self-concept change. On the
surface, these momentary changes in the phenomenal
self seem to be just that, momentary, with no long-term
significance for the self. A shift in one direction—for
example, spending the day alone at the beach and
thinking of oneself as somewhat introverted—will
be replaced by new self-views of extraversion after
attending a party that evening. Exceptions may lead
to more permanent changes in the self. For example,
one study reported that actors’ self-concepts took the
qualities of the characters they portrayed and that these
changes persisted 1 month after the close of the play.
This finding suggests that repeated exposure to a situation
that focuses one on specific aspects of the self
will cause those aspects of the self to be more chronically
prominent or salient in the phenomenal self.
Other findings indicate that momentary shifts in the
phenomenal self can influence the impressions that
others have of the individual and can lead them to
interact with the person based on these impressions.
Thus, if because of a momentary shift in the phenomenal
self others come to view you as more extraverted
than you normally view yourself, they will treat you as
if you are an extraverted person and repeated interaction
with these people can change the self. Finally,
sometimes the context or social pressure induces
people to behave in ways that are inconsistent with the
self. If people believe that they freely choose to act in
this self-contradictory way, they will be motivated to
change their self-concept to reduce the inconsistency.
In this way, new information about the self becomes
available for inclusion in the phenomenal self.
See also Self; Self-Awareness; Self-Concept
Further Readings
Frederick Rhodewalt
Rhodewalt, F. (1998). Self-presentation and the phenomenal
self: The “carryover effect” revisited. In J. M. Darley &
J. Cooper (Eds.), Attribution and social interaction: The
legacy of Edward E. Jones. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
PLACEBO EFFECT
Definition
A placebo is a medical term for a drug that has no
active ingredient. Biologically, it doesn’t do anything,
but the patient might mistakenly believe it is a powerful
medicine. In fact, in bygone eras, some people who

took snake oil and other medically useless substances
did get better, partly because they believed that these
substances would cure them. The phrase placebo effect
refers to a person’s response to a substance only as
the result of the expectation of such a response. The
response is called a placebo effect when the substance
is known not to induce any response, but a consistent
response is found. Because of the placebo effect,
people may experience or perceive the effects of medication,
such as pain relief or psychotropic effects,
even when the “medication” given to them is merely
an inert dose that the patient believes to be medicinal
(i.e., a pill or serum with no reagent). Placebo effects
are one category of expectation effects, though not all
expectancy effects are placebo effects because people
may expect any outcome for any reason, whether or
not they have been given a placebo.
History and Modern Usage
The word placebo, in Vulgate Latin, referred to pleasing
or satisfying some need or desire. Adopted by the
medical community, the term referred to a “drug”
given to satisfy a patient’s desire for a drug, without
giving the patient the actual drug. Because many medications
may have negative side effects, doctors began
prescribing pills with no medicinal content, informing
patients that the pills were indeed the drug they
sought. In this manner, patients were satisfied without
being exposed to unnecessary, potentially dangerous
drugs. These pills were often made out of sugar, and
for this reason placebos are often referred to as sugar
pills.
Doctors found, however, that some patients who
were given these inert pills responded to the treatments,
reporting that their symptoms had improved or
ceased! Because the “medications” prescribed could
not be lauded for the improvements, psychological
expectations were used to explain the patients’
responses, and still are. People have shown placebo
effects for medications expected to relieve pain, prevent
heart attacks, heal injuries, and reduce symptoms
for depression. Though placebo effects are rarely as
effective as actual medication, it is nonetheless impressive
that people feel and exhibit responses to nothing
more than their expectations.
Today, medical researchers take special care to test
for placebo effects by using “double blind” experiments:
giving all subjects pills that appear identical,
but ensuring that some subjects receive the real drug
while others receive a placebo. When neither the
subject nor the provider knows whether the subject is
getting a real pill or a placebo, all subjects have the
same expectations. As such, differences in outcome
between subjects who receive real medication and
subjects who do not cannot be caused by differences
in expectation. Comparing these two groups to subjects
in a third “control” condition, in which subjects
have been given no treatment (not even a sugar pill)
nor told to expect any results, allows researchers to
test whether there is a placebo effect present.
Some theorists suggest that placebo effects are
physiological responses induced by the placebo.
Others hypothesize that motivations (e.g., to please
a doctor), or simply expectations alone may cause
placebo effects.
Adam D. I. Kramer
See also Demand Characteristics; Expectancy Effects;
Expectations
Further Readings
White, L., Tursky, B., & Schwartz, G. (1985). Placebo: Theory,
research, and mechanisms. New York: Guilford Press.
PLANNED BEHAVIOR THEORY
See THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR
PLANNING FALLACY
Planning Fallacy———671
Definition
The planning fallacy refers to a specific form of optimistic
bias wherein people underestimate the time that
it will take to complete an upcoming task even though
they are fully aware that similar tasks have taken
longer in the past. An intriguing aspect of this phenomenon
is that people simultaneously hold both optimistic
beliefs (concerning the specific future task)
as well as more realistic beliefs (concerning relevant
past experiences). When it comes to planning the
future, people can know the past and yet be doomed to
repeat it.

672———Planning Fallacy
The tendency to underestimate task completion
times has important practical implications. Governments,
businesses, and individuals all spend a considerable
amount of time, money, and effort trying to
forecast how long projects will take to complete. In
daily life, accurate predictions allow individuals to
plan effectively and coordinate their schedules with
those of friends, family members, and coworkers.
Unrealistic completion estimates can have serious economic,
personal, and social costs and thus merit research
attention.
Evidence and Causes
The most direct evidence for the planning fallacy
comes from studies in which people predict how long
an upcoming project will take to complete, report
completion times for similar projects in the past, and
subsequently carry out the project. For example, university
students reported that they typically completed
their writing assignments about a day before the due
date, but predicted that they would complete their current
summer essay more than a week before it was
due. They tended to finish the essay, as usual, about
a day before the deadline. The tendency to underestimate
completion times has been observed for a wide
variety of activities ranging from daily household
chores to large-scale industrial projects.
Why would people repeatedly underestimate how
long their tasks will take to complete? According to
cognitive explanations, the bias results from the kinds
of information that people consider. When generating
a task-completion prediction, people’s natural inclination
is to plan out the specific steps that they will
take to successfully complete the project. The problem
with this approach is that events don’t usually unfold
exactly as planned. Given the vast number of potential
impediments, there is a great likelihood that people
will encounter unexpected problems, delays, and interruptions.
When people focus narrowly on a plan for
successful task completion, they neglect other sources
of information—such as past completion times, competing
priorities, and factors that may delay their
progress—that could lead to more realistic predictions.
This cognitive explanation has been supported by
studies in which individuals describe their thoughts
while predicting when they will finish an upcoming
project. Most descriptions focus on specific future
plans whereas very few descriptions mention relevant
past experiences or potential problems. In addition,
experimental studies have shown that people who are
instructed to develop a detailed future plan for a task
make more optimistic predictions than those who
are not. These findings imply that people’s unrealistic
predictions are caused, at least in part, by their tendency
to focus narrowly on a plan for successful task
completion.
Motivation can also play a role, by guiding the cognitive
approach that people take. For example, strong
desires to finish tasks early may increase people’s
focus on future plans and decrease their focus on past
experiences, resulting in highly optimistic predictions.
The interplay between motivation and cognition was
illustrated in a field study. Taxpayers who expected an
income tax refund, and were thus strongly motivated
to file their tax return early, estimated they would file
their return about 10 days earlier on average than did
taxpayers who did not expect a refund. In fact, the
two groups did not differ in when they filed their
returns, which was much later than either group had
predicted. Incentives for early task completion appear
to increase people’s attention to future plans and
reduce attention to relevant past experiences—the
very pattern of cognitive processes that fuels the planning
fallacy.
Moderating Factors and Strategies
Given the potential costs of unrealistic predictions,
researchers have attempted to identify factors that
may limit their occurrence. The findings suggest that
the bias is remarkably robust. It appears for a wide
range of tasks and activities, it generalizes across individual
differences in personality and culture, and it
appears for group predictions as well as individual
predictions. One factor that does appear to have a
great influence, however, is whether people’s predictions
involve their own tasks or those of others. When
people make predictions about others’ tasks, rather
than their own, they are less prone to underestimate
completion times. This actor–observer difference
makes sense given the cognitive and motivational
causes of the planning fallacy. Observers typically do
not have access to the wealth of information that
actors possess about their future plans and circumstances,
making it difficult for observers to generate a
detailed future plan. Also, neutral observers do not
generally share the same motivations as actors (e.g.,
to complete the task promptly), and thus may be less
inclined to focus selectively on information that

supports an optimistic forecast. Whenever it is important
to avoid unrealistic predictions, then, individuals
may be well advised to consult with neutral observers.
Researchers have also examined strategies that
individual forecasters can use to avoid underestimating
their own completion times. One strategy involves
linking past experiences with specific plans for an
upcoming task. Specifically, before generating a taskcompletion
prediction, forecasters are asked to recall
when they typically finish projects, and then to
describe a plausible scenario that would result in the
upcoming project being done at the usual time. This
procedure should prevent people from either ignoring
past experiences or denying the relevance of those
experiences, and it has been shown to eliminate the
usual optimistic bias. Another strategy that can be
effective is to break down a multifaceted task into its
smaller subcomponents, and consider how long each
of the subcomponents will take.
See also Decision Making; Heuristic Processing;
Overconfidence
Further Readings
Roger Buehler
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the
“planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task
completion times. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 67, 366–381.
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (2002). Inside the
planning fallacy: The causes and consequences of
optimistic time prediction. In T. D. Gilovich, D. W.
Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.), Heuristics and biases:
The psychology of intuitive judgment (pp. 250–270).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction:
Biases and corrective procedures. In D. Kahneman,
P. Slovic, & A. Tversky (Eds.), Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases (pp. 414–421).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
PLURALISTIC IGNORANCE
Pluralistic ignorance occurs when people erroneously
infer that they feel differently from their peers, even
though they are behaving similarly. As one example,
imagine the following scenario: You are sitting in a
Pluralistic Ignorance———673
large lecture hall listening to an especially complicated
lecture. After many minutes of incomprehensible
material, the lecturer pauses and asks if there are
any questions. No hands go up. You look around the
room. Could these people really understand what the
lecturer is talking about? You yourself are completely
lost. Your fear of looking stupid keeps you from raising
your hand, but as you look around the room at
your impassive classmates, you interpret their similar
behavior differently: You take their failure to raise
their hands as a sign that they understand the lecture,
that they genuinely have no questions. These different
assumptions you make about the causes of your own
behavior and the causes of your classmates’ behavior
constitute pluralistic ignorance.
Another case of pluralistic ignorance that is familiar
to many college students concerns drinking on
campus. Alcohol use is prevalent at most colleges and
universities. Students drink at weekend parties and
sometimes at evening study breaks. Many drink to
excess, some on a routine basis. The high visibility of
heavy drinking on campus, combined with reluctance
by students to show any public signs of concern or
disapproval, gives rise to pluralistic ignorance: Students
believe that their peers are much more comfortable
with this behavior than they themselves feel.
Social Dynamics
Pluralistic ignorance plays a role in many other dysfunctional
social dynamics. In addition to the cases
already mentioned, researchers have linked pluralistic
ignorance to the failure of bystanders to intervene in
emergency situations. Bystanders recognize that their
own inaction is driven by uncertainty and fear of
doing the wrong thing; however, they think other
bystanders are not intervening because these others
have concluded that the situation is not an emergency
and there is no need to intervene. Pluralistic ignorance
also acts as an impediment to the formation of new
relationships. Consider the case of Jack and Jill, who
secretly harbor romantic interest in each other. Jack
does not approach Jill because he fears that she will
reject him, and Jill does not approach Jack for the
same reason. However, Jack assumes that Jill is not
approaching him because she is not interested in him,
and Jill makes the same assumption about Jack’s failure
to approach her. In this case, pluralistic ignorance,
rather than a lack of interest, is keeping Jack and Jill
apart. Finally, pluralistic ignorance keeps nurses from

674———Polarization Processes
acknowledging the stresses of their jobs, prison guards
from showing sympathy for their prisoners, corporate
board members from acknowledging their concerns
about their firm’s corporate strategy, and ordinary
citizens from acknowledging concerns about their
government’s foreign policy. Pluralistic ignorance is a
very common dynamic in social life.
Social Norms
Pluralistic ignorance begins with widespread conformity
to social norms—norms that govern appropriate
behavior in the classroom, at a party, in a boardroom,
or in a hospital; norms that regulate behavior with
friends, strangers, or colleagues. Indeed, most social
contexts and relationships are characterized by normative
expectations for behavior, whether people realize
it or not. These norms dictate, for example, that
one should show unwavering public support for
friends and colleagues, should not challenge people’s
personal choices, and should appear calm, collected,
and in control at all times. Of course, often these
behaviors do not reflect how people truly feel. Often
people have misgivings about their peers’ behavior;
often they do not agree with their colleagues’ proposals;
often they feel uncertain, anxious, and fearful.
When discrepancies between norm-driven behavior
and private feelings arise, pluralistic ignorance is the
result. People know that their own behavior does not
reflect their true sentiments, but they assume that
other people are acting on what they genuinely feel.
Consequences
Pluralistic ignorance has been linked to a wide range
of deleterious consequences. For example, victims of
pluralistic ignorance see themselves as deviant members
of their peer group: less knowledgeable than their
classmates, more uptight than their peers, less committed
than their fellow board members, less competent
than their fellow nurses. This can leave them
feeling bad about themselves and alienated from the
group or institution of which they are a part. In addition,
pluralistic ignorance can lead groups to persist in
policies and practices that have lost widespread support:
This can lead college students to persist in heavy
drinking, corporations to persist in failing strategies,
and governments to persist in unpopular foreign policies.
At the same time, it can prevent groups from
taking actions that would be beneficial in the long
run: actions to intervene in an emergency, for example,
or to initiate a personal relationship.
Fortunately, pluralistic ignorance can be dispelled,
and its negative consequences alleviated, through education.
For example, students who learn that support
for heavy drinking practices is not as widespread as
they thought drink less themselves and feel more
comfortable with the decision not to drink. Alcohol
intervention programs now routinely employ this strategy
to combat problem drinking on campus.
Deborah A. Prentice
See also Bystander Effect; Conformity; Deviance; Norms,
Prescriptive and Descriptive
Further Readings
O’Gorman, H. J. (1986). The discovery of pluralistic
ignorance: An ironic lesson. Journal of the History of the
Behavioral Sciences, 22, 333–347.
Prentice, D. A., & Miller, D. T. (1993). Pluralistic ignorance
and alcohol use on campus: Some consequences of
misperceiving the social norm. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 64, 243–256.
Todorov, A., & Mandisodza, A. N. (2004). Public opinion on
foreign policy: The multilateral public that perceives itself
as unilateral. Public Opinion Quarterly, 68, 325–348.
Vorauer, J., & Ratner, R. (1996). Who’s going to make the
first move? Pluralistic ignorance as an impediment to
relationship formation. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 13, 483–503.
Westphal, J. D., & Bednar, M. K. (2005). Pluralistic
ignorance in corporate boards and firms’ strategic
persistence in response to low firm performance.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 50, 262–298.
POLARIZATION PROCESSES
Definition
Like the North Pole and the South Pole or the opposite
ends of a magnet, poles represent extreme endpoints,
and polarization indicates movement toward
those extremes. In psychological terms, polarization
processes describe movement in individuals’ views
toward opposite extremes. For example, imagine a
group of individuals that includes both moderate
supporters and moderate opponents of abortion, and

imagine they engage in a discussion of the issue.
Imagine further that each side then becomes more
extreme in its respective support of, or opposition to,
abortion. That movement to more extreme positions is
said to reflect polarization because each side has
moved to a more extreme pole or endpoint on the relevant
continuum. In social psychology, polarization
processes have been studied in three domains: group
decision making, attitudes, and intergroup perception.
Group Decision Making
Beginning in the 1960s, researchers became interested
in how individual judgments could be affected by
group discussion. A typical study would present individuals
with a number of problems, known as choice
dilemmas, in which the task was to indicate a preference
for one of two possible solutions to each problem.
For example, participants would be asked to
indicate the minimum probability that a new company
will survive before a prospective employee should
accept a position with the company rather than retain
an existing job. In the typical design, participants
would indicate their responses individually and then
engage in a conversation about the problem with other
members of a group. The group would be asked to
render its unanimous joint decision, and then each
member would be asked to indicate, once again, his or
her personal response.
The standard finding from such research was that
a group would reach a joint decision favoring more
risk than the average response of its constituent members.
For example, imagine that a group included
three members, and one of those members indicated
initially that there had to be a 5 in 10 chance that
the hypothetical company would succeed before the
employee should accept the new position. Imagine
another group member indicated a response of 3 in 10,
whereas the final member responded with 1 in 10. The
average response of the three members would then
be 3 in 10. However, after discussion, the group might
come to a joint decision of 2 in 10, and individual
members’ personal responses might also gravitate
toward the riskier end of the probability continuum.
This finding was labeled the “risky shift” because
group discussion tended to push individuals to adopt,
on average, riskier solutions to choice dilemmas than
they initially favored.
Later research, however, suggested that the nature
of the particular dilemma determined whether groups
Polarization Processes———675
would end up favoring more risk than their average
member or, alternatively, would favor more caution.
For some choice dilemma items, for example, after
group discussion, individuals who had previously
expressed mild endorsement of the safe option would
end up endorsing an even safer option. Accordingly,
instead of the risky shift, the phenomenon became
known as group polarization, because groups tended
to move individual members to adopt positions that
were somewhat more extreme than their initial stances.
If those initial positions favored risk, then groups
would prompt greater endorsement of risk; if instead,
a safe option was preferred, then after group discussion,
it would be more preferred.
Two primary factors have been cited as responsible
for group polarization effects. The first involves the
presence of persuasive arguments. Being a member
of a group means that there is an opportunity to be
exposed to novel arguments regarding an issue—
arguments that can help reinforce and strengthen an
individual’s initial position, producing movement
toward the extremes. In addition, social comparison
processes can operate in a group, with each member
making an effort to demonstrate that he or she endorses
the apparent group norm. Such processes can produce
a situation in which individuals move to more extreme
positions in an attempt to position themselves squarely
on the appropriate side of the safe-risk continuum.
Attitudes
A second domain in which polarization processes
have been studied is that of attitudes. Beginning in the
1970s, research on attitude polarization demonstrated
that people who were asked to think carefully about a
particular attitude that they held ended up endorsing a
more extreme version of that attitude.
Related research has suggested that attitudes can
become more polarized as a result of a biased search
for evidence in support of the initial attitude. For
example, in one study, capital punishment opponents
and proponents were exposed to written arguments
that both supported and refuted some traditional justifications
for the death penalty. After being exposed to
such mixed evidence, these partisan subjects became
more persuaded of the correctness of their initial attitude.
This polarization of initial positions appeared to
occur because participants engaged in biased interpretation
of the relevant evidence, uncritically accepting
information that supported their initial positions while

676———Political Psychology
subjecting to harsh scrutiny information that contradicted
their initial stances, a phenomenon that has been
labeled “biased assimilation.”
Intergroup Perception
A final domain in which polarization processes have
been studied involves intergroup perception, in which,
typically, members of opposing groups are asked to
make judgments concerning the views of both members
of their side and members of the opposite side
of some contentious issue. In one study, for example,
supporters and opponents of abortion were asked to
predict the view that would be espoused by the average
pro-choice and the average pro-life member of
their respective groups. Members of both groups overestimated
the extremity of the average view held by
each side, believing that the two groups were farther
apart in their views than they actually were, a phenomenon
labeled “false polarization.” The implication
of these inaccurate perceptions is that disputants who
overestimate the degree of difference between the
views of each side may consequently miss opportunities
to resolve intergroup conflict.
See also Attitudes; Group Polarization; Outgroup
Homogeneity; Risky Shift; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Andrew Ward
Brown, R. (1986). Social psychology: The second edition.
New York: Free Press.
Ross, L., & Ward, A. (1995). Psychological barriers to
dispute resolution. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 27, pp. 255–304).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Political psychology is an interdisciplinary field of
study that lies at the crossroads of many fields of
research, including psychology, political science,
communication, economics, and sociology. Although
the field is very broad, much of its research deals with
using principles and theories from both psychology
and political science to understand and predict people’s
political opinions, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Political thought and behavior play an important
role in determining leaders and how leaders will think
and behave. Political psychology attempts to apply
scientific principles to better understand these processes.
Although this entry presents only the smallest of
glimpses into a very limited sample of what political
psychology has to offer, it is hoped that the reader will
gain an insight into the topics that political psychologists
explore and the tools with which they conduct
their research.
Areas of Research
As suggested by the definition, political psychology is
a vast area of study, encompassing research and theory
from a wide variety of other academic disciplines.
As such, space limitations make it impossible to discuss
all or even most of the areas of study. However,
much of the field can be distilled into several important
subareas.
Individuals
One area of interest to political psychologists is the
prediction and understanding of the political thoughts
and behaviors of typical citizens. Much research, for
example, has investigated what factors contribute to the
choices that people make they vote. Some of the most
basic research has investigated the relation between
demographics and vote choice, focusing on how, for
example, age, race, gender, and household income predict
vote choice. Other research has focused on how
membership in groups such as political parties, trade
unions, and religious organizations can be used to predict
vote choice. Still other studies have investigated
how a person’s stances on political issues such as abortion,
taxes, and welfare can predict the candidates for
whom he or she will vote.
But voting is only one example of political behavior.
Consider the fact that some citizens immerse
themselves in the political world, learning a great deal
about candidates for political races, donating time and
money to their preferred candidates, and never missing
an election. Others, however, seem not to care,
remaining ignorant of the political world in which they
live, unaware of the candidates running for election

and rarely if ever taking part in the political process.
The study of why people do or do not participate in
the political process is another individual-level phenomenon
that has garnered much research. For example,
some research has investigated how a person’s
demographics predict political participation, learning
that, for example, older people, people of higher
income, and people of higher education are more
likely to participate. Other research has shown that
psychological phenomena such as emotions, feelings
of threat, or a perception of a personal stake in an
issue can lead a person to participate.
Still other research has explored how political
campaigns can influence individuals’ political thoughts
and behaviors. Stephen Ansolabehere and Shanto
Iyengar, for example, have studied the effects of
attack advertisements on individuals. They argue that
such negative messages can make individuals become
more extreme in their political ideologies and, at
the same time, make them less likely to vote. Other
research has investigated how campaigns are influenced
by, for example, media coverage of candidates
and issues relevant to the campaign, the amount of
money spent on the campaigns, and the state of the
economy during the campaign.
Leaders
Whereas some political-psychological research
focuses on the typical citizen, other research instead
attempts to understand the political leader. Margaret
Hermann has argued that to gain insight into what
makes a good leader requires understanding several
important aspects of the leader and his or her surroundings.
The first of these aspects is the context around the
leader. For example, one type of leader might be best
for a country during years of peace, whereas another
type of leader might be best for the same country during
wartime. The second aspect is to understand the
characteristics and behavioral traits of the leader. For
example, Alexander George proposed that some U.S.
presidents have shown a formalistic style of leadership
in which decisions are made in a highly organized
structure, other presidents have shown a competitive
style in which power is distributed though conflict and
bargaining, and still other presidents have shown a
collegial style in which teamwork and interaction are
valued. The third of Hermann’s aspects is to understand
the leaders’ constituencies and the relations between
the leader and the constituents. Simply stated, certain
groups of people may be best led by certain leaders.
Thus, by understanding the context, the leader, and the
constituents, one may be able to predict the success or
failure of a given leader.
Intragroup Processes
Many political psychologists focus on groups and,
in particular, how groups come to make decisions.
Although it seems logical that groups of people would
come to make more accurate decisions than they
might otherwise make individually, this is often not
the case. For example, Irving Janis found evidence
that, in certain circumstances, groups can be driven
more to come to a consensus that keeps members of
the group satisfied than to come to an accurate decision
that may offend or anger members of the group.
Janis termed this phenomenon groupthink, suggesting
that many of history’s worst decisions can be
explained in part by its processes, such as the decision
to carry out the Bay of Pigs invasion. In a similar vein,
David Myers and Helmut Lamm found evidence that
members of groups tend to hold more extreme opinions
and make more extreme choices when thinking
about and discussing options than when formulating
such opinions and choices alone. This phenomenon,
called group polarization, has also garnered much
attention by political psychologists.
International Relations
Political Psychology———677
Another area of political psychology deals with
understanding nations and countries. One area of
study on international relations examines what makes
international conflict possible. For example, Jim
Sidanius and his colleagues have argued that part of
the reason that nations go to war is because of social
dominance: that those societies who have disproportionately
high resources and power want to maintain
this social inequality and will go to great lengths—
including waging war—to do so. Others, like Urie
Bronfenbrenner, have suggested that enemy nations
have negatively distorted images of each other and
that these false images can lead to mutual aggression
and mistrust. Still other research has investigated
other aspects of international relations, such as prejudice,
treaties, conflict resolution, alliances, and
terrorism.

678———Pornography
Methodologies
Because political psychologists attempt to understand
myriad political processes at many different levels of
analysis, they use a wide range of research techniques
to do so.
Surveys
Often, research devoted to understanding individuallevel
phenomena is conducted using surveys, a technique
in which participants provide their opinions,
thoughts, and beliefs about various issues, people, and
objects. Some surveys are conducted in a respondent’s
home in a face-to-face format. Others are conducted
by telephone, using random-digit-dialing techniques to
ensure proper sampling. Other techniques include mail
surveys and surveys conducted online. Political psychologists
have made especially extensive use of data
from the National Election Study surveys, which have
been conducted every 2 years since 1948. Participants
in these surveys provide a wealth of data about themselves,
including their demographics, their political ideologies,
and their thoughts and feelings about various
candidates, political issues, political parties, public officials,
and more.
The Experimental Method
To determine causal relations between variables,
political psychologists conduct research using the
experimental method. Randomly assigning respondents
to conditions and manipulating variables allows
such hypotheses of causality to be tested. Although
surveys are often conducted using the experimental
method, political psychologists often conduct elaborate
experimental research that collects data in a way
that surveys cannot.
Case Studies
Rather than examining data collected from groups
of people like surveys and experiments do, case
studies examine one single data point in its naturalistic
setting. Thus, instead of learning what a relatively
large sample of people think or feel about a particular
issue, a case study might examine how decisions made
by a person or a group of people during a particular
crisis either alleviated or worsened the situation.
Content Analysis
When conducting content analyses, political psychologists
examine archived writings and speeches
to understand a political phenomenon. Such content
analyses can be useful in, for example, distilling a
former president’s personality from his state of the
union addresses, or understanding the main differences
between two political parties on an issue by examining
transcripts from relevant debates.
George Y. Bizer
See also Group Polarization; Groupthink; Leadership; Social
Dominance Orientation
Further Readings
Cottam, M., Dietz-Uhler, B., Mastors, E. M., & Preston, T.
(2004). Introduction to political psychology. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Hermann, M. G. (1986). Political psychology: Contemporary
problems and issues. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Kuklinski, J. H. (2002). Thinking about political psychology.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Monroe, K. R. (2002). Political psychology. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Sears, D. O., Huddy, L., & Jervis, R. (2003). Oxford
handbook of political psychology. New York: Oxford
University Press.
PORNOGRAPHY
Definition
The term pornography refers to sexually explicit
media that are primarily intended to sexually arouse
the consumer. Such media include magazines, the
Internet, and films. They have become very common
in many societies and are reported to regularly provide
huge profits for the producers and distributors of such
media.
Gender Differences
Some of the social scientific research in this area has
focused on who are most likely to be the consumers of
these media. The findings reveal considerable gender
differences in consumption and use of pornography,

although within each gender there are also large
differences in consumption. Generally, research has
found that males are more likely to be consumers of
various types of pornography, although some women
also do use and enjoy pornography. Men have been
found to be much more likely to use pornography on
their own, often as a stimulant to masturbation. A considerable
number of men and women report using
pornography in the context of a relationship where
such media are used together by a couple.
Men generally are more likely to be attracted to
pornography and to use it more regularly, and they
generally have more favorable attitudes, and react with
less negative affect, to it. This is particularly true for
portrayals featuring nudity of the opposite sex, often
in various sexual poses, and portrayals of sexual acts
devoid of relationship context. In contrast, men are less
likely than women to consume sexually explicit media
that emphasize sexual communion and romance.
Effects
The question of what impact exposure to such pornographic
materials has on consumers has been debated
and researched from many vantage points. Although
social psychological research has been designed to be
objective, it appears that the types of hypotheses tested
have often been guided by ideological/political perspectives
on this topic. For example, some researchers,
guided by assertions made by conservative thinkers,
have tested whether exposure to pornography can
affect attitudes about family life and commitment to
long-term relationships. Other researchers, guided by
concerns of feminists, have tested whether pornography
exposure affects attitudes and behaviors toward
women, particularly in areas such as violence against
women.
Social scientific research on pornography’s effects
includes primarily three types of studies using differing
methodologies. Each type of method has certain
advantages and disadvantages. First are studies that
seek to find out if there may be causal effects of exposure
to different types of pornography. Typically, such
studies have randomly assigned participants to different
conditions. The researchers then manipulated how
much pornography, if any, the participants in the various
conditions were exposed to. These studies have
usually been conducted in laboratory environments,
although some relevant experiments have also been
successfully completed in less artificial environments.
The value of such research is that it can determine
cause and effect with confidence because participants
in the various conditions may be considered equal
before their pornography exposure because of random
assignment to conditions. Any differences found after
different pornography exposure may be attributed to
the differences in exposure content and amounts. The
second type of research has not involved any manipulation
by the researchers of amount of pornography
consumption. Instead, people have been surveyed
regarding how much and what type of pornography
they have been exposed to in their daily lives, and
such differences have been correlated with differences
in their attitudes and behaviors. Although it is more
difficult to identify causal connections in this type of
research, there is the advantage of studying what
people actually are like in their usual environments.
The third type of research has examined in various
cultures how much pornography is being consumed in
the society at large and changes in such consumption
over time. Such changes have then been correlated
with other changes in the society, such as changes in
sexual crimes. Although such research has provided
an interesting window regarding varied cultures, one
problem is that it is difficult to relate changes at the
larger societal level to individual behavior. Also, there
are typically many other changes that have occurred in
a society at the same time as changes in pornography
consumption have been happening.
Implications
Pornography———679
Most of the research using these three types of
methodologies has involved male participants, who, as
noted earlier, are more frequent consumers of pornography
than females are. Although differences have
emerged from the various types of studies, some general
conclusions seem justified. Overall, it seems that
no simple generalizations are justified but that the
effects depend largely on the type of person who consumes
pornography as well as the content of the material
the person uses. In the area of aggression against
women, the research suggests that if a man already
has relatively strong tendencies to be aggressive toward
women, then heavy pornography consumption may
increase his aggressive tendencies. This seems to be
particularly likely if the type of pornography he is sexually
aroused by includes violent content. Conversely,

680———Positive Affect
if a man has little risk for being aggressive toward
women, then whether or not he consumes pornography
does not appear to significantly affect his risk
for being aggressive toward women. Moreover, the
research suggests that many individuals in some cultures
use pornography on a fairly regular basis and,
at least in their own self-perceptions, report generally
positive and little negative effects. Therefore, the
overall findings suggest that there may be considerable
variations among individuals within a culture
in how pornography affects them. Similarly, differing
environments in various cultures, such as the degree
of hostility versus trust between males and female and
the availability of sex education, may create major
individual differences in the role and impact of pornographic
stimuli on members of differing societies.
Neil Malamuth
See also Aggression; Gender Differences; Intimate Partner
Violence; Media Violence and Aggression; Sex Drive;
Sexual Desire
Further Readings
Hald, G. M. (2006). Gender differences in pornography
consumption among young heterosexual Danish adults.
Archives of Sexual Behavior, 35, 577–586.
Kutchinsky, B. (1991). Pornography and rape: Theory and
practice? Evidence from crime data in four countries
where pornography is easily available. International
Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 14, 47–64.
Malamuth, N., & Huppin, M. (2005). Pornography and
teenagers: The importance of individual differences.
Adolescent Medicine, 16, 315–326.
Weinstein, J. (1999). Hate speech, pornography, and the
radical attack on free speech doctrine. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
POSITIVE AFFECT
Definition
Positive affect is the pleasant state that can be induced
by small things that happen in everyday life. It is one
of the most exciting topics currently under investigation
in the psychological research literature. The
findings suggest that there is the potential for a large
impact of positive affect on social behavior and interpersonal
processes, as well as on thinking, problem
solving, and decision making. In addition, the topic
has been studied in naturalistic ways and in a diverse
range of realistic settings, and results of these studies
suggest that positive affect may be important in many
contexts of everyday life, from classrooms to boardrooms
to physicians’ offices. The field itself is still
young enough that there remain some controversies
about how to understand what the processes are that
are fostered by positive affect, which should be inviting
to researchers not already in the field.
The noun affect, as used in psychology, refers to
feelings or emotions, and differs from the noun effect,
which refers to the result of some action or circumstance.
Positive affect, then, refers to pleasant feelings
or emotions. From one perspective, positive affect is the
most general term for pleasant feeling states, encompassing
all the different types of positive feelings
and all of their effects—neurophysiological, cognitive,
motivational, behavioral, and interpersonal (however,
in medical and related fields, the term is reserved for
only the conscious feeling state). It can include good
moods, pleasant emotions (e.g., joy, calmness, love),
mild happy feelings, and their consequences.
Further Distinctions
As affect is studied in the psychology research literature,
however, some finer distinctions are often made.
Thus, positive affect usually refers to a mild happy or
pleasant general feeling state, induced in some simple
way that people may readily experience in daily life.
Sometimes specific positive emotions, such as elation,
joy, or love, are included under the general heading,
“positive affect,” but some researchers make a distinction
between positive emotions such as love, on the
one hand, and positive affect, a more general state, on
the other. Some people working on the topic use the
term mood to refer to this general state. However,
some researchers avoid using the term mood because
that term can carry unwanted connotations such as
moodiness, which are not what the researchers in this
field study.
Some researchers who study positive affect intend
to distinguish between positive affect or mood and
positive emotions. A distinction has been proposed
between these terms, just for convenience, that suggests
that affect or mood refers to a general state,
perhaps a background feeling state, whereas specific
emotions refer to more focused feelings. In addition,
emotions also seem to be feelings that are targeted at
a particular referent person, group, or thing, perhaps

the source of the emotion, and they may have specific
behaviors associated with them. For example, if someone
makes you angry, you become angry at that person
and you may interrupt what you are doing to say
something to that person (or worse). Or if something
like a big, barking dog frightens you, you feel afraid
of the dog and run away from it, interrupting your
walk down the lane. Notice that these examples are
easier to find in the negative domain than in the positive,
but perhaps there are focused positive emotions
as well, such as love. Affect, in contrast, has been proposed
to be less focused and a more generalized feeling
state that can occur as a background state even
while the person experiencing it can continue to work
on some task or play some game or interact with other
people. Affect may influence the way the task is done,
but the task can be completed.
However, this distinction between affect and
emotions is difficult to maintain, and may just come
down to degree, or context, because one can think of
emotions that are mild and do not interrupt ongoing
behavior, or instances where one suppresses the impetus
to react to the emotion and goes on with the task
one is doing. One can work on a problem while
loving someone (positive emotion) or while angry at
someone (negative emotion). The usefulness of the
distinction is only a practical one, in that it defines not
a fundamental difference between affect and emotion,
but a situation in which the influence of feeling states
on other tasks or processes can be observed.
Positive affect has been defined in this entry as the
pleasant state that can be induced by small things that
happen in everyday life, so it may be helpful to mention
some of the ways in which it can be induced, to understand
the state more fully. In research studies, positive
affect has been induced by events such as having
research participants receive a useful, inexpensive free
sample (worth under $1.00), find a dime or quarter in
the coin-return of a public telephone that they happened
to use in a shopping mall, be offered a cookie while
studying in a library, be told that they succeeded (outperformed
the average) on a simple, perceptual-motor
task, view 5 minutes of a non-aggressive, nonsexual
comedy film, or view a few pleasant slides, to mention
only a few of the techniques that have been used
successfully.
With regard to defining and understanding positive
affect, it is important to note that measures of stable
personality characteristics thought to reflect people’s
capacity for happiness or general, underlying tendency
to be happy are not mentioned, nor are people’s
reports of overall well-being, in response to direct
questions about it. Positive affect refers to ongoing
feelings rather than stable underlying positive dispositions
or traits; sometimes, as one might expect, some
stable dispositions may also reflect or produce ongoing
positive feelings, but in actuality they may not
relate to current feelings at any given time. Although
it is possible that affective dispositions to be happy or
optimistic, for example, may play a role similar to that
of induced positive affect, it is important to remember
that most of the research on positive affect involves
induction of affect among individuals who are randomly
assigned to the affect conditions. This means
that, without considering the person’s underlying affective
disposition (or their underlying tendencies to
behave in a given way or engage in certain thought
processes), the mild interventions such as those
described previously have been found to produce the
effects described next.
Effects
Positive Affect———681
The focus in the research on positive affect has been
on the effects of current feelings on other processes
such as brain activity, problem solving, social interaction,
and so forth.
A large body of evidence indicates that positive
affect fosters mental flexibility, such as the ability to
switch among ideas and include a broader range of
ideas in mind at any given time. Often, positive affect
helps people see how distinct lines of thought can
relate to one another or be brought to bear upon one
another. This has been found to result in improved
creative problem solving, the ability to come up with
innovative solutions to difficult problems, and openness
to new information, even information that doesn’t
fit with one’s preconceptions or favorite, old ways of
thinking about a given situation or problem. This particular
finding—improved creative problem solving
and innovation—is one that has also been obtained by
researchers studying the effects of the relatively stable
dispositions of optimism, and of positive affectivity (a
tendency to be positive or upbeat). Induced positive
affect has also been shown to result in improved judgment
and decision making in some circumstances,
especially dangerous or genuinely risky situations,
and increased social responsibility, helpfulness to others,
and concern with the welfare of others as well as
oneself. Also observed to result from positive affect
have been an increased tendency to see connections
between one’s behavior, effort, and performance, on

682———Positive Illusions
the one hand, and one’s outcomes, on the other, where
those connections actually exist (but not where they
do not exist, such as in chance situations). These
effects produce increased motivation in achievement
or work situations as well as an increased ability
to show self-control in situations where self-control
would be in the person’s long-term best interest.
These findings have occurred in several applied
contexts, including managerial situations, physicians’
diagnostic processes, and consumer decision situations.
Many researchers have found these effects
exciting, because they open a window to understanding
ways of increasing problem-solving effectiveness
and creativity and improving thought processes and
social interaction, responsibility, and self-control (and
a pleasant way, at that!).
However, some researchers believe that positive
affect takes cognitive capacity and therefore leads
people to be impaired in problem solving and to think
sloppily rather than carefully and systematically.
Others also see positive affect as interfering with careful
thought, but because of an absence of motivation to
think carefully, rather than because of capacity deficit.
A recent view that is related to these has suggested,
likewise, that people who are feeling happy are not
careful thinkers, but for the reason that they tend to
rely on stored information, schemata, and scripts,
rather than taking in new knowledge. There are also a
few other variants on these themes, but they are all
related in that they result in the idea that positive affect
leads to superficial and overly hasty, careless, thought
processes, compared with those demonstrated by
people in whom affect has not been induced. These
researchers argue that the creative problem solving and
innovation observed in the studies referred to earlier
only results because the problem-solving task can be
solved without systematic thought. This latter point,
however, has never been demonstrated (and without
positive affect or a give-away hint about the solution to
the problem, the rate of solution to these problems that
require innovative thought is very low—about 15%,
for example—whereas it is quite substantial in the
positive affect conditions—about 65%, for example).
Finally, this research literature indicates that
positive and negative affect are neither the same, nor
symmetrical opposites, in their effects on thought
processes and behavior. One cannot generalize from
what one learns about positive affect to assume that
the opposite is true of negative affect, or that the two
kinds of feeling states produce the same effects—
assuming, for example, that all emotion generally
produces the same effect on thinking and behavior.
The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this entry,
but it is a point worth noting.
Future Research
The research field on the topic of positive affect is
currently a very active one, with scientists working to
expand understanding of the range of problems and
activities and contexts in which positive affect will
have effects, and also working to understand exactly
what the processes are that have given rise to the
opposing views of its overall impact that still exist
in the field. The topic is truly an exciting area for
continued research, with many avenues for additional
research still to be explored.
See also Affect; Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive
Emotions; Emotion; Happiness
Further Readings
Alice Isen
Ashby, F. G., Isen, A. M., & Turken, A. U. (1999).
A neuropsychological theory of positive affect and
its influence on cognition. Psychological Review,
106, 529–550.
Isen, A. M. (1985). Asymmetry of happiness and sadness
in effects on memory in normal college students.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,
114, 388–391.
Isen, A. M., Nygren, T. E., & Ashby, F. G. (1988). The
influence of positive affect on the perceived utility of
gains and losses. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 55, 710–717.
POSITIVE ILLUSIONS
Definition
Positive illusions refers to a set of three related beliefs
that characterize the way people think about (1) themselves,
(2) their ability to control environmental events,
and (3) their future. Instead of being evenhanded or
balanced between the good and the bad, people are
unrealistically positive: They believe they have many
more positive than negative personal qualities, they
exaggerate their abilities to bring about desired outcomes,
and they are overly optimistic about their futures.

If not too extreme, these positive illusions promote psychological
well-being and psychological functioning.
History and Background
Accurate self-views were once thought to be an essential
feature of psychological well-being. It is easy to
see why. People who harbor delusions of grandeur or
believe they control the moon and stars are not
paragons of mental health. Whether accuracy is best,
however, is another matter. It is entirely possible that
excessively positive self-views are detrimental, but
mildly positive ones are beneficial.
One way to address this issue is to ask, “Do most
people know what they are really like?” For example,
suppose we randomly sample a group of people and
ask them, “Compared with most other people, how
intelligent are you?” Logically, most of the people in
our sample should say they are as intelligent as most
other people, with the rest equally split between saying
they are less intelligent and more intelligent than most
other people. This does not occur. Instead, most people
say they are more intelligent than most other people.
Furthermore, this effect occurs for a wide variety of
personality traits and abilities. People believe they are
more competent, flexible, and intelligent than others;
drive better than others; are more caring, adaptive, and
fairer than others; are happier and have better interpersonal
relationships than others; and are more deserving
of good fortune and good health. They also believe
their judgments are less distorted by greed, selfaggrandizement,
or personal gain than are other
people’s judgments and that their opinions are
grounded in facts, but other people’s opinions are
driven by ideology. The bias even extends to friends,
family, loved ones, and fellow group members, and is
characteristic of people from a variety of cultures.
People also exaggerate their abilities to bring about
desired outcomes. They readily credit themselves
when things go well, but deny responsibility when
things go awry. Together, these beliefs give rise to
unrealistic optimism. Believing they are “good” and
“powerful,” leads people to believe their futures will
be brighter than base rate data justify. For example,
even though the current divorce rate in industrialized
countries is approximately 50%, roughly three-quarters
of newlyweds believe they will never divorce.
The prevalence of illusions does not mean that
people are wildly inaccurate. In most cases, the degree
of distortion is modest, resulting in a self-portrait that
is just a bit too good to be true. Moreover, positive
Positive Illusions———683
illusions do take reality into account. For example,
although smokers think they are less likely to get cancer
than are most other smokers, they readily acknowledge
they are at greater risk than are nonsmokers.
Benefits
If not too excessive, positive illusions can be beneficial.
These benefits fall into four areas. First, positive
illusions are linked with subjective well-being. People
who hold positive self-views are happier and more
content than are those who are more realistic. Second,
under some circumstances, positive self-views can
also beget success. People who are confident in their
abilities often perform better at achievement-related
activities (e.g., exams, sporting contests) than do those
who are more modest, even when their confidence is
not entirely warranted. These effects are most apparent
at tasks of moderate difficulty. Third, positive illusions
promote interpersonal relationships. People who
view their romantic partners through rose-colored
glasses are more satisfied with their relationship and
more committed to it than are those who have a more
realistic view of their partners’ actual strengths and
weaknesses. Finally, positive illusions help people
cope with life’s challenges. For example, cancer
patients who believe they can prevent the recurrence
of cancer enjoy greater health than do those who are
realistic, and preoperative patients who are unduly
optimistic about their operation’s success fare better
than those who more accurately perceive the procedure’s
dangers and risks.
These benefits are achieved through a variety of
means, but the most important is that positive illusions
promote a problem-focused approach to coping.
Rather than assuming that all is lost or blithely adopting
a “What, me worry?” attitude, people who exhibit
positive illusions roll up their sleeves and actively
strive to build brighter lives for themselves. In this
sense, positive illusions have motivational consequences.
Believing that success is well within one’s
reach motivates people to work hard to achieve positive
outcomes.
Costs
The many benefits of positive illusions should not
blind us to their potential costs. First, positive illusions
can lead people to undertake activities for which
they are ill-suited. For example, an aspiring dancer
may invest years pursuing a career in the arts

684———Positive–Negative Asymmetry
without having the requisite talent. Positive illusions
can also lead people to make poor economic
decisions or engage in behaviors that are detrimental
to their well-being. Gamblers, for example, often exaggerate
their ability to control events that are heavily
influenced by chance, such as roulette. Finally, positive
illusions can have interpersonal costs. Although
people generally prefer the company of optimistic
people, they are not drawn to people who are boastful
or narcissistic.
Importance
Research on positive illusions is important for two
reasons. First, it has theoretical implications. Theories
of mental health are largely based on what most
people do (i.e., what’s normative is normal). Evidence
that most people possess inaccurate self-knowledge
indicates that accuracy is not an essential component
of normal psychological functioning. Second, positive
illusions have practical implications. The capacity to
adapt to life’s challenges is one of the most important
skills a person can possess. Positive illusions have consistently
been shown to play a key role in helping people
cope with, and even benefit from, life-threatening illnesses
and life-altering tragedies.
Jonathon D. Brown
See also Coping; Illusion of Control; Marital Satisfaction;
Narcissism; Self-Concept; Self-Deception;
Self-Enhancement; Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being:
A social psychological perspective on mental health.
Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193–210.
POSITIVE–NEGATIVE ASYMMETRY
Definition
The positive–negative asymmetry refers to two complementary
tendencies regarding how people respond
to positive and negative events or information. On
one hand, there is a tendency for bad events (such as
failing a class, being criticized, or experiencing the
loss of a close friend) to have more impact on a person
than good events (winning a prize, receiving a
compliment, or making a new friend). The greater
strength of negative information is most obvious in
the area of impression formation, where it is called
the negativity effect. Accordingly, when people form
an impression of another person, they put greater
weight on the person’s bad behaviors (such as hitting
a child for no reason) than on the person’s good
behavior (such as rescuing a family from a burning
house). On the other hand, most of the experiences
people have in everyday life are pleasant. As a result,
there is a tendency for people to expect positive outcomes
and good experiences from other people. In
part, this very expectation may lead people to be surprised
by and strongly affected by the bad things that
occur in life.
Social Domains Where Bad Is
Stronger Than Good
Bad events seem to carry more power than do good
ones in a variety of domains. To appreciate the negativity
effect in impression formation, try this thought
experiment. Imagine a person who is very immoral,
someone who has done horrendous things. Would you
be surprised to learn that this villain did something
very positive such as talked a friend out of suicide?
Most people would find this mildly surprising. Now
imagine a very moral person. Would you be surprised
to learn that this person sold narcotics to neighborhood
children? Most people would be quite surprised
to hear that a very moral person did something so
harmful. This thought experiment demonstrates the
power of negative information in the impression. A bad
act is capable of greatly altering one’s impression of a
person, whereas a person’s good acts seem to count
for less in the impression.
The greater weight of negative or immoral behavior
also affects the attribution process. Attribution
research examines how one’s impressions of a person
are influenced by both the person’s behavior and the
situational forces that surround the behavior. For
example, if a coworker makes a donation to a charity
when asked by the boss, you may discount the possibility
that the coworker has a helpful trait. But a person’s
immoral behavior carries greater weight and
may override this discounting tendency. For example,
if a coworker is paid handsomely by the boss to swindle
poor people, you are likely to see the coworker as

immoral. Notice that the presence of the (situational)
reward in this situation has little effect on your impression.
In summary, when people hear about moral behavior,
they take the situation into account when judging
the person, but when they hear about a person’s
immoral behavior, they are likely to judge the person
to be immoral, regardless of the situation. People’s
inferences about a person’s underlying motives may
help explain this asymmetry. For example, a person
who commits a harmful act (such as swindling poor
people) for money is probably motivated by selfishness,
a motive that is entirely consistent with an immoral
trait.
Research on impression formation and attribution
focuses on people’s reaction to strangers. What about
close relationships? Are people more affected by the
irritating behaviors of a romantic partner or spouse
than by a partner’s positive behaviors? Research by
John Gottman suggests that negative events count
more in this domain as well. The researcher videotaped
couples as they discussed conflicts in their relationships.
Although couples demonstrated a variety of
styles of conflict resolution, negative behaviors by the
partners were more strongly related to the couple’s
relationship satisfaction than were positive behaviors.
Positive behaviors such as politeness, compliments,
and gifts did help the relationship in minor ways. But
negative behaviors such as insults and criticism were
more decisive in determining whether the couple stayed
together. In fact, Gottman reached the startling conclusion
that a healthy relationship requires five times
more good interactions than bad interactions.
Why Do Bad Things Have
Greater Impact?
The broadest explanation for the negativity effect is
that it has survival value. To appreciate this idea, think
of the world as if it is a field filled with mushrooms
and poisonous toadstools. A mushroom lover must be
exceedingly careful when picking fungi for Sunday’s
dinner. The tastiest mushroom brings only a moment
of pleasure. In contrast, eating the wrong toadstool
can lead to an untimely and painful death. More generally,
people’s experiences with positive events (e.g.,
winning the lottery, sexual orgasm) may have less
impact on their survival than their experiences with
negative events (particularly those that risk bodily
harm). As a result, it is adaptive for people to place
greater weight on bad events than on good events.
Positive–Negative Asymmetry———685
A variety of specific psychological mechanisms
may be involved in producing this negativity effect,
including perceptual, cognitive, and affective factors.
Bad events tend to receive more attention and more
thorough processing than good events do. For example,
when people are shown an array of human faces
with different expressions, threatening faces are
detected more quickly and accurately. This tendency
to focus first on the negative may be relatively automatic.
In a series of studies based on the Stroop paradigm,
participants were shown personality trait
adjectives and asked to name the color of ink in which
the word was printed. Participants were slower to
name the color when the word concerned a negative
trait (e.g., sadistic) than a positive trait (e.g., honest).
It appears that traits with negative meaning are distracting
and slow down the color-naming process.
Moreover, the participants in these studies were not
deliberately focusing on the trait adjectives and, consequently,
were probably unaware of the biasing impact
of the negative words.
Perhaps the most elaborate theoretical explanations
for the negativity effect involve cognitive mechanisms.
For example, in seeking to explain the negativity
effect in impressions and attributions, Glenn D.
Reeder and Marilyn Brewer described the kinds of
behavior that people typically expect from people
with different types of traits. These trait-behavior relations
often take an asymmetrical form. Specifically,
people typically expect a person with a moral trait to
emit moral behavior (e.g., helping people in need and
giving generously to charity), but not immoral behavior
(e.g., hurting other people). In contrast, people
expect that a person with an immoral trait will emit
both immoral behavior and moral behavior. It follows
from these trait-behavior expectations, therefore, that
immoral behavior will be more informative (or diagnostic)
in the impression process because it must
have been performed by an immoral person. Yet moral
behavior is less informative because it could have
been performed by either a moral person or an immoral
person.
Finally, some research suggests that people’s evaluation
of positive and negative events are governed by
separate affective (or feeling) systems. For example, a
person may feel ambivalent toward a romantic partner
or family member, such that he or she feels both strong
positive feelings and strong negative feelings at the
same time. In general, however, it appears that the negative
system evokes stronger and more rapid responses.

686———Positive Psychology
Exceptions to the Rule That
Bad Is Stronger Than Good
Although bad seems to outweigh good when the two
are juxtaposed, people are generally optimistic about
the future, expect the best from other people, and hold
pleasant memories of the past. For most people, life is
generally a positive experience. Indeed, the preponderance
of positive events in everyday life may contribute
to the fact that negative events stand out (or are
“figural” to the “ground” of positive events). Given
the novelty of negative events, it stands to reason that
people would pay more attention to them. Thus,
people’s tendency to expect the best in life is not contradicted
by their tendency to react more strongly to
the worst in life.
Shelley Taylor described two complementary
psychological processes that can account both for
people’s optimism and their tendency toward the negativity
effect. Bad or threatening events create a problem
that requires a quick response. In contrast, good
or desirable events can be ignored with little penalty.
Consequently, negative events cause a quick and intense
mobilization to meet the threat. Once the threat is
over, a second psychological process of minimization
begins to take effect. This second process helps
people repair the trauma of the earlier process by
directing their attention toward the positive aspects of
experience.
Glenn D. Reeder
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Discounting, in
Attribution; Person Perception
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., &
Vohs, K. D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review
of General Psychology, 5, 323–370.
Peeters, G., & Czapinski, J. (1990). Positive-negative
asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction between
affective and informational negativity effects. In
W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European Review
of Social Psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 33–60). Chichester,
UK: Wiley.
Reeder, G. D., & Brewer, M. B. (1979). A schematic model
of dispositional attribution in interpersonal perception.
Psychological Review, 86, 61–79.
Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1989). Negativity and
extremity biases in impression formation: A review of
explanations. Psychological Bulletin, 105, 131–142.
Taylor, S. E. (1991). Asymmetrical effects of positive and
negative events: The mobilization-minimization
hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 67–85.
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Positive psychology is the study of the processes and
conditions that contribute to optimal functioning and
flourishing in human beings. It is the study of positive
experiences, positive traits, and positive communities.
Examples of topics in positive psychology include the
study of positive emotions, such as hope, curiosity,
and love; the study of individual strengths, such as
wisdom and courage; and the study of positive practices
in institutions, such as school policies that foster
students’ intrinsic motivation to learn. Although interest
in such topics has been around since the beginning
days of psychology, the term positive psychology is
quite recent and was coined as part of a concentrated
effort by psychologists who saw a need to highlight
these relatively neglected areas of research.
History and Background
When positive psychology is defined as the study of
the ways people flourish and the conditions that contribute
to their optimal functioning, it is clear that the
concept of positive psychology (if not the term) has
existed since the early 1900s and the days of Williams
James, who was interested in what he called healthy
mindedness. Other well-known psychologists interested
in topics now classified under the heading of
positive psychology included Gordon Allport, who
wrote about positive human characteristics, and
Abraham Maslow, who asserted that health was not
merely the absence of disease. Despite these early
seeds of interests in positive topics, in the latter half
of the 20th century, psychological research largely
focused on disorder, dysfunction, and damage, while
the study of the psychological aspects of what makes
life worth living receded into the background.
The recent surge in interest in positive psychology
was initially a response to clinical psychology’s focus
on mental illness and the lack of work on healthy
mental processes. However, the field of social psychology
also showed the same imbalance—focusing
the lion’s share of effort on human failures, biases,

and other ways situations and people can deter or
damage themselves and those around them. For example,
there is an abundance of studies on emotions such
as fear, shame, guilt, anger, disgust, and anxiety, but
only few on emotions such as joy, gratitude, and contentment.
In the rapidly growing field of close relationships,
a disproportionate number of studies have
examined how couples weather, or fail to weather, bad
relationship behavior such as criticisms and infidelities.
But psychologists know little about the how good
relationship behaviors such as compliments and displays
of affection affect both the individual and the
relationship itself. Similarly, there have been hundreds
of studies on how couples, families, and friends
engage in and manage conflict, but only a few on how
they have fun and laugh with one another. In the areas
of social cognition and intergroup behavior, social
psychologists have focused much of their attention on
topics such biases and prejudice, and much less of
their attention on accuracy and tolerance. Several
notable exceptions to the bias in social psychology
have included work on altruism, passionate love, and
optimism.
There are likely several reasons that many psychologists,
including social psychologists, focus on the
more negative or neutral aspects of human existence.
First, there is an urgency to try to relieve suffering.
Compassion steers psychologists toward helping those
who are the worse off before improving the lives of
those who are already doing fairly well. The history
of research funding in the United States reflects this
sentiment. After World War II, most funding agency
priorities focused on the description, diagnosis, and
treatment of mental illness and disorders. Moreover,
some may assume that studying the psychological contributions
to flourishing and optimal health cannot
and will not help those who are distressed. To the contrary,
research suggests just the opposite. For example,
Shelley Taylor and her colleagues have demonstrated
that optimistic beliefs and a sense of personal control
serve as a buffer against both mental and physical disease.
That is, people who harbor some degree of positive
illusions about their own fate and abilities are less
likely to actually become ill or distressed. And, if they
do become sick or upset, their prognosis is better than
is that of those who do not have these positive beliefs.
A second reason for psychology’s overemphasis
on human foibles and shortcomings lies in the fact
that psychologists are people too. And because they
are human, negative stimuli are often more salient,
powerful, and memorable than positive stimuli. For
Positive Psychology———687
example, social psychologists have shown that people
often see negative behavior as more diagnostic of a
person’s character than positive behavior is. People
tend to automatically pay more attention to negative
cues in their surroundings than to positive cues. And,
negative information is often more surprising and
memorable than positive information is. In a review of
the research bearing on this question, Roy Baumeister
and his colleagues concluded that because the evidence
so strongly suggests that bad is stronger than
good, it should be considered a universal principle in
psychology. It is not difficult to imagine how evolutionary
pressures would have favored human ancestors
who were somewhat more biased toward noticing
and reacting to negative and potentially dangerous
cues in their surroundings. Likewise, the pressure to
document results in researchers’ scientific laboratories
likely led social psychologists to focus first on the most
salient, powerful, and immediate stimuli. However,
one explanation for the fact negative stimuli are so
strong is because they are far less frequent than positive
stimuli. They violate expectations because one’s
default experience is positive or neutral. The obvious
implication is that, over time, positive processes may
exert more of an influence on human psychological
and physical functioning than negative processes do.
Recent evidence suggests that displaying and writing
about positive emotions early in life (e.g., young
adulthood) has a long-term effect on mental and physical
health such that those who seem to experience
more positive emotions live longer and more satisfying
lives.
The Positive Psychology Movement
The recent movement in positive psychology began in
the last few years of the 1990s, during Martin Seligman’s
tenure as president of the American Psychological
Association. The architects of this movement were
prominent psychologists who saw a need to highlight
the neglected areas of research on optimal human
functioning. And the time was right. Many new and
established researchers had begun to focus their scientific
attention on topics such as positive emotions,
morality, optimism, happiness, and well-being. In
January 2000, when Martin Seligman and Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi edited a special issue of the journal
American Psychologist entirely devoted to positive
psychology, the positive psychology movement was
solidified. In their introductory piece for this issue,
they claimed that psychology was not producing enough

688———Positive Psychology
insights into the conditions and processes that make
life worth living. In one metaphor often used by positive
psychology’s advocates, psychology was said to
have already learned how people get from negative
eight to zero but learned much less about how people
get from zero to positive eight. But was a movement
in positive psychology really needed? The answer is
straightforward. The science of psychology has made
great progress in understanding what goes wrong in
individuals, families, groups, and institutions, but
these advances have come at the expense of understanding
what is right with people.
In the short time since the phrase positive psychology
came into being, quite a lot has happened. Dozens
of conferences, summits, and workshops, both in
the United States and abroad, have brought together
researchers with diverse backgrounds and skills.
Several books, edited volumes, and handbooks have
been published. Numerous grants have facilitated the
research of young investigators, and courses in positive
psychology have appeared in the catalogues of many
universities and high schools. Research on positive
psychological topics has flourished, and many groundbreaking
empirical and theoretical strides have been
made. For example, in the field of emotion research,
positive emotions had been largely ignored in favor
of the study of negative emotions. In 1998, however,
Barbara Fredrickson published her broaden-and-build
theory of positive emotion in which she hypothesized
that the function of positive emotions was to widen the
array of thoughts of actions accessible to the individual
such that they approach their environment more
readily and openly, leading to increased resources.
Since then, several empirical studies have provided
empirical support for this theory and interest in positive
emotions more generally has grown.
Challenges to Positive Psychology
The positive psychology movement has had challenges
and criticisms. First, researchers who actually
had been studying optimal functioning and flourishing
all along may have wondered why a movement
was even launched. Second, others have made the
assumption that if there is a positive psychology, then
the rest of psychology must be negative psychology.
Moreover, if a positive psychology movement was
needed, then it was because what had been learned in
the field thus far was not useful. Actually, most of the
work in psychology is neutral, but there is certainly
much more known about negative than positive topics.
Moreover, because this previous work has been so
extraordinarily successful, the lack of attention to positive
topics has become glaring, despite the excellent
progress made by the handful of researchers who have
been doing positive psychology all along. Another
criticism of people involved in positive psychology is
that they fail to recognize the indisputable negative
sides of life, seeing the world instead through rosecolored
glasses. However, the goal of the positive
psychology movement was never to erase or supplant
work on pathology, suffering, and dysfunction. Rather,
the aim is to increase what we know about human
resilience, strength, and growth to complement and integrate
into the existing knowledge base.
Where does the relatively new field of positive psychology
go from here? Interestingly the aim of the positive
psychology movement is to make itself obsolete.
That is, the goal is to restore the empirical and theoretical
effort in psychology to a more balanced profile. To
achieve this goal, positive psychology must understand
what contributes to individuals’ strengths, the factors
that lead to resilience, the function of rewarding relationships
with others, and the role positive experiences
play in human life. Positive psychology needs to understand
how all these factors contribute to physical health,
psychological well-being, effective groups, and successful
institutions. Finally, positive psychology needs
to develop effective interventions to increase and sustain
these processes.
Shelly L. Gable
See also Bad Is Stronger Than Good; Broaden-and-Build
Theory of Positive Emotions; Happiness; Helping
Behavior; History of Social Psychology; Positive Affect
Further Readings
Aspinwall, L. G., & Staudinger, U. M. (Eds.). (2003).
A psychology of human strengths: Fundamental
questions and future directions for a positive psychology.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Gable, S. L., & Haidt, J. (2005). What (and why) is positive
psychology? Review of General Psychology, 9, 103–110.
Kahneman, D., Diener, E., & Schwarz, N. (Eds.). (1999).
Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology.
New York: Russell Sage.
Keyes, C. L. M., & Haidt, J. (Eds.). (2003). Flourishing:
Positive psychology and the life well lived. Washington,
DC: American Psychological Association.

Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive
psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist,
55, 5–14.
Snyder, C. R., & Lopez, S. J. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of
positive psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
POWER
Power affects almost all facets of social life, from the
food people eat to how long they live. Power concerns
are evident in most kinds of relationships, including
intimate bonds, parent–child relationships, sibling
relations, and relations between group members. This
brief entry examines what social psychology has learned
with respect to three questions concerning power:
What is power? Where does it come from? And how
does power influence behavior?
What Is Power?
Power is typically defined according to two attributes:
(1) the ability to control one’s own outcomes and those
of others and (2) the freedom to act. Power is related to
but not synonymous with status, authority, and dominance.
Status is the outcome of a social evaluation that
produces differences in respect and prominence, which
contribute to an individual’s power within a group. It is
possible to have power without status (e.g., the corrupt
politician) and status without relative power (e.g., a
religious leader in line at the Department of Motor
Vehicles). Authority is power that derives from institutionalized
roles or arrangements. Nonetheless, power
can exist in the absence of formal roles (e.g., within
informal groups). Dominance is behavior that has the
acquisition or demonstration of power as its goal. Yet,
power can be attained without performing acts of
dominance, as when leaders attain power through a
cooperative and fair-minded style.
Where Does Power Come From?
Starting as early as age 2, people arrange themselves
into social hierarchies. Within a day or so, young
adults within groups agree with one another about who
is powerful and who is not. Where does an individual’s
power come from? In part, individual differences
matter. Thus, extraverted people—that is, those
who are gregarious, energetic, and likely to express
enthusiasm—often attain elevated power within natural
social groups. People with superb social skills are
more likely to rise in social hierarchies. And even
appearance matters. People who are physically attractive,
males who are taller and have large muscle mass,
and even males with large, square jaws, often attain
higher positions in social hierarchies.
Power also derives from facets of the interpersonal
context. Authority-based roles within groups endow
some individuals with power. This is true in formal
hierarchies, such as the workplace, as well as in informal
hierarchies, such as family structures in cultures
that have historically given older siblings elevated
power vis-à-vis younger siblings. Power can derive
from knowledge-based expertise. Medical doctors
wield power over their patients because of their specialized
knowledge. Power can derive from coercion
based on the ability to use force and aggression.
Power can stem from the ability to provide rewards to
others. This helps explain why members of elevated
socioeconomic status and majority group status tend
to experience greater levels of power than do people
of lower socioeconomic status and minority group status.
Finally, power derives from the ability to serve as
a role model, which is known as reference power.
How Does Power
Influence Behavior?
Power———689
The English language is rich with aphorisms that concern
the effects of power: “Power corrupts.” “Money
[a source of power] is the root of all evil.” A recent
theoretical formulation known as the approachinhibition
theory of power has offered two broad
hypotheses concerning the effects of power.
Elevated power is defined by control, freedom, and
the lack of social constraint. As a consequence, elevated
power tends to make people less concerned with
the evaluations of others, more automatic in social
thought, and more disinhibited in action. In general,
power predisposes individuals to approach-related
behavior, moving toward satisfying goals. In contrast,
reduced power is associated with increased threat,
punishment, and social constraint. As a result, being
in low-power positions tends to make people more
vigilant and careful in social judgment and more
inhibited in social behavior.
A first hypothesis that derives from this approach/
inhibition theory of power is that high-power individuals
should be less systematic and careful in how they

690———Power
judge the social world. One result is that high-power
individuals should be more likely to thoughtlessly
stereotype others, rather than carefully relying on
individuating information. Several experimental studies
support this hypothesis: Participants given power in
experiments are indeed less likely to attend to individuating
information and more likely to rely on stereotypes
in judging others. Individuals who desire to see
their own group dominate other groups, known as the
social dominance orientation, are also more likely to
stereotype.
Predisposed to stereotype, high-power individuals
should tend to judge others’ attitudes, interests, and
needs in a less accurate fashion—a hypothesis that
has received support from numerous studies. A survey
study found that high-power professors were less
accurate in their judgments of the attitudes of lowpower
professors than were low-power professors in
judging the attitudes of their high-power colleagues.
In a similar vein, power differences may account for
the tendency of males to be slightly less accurate than
females in judging expressive behavior. Power may
even be at work in the striking finding that younger
siblings, who experience reduced power vis-à-vis older
siblings, outperform their older siblings on theory-ofmind
tasks, which assess the ability to construe correctly
the intentions and beliefs of others.
Power even seems to prompt less careful thought
in individuals who experience a tremendous incentive
to demonstrate sophisticated reasoning—Supreme
Court justices. A study compared the decisions of
U.S. Supreme Court justices when they wrote opinions
endorsing the positions of coalitions of different
sizes. In some cases, justices wrote on behalf of a
minority, typically equated with low power; in other
cases, justices wrote on behalf of the victorious majority.
Justices writing from positions of power crafted
less complex arguments in their opinions than did
those writing from low-power positions.
The theory’s second hypothesis is that power
should make disinhibited (less constrained) social
behavior more likely. Support for this hypothesis is
found in numerous studies. Individuals given power
experimentally are more likely to touch others and to
approach them closely physically, to feel attraction to
a random stranger, to turn off an annoying fan in the
room where the experiment is being conducted, and to
flirt in overly direct ways. In contrast, low-power individuals
show inhibition of a wide variety of behaviors.
Individuals with little power often constrict their posture,
inhibit their speech and facial expressions, and
clam up and withdraw in group interactions.
Perhaps more unsettling is the wealth of evidence
showing that elevated power makes antisocial communication
more likely. For example, high-power individuals
are more likely to violate politeness-related
communication norms: They are more likely to talk
more, to interrupt more, and to speak out of turn more.
They are also more likely to behave rudely at work.
They are more likely to tease friends and colleagues
in hostile, humiliating fashion. Low-power individuals,
in contrast, generally speak politely, making requests
indirectly or by asking vague questions, whereas highpower
individuals speak forcefully and directly, asking
pointed questions and making commands. Power
even influences patterns of gaze. A clear indicator of
power is the following pattern of gaze: High-power
individuals look at listeners when speaking and are
looked at when speaking, whereas low-power individuals
look away when speaking but look at others when
listening.
Power disinhibits more harmful forms of aggression
as well, leading to violent behavior against lowpower
individuals. For example, power asymmetries
predict the increased likelihood of sexual harassment.
Across cultures and historical periods, the prevalence
of rape rises with the cultural acceptance of
male dominance and the subordination of females.
Furthermore, the incidence of hate crimes against disliked
minority groups (that is, non-Whites) was highest
when the proportion of demographic majority
members (that is, Whites) in a particular neighborhood
was largest relative to the proportion of minority
members.
Research suggests that we should be careful about
who gains power, for power seems to allow individuals
to express their true inclinations, both good and bad. If
the person is inclined toward malevolent or competitive
behavior, power will only make him or her more
so. If, on the other hand, the person is more benevolent
or good natured, power will amplify the expression
of those tendencies. In a study that nicely illustrates
this claim, Serena Chen and colleagues identified
and selected participants who were either more selfinterested
and exchange-oriented, or more compassionate
and communal-oriented. Each participant was
then randomly assigned to a high-power or low-power
position in a clever, subtle manner: High-power

individuals were seated in a snazzy leather professorial
chair during the experiment; low-power individuals
were seated in a plain chair typical of psychology
experiments. Participants were then asked to volunteer
to complete a packet of questionnaires with the help of
another participant, who was late. Consistent with the
idea that power amplifies the expression of preexisting
tendencies, the communal-oriented participants with
high power took on the lion’s share of filling out the
questionnaires. In contrast, the exchange-oriented participants
with high power acted in more self-serving
fashion, leaving more of the task for the other participant.
The effects of power, then, depend quite dramatically
on who is in power.
Dacher Keltner
Carrie Langner
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Authoritarian
Personality; Extraversion; Group Dynamics; Leadership;
Nonverbal Cues and Communication; Power Motive;
Roles and Role Theory; Self-Regulation; Social
Dominance Orientation; Social Relations Model
Further Readings
Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003).
Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review,
110, 265–284.
POWER MOTIVE
The key defining element of the power motive is one
person having an impact on the behavior or emotions
of another, or being concerned about prestige and
reputation. This basic imagery is often elaborated with
anticipations, actions designed to have impact, prestige,
pleasure at reaching the goal, and so forth. The
measure is implicit, tapping a motivation system based
on emotional experience rather than conscious verbal
processing, which is affected by language, defenses,
and rationalizations. Thus, the content analysis measure
of the power motive is usually uncorrelated with
direct questionnaire measures—that is, what people
believe or consciously report about their need for power.
A power motive should be distinguished from other
power-related psychological concepts. For example,
power motive is not related to power styles or traits
(such as dominance or surgency), beliefs about power
(such as authoritarianism or Machiavellianism), the
sense of having power (internal control of reinforcements),
occupying power positions, or having the skills
to get or use power.
History
Power is a concept fundamental to human social life.
Hence, the idea that people have a power drive or
power motive has a long history in philosophy and
psychology. The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles
wrote of “strife” as a master motive opposed to “love.”
The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche introduced the term will to power, which
psychologist Alfred Adler later adapted as the striving
for superiority. In his later work, Sigmund Freud postulated
an aggressive or destructive instinct, whereas
Henry Murray included a need for dominance in his
catalog of human motives.
Measurement
In modern psychology, the power motive (also labeled
“n Power”) is measured through content analysis
of imaginative verbal material—typically, stories that
people tell or write in response to vague or ambiguous
pictures on the Thematic Apperception Test. The power
motive scoring system was developed experimentally,
by comparing the stories of people whose power concerns
had been aroused with the stories of a control
group that had no arousal experience. It was later
adapted to score any kind of imaginative verbal or
written material, such as fiction, political speeches,
and interviews.
Characteristics
Power Motive———691
People express their need for power in a variety of
different ways, often depending on other moderating
variables such as social class, responsibility, or extraversion.
They are drawn to careers involving direct
and legitimate interpersonal power, where they can
direct other people’s behavior through positive and
negative sanctions, within a legitimate institutional
structure: for example, business executive, teacher,
psychologist or mental health worker, journalist, and
the clergy. They also are active members and officers
in organizations.

692———Preference Reversals
Power-motivated people try to become visible and
well-known. They take extreme risks and use prestige
(or self-display). They are good at building alliances,
especially with lower-status people who aren’t wellknown,
who have nothing to lose and so become a
loyal base of support. In small groups, people high in
power motivation tend to define the situation, encourage
others to participate, and influence others; however,
they are not especially well-liked, and they do
not work particularly hard or offer the best ideas. As
leaders, they are able to create high morale among
subordinates. Political and organizational leaders high
in n Power are often viewed by their associates as
charismatic and judged by historians as great. In times
of social stress, therefore, voters turn to them.
Research
Several studies suggest a negative side to the power
motive, supporting Lord Acton’s famous comment,
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.” In experimental studies, small-group
leader-managers high in power motivation are vulnerable
to flattery and ingratiation. Although more
cohesive and higher in morale, their groups are less
effective in gathering and using information, and pay
less attention to moral concerns. In negotiation or
bargaining, power-motivated people tend to break
agreements to demand better terms. If they lack a
sense of responsibility, they engage in a variety of
“profligate impulsive” behaviors: verbal and physical
aggression, excessive drinking and multiple drug use,
gambling, and exploitative sex. Finally, they are vulnerable
to boredom, sometimes finding it difficult to
take pleasure in their lives.
Most of these actions associated with power
motivation are true for women as well as for men.
However, power-motivated men may be more likely to
be abusive and oppressive to their partners.
Recent research suggests that the need for power
is related to certain physiological processes, mechanisms,
and hormones. Power-motivated people show
greater sympathetic nervous system arousal in
response to stress and threat. This leads, in turn, to
lower immune system efficiency and more infectious
diseases. Power motivation is also related to higher
blood pressure and cardiovascular problems.
High levels of power motivation are associated
with aggression, both among individuals and among
political leaders, governing elites, and societies, especially
in times of crisis. International crises in which
both sides express high levels of power motivation are
likely to escalate to war, whereas crises with lower
levels are more likely to be resolved peacefully.
Not much research has been done on the developmental
origins of the power motive. Many theorists
(for example, Adler and political scientists Harold
Lasswell and Alexander George) believe that power
strivings originate from an early sense of weakness or
lacking power. Some longitudinal research suggests,
however, that n Power is fostered by early parental permissiveness
rather than restriction, especially permissiveness
about the expression of sex and aggression.
Are there good and bad kinds of the need for
power? Can power motivation be tamed or tempered
by some other psychological variables into prosocial
rather than antisocial behavior? Different research
studies have suggested that affiliation motivation, maturity,
sense of responsibility, self-control, and inhibition
can—sometimes but not always—play such a role.
David G. Winter
See also Aggression; Power; Thematic Apperception Test
Further Readings
De Hoogh, A. H. B., Den Hartog, D. N., Koopman, P. L.,
Thierry, H., Van den Berg, P. T., Van der Weide, J. G.,
et al. (2005). Leader motives, charismatic leadership, and
subordinates’ work attitude in the profit and voluntary
sector. Leadership Quarterly, 16, 17–38.
McClelland, D. C. (1975). Power: The inner experience.
New York: Irvington.
Winter, D. G. (1973). The power motive. New York: Free
Press.
Winter, D. G. (1993). Power, affiliation and war: Three tests
of a motivational model. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 65, 532–545.
Zurbriggen, E. L. (2000). Social motives and cognitive
power-sex associations: Predictors of aggressive sexual
behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
78, 559–581.
PREFERENCE REVERSALS
Definition
Preference reversals refer to the observation that there
are systematic changes in people’s preference order
between options. Preference order refers to an abstract

elation between two options. It is assumed that when
an individual is presented with options A and B, he or
she either prefers A to B or prefers B to A (or is indifferent
between A and B). Systematic changes refer to
the observation that people exhibit different or even
reverse preferences for the same options in normatively
equivalent evaluation conditions (i.e., conditions
that differ at first sight but in which the options
that people are presented with have essentially
remained the same).
History and Background
The preference reversal phenomenon was first
observed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s by
Sarah Lichtenstein and Paul Slovic in a gambling context.
They observed that if people are asked to choose
between a relatively safe bet with a low payoff and a
relatively risky bet with a high payoff, and if they are
asked to indicate their selling prices if they were to
sell these very lotteries, people’s choice ordering is
systematically different from their price ordering.
More specifically, people tend to state a preference for
the safer bet but tend to state a higher selling price for
the riskier one. Very soon, this finding was replicated
several times.
Although the theoretical concept of preferences as
an abstract relation between two options seems very
clear and natural, this abstract relation is a psychological
construct that must be operationalized or measured
by some observable behavior. Researchers have
introduced multiple elicitation methods or methods
that enabled them to observe decision makers’ preferences.
Besides asking individuals to choose among
different options or to indicate how much they are
willing to accept to forego or sell an option (i.e., willingness
to accept), people have been asked to indicate
how much they are willing to pay to obtain an option
(i.e., willingness to pay), to state a price that is considered
to be equivalent to an option (i.e., a certainty
equivalent), or to give the probability of winning an
option that is considered equivalent to another option
(i.e., a probability equivalent). Researchers then use
this information to rank order people’s preferences.
Consistently, the rank order of preferences produced
by one measurement method did not correspond with
the rank order produced by a second measurement
method. In other words, systematic preference reversals
were found repeatedly.
In addition, the preference reversal phenomenon has
not stopped at lotteries. Rather than being a peculiar
Preference Reversals———693
characteristic of a choice between bets, it has been
found to be an example of a general pattern. Research
has also shown preference reversals when options
offering a certain but delayed outcome are used. When
faced with a choice between delayed payments, decision
makers often select the short-term option but
assign a higher certainty equivalent to the long-term
option. Different descriptions of the same problem
also cause individuals to exhibit different preferences.
Nowadays, preference reversals are firmly established
as robust phenomena. Contrary to what researchers
assumed originally, preferences do depend on the method
of elicitation (i.e., there is no procedure invariance)
and they do depend on how the options are described
(i.e., there is no description invariance). Rather than
trying to eliminate the preference reversal phenomenon
as they tend to have done in the past, researchers
are now trying to explain it.
Context and Importance
The study of preference reversals has led to a conception
of preferences that differs from the classical
assumption that decision makers have a stable preference
order for all options under consideration and
consistently select the option highest in that order. An
ever-growing body of evidence suggests that the socalled
assumption of context-free preferences is not
tenable. Instead, preferences appear to be contextspecific.
The preference reversal phenomenon has
contributed to knowledge that decision making is a
constructive process. Preferences are often constructed
in the elicitation process, rather than only
being revealed. This new conception of preferences
particularly applies to judgments and choices among
options that are important, complex, and perhaps unfamiliar
or novel, such as careers and cars for instance.
It has been shown empirically that people display
more preference reversals for options that they are
unfamiliar with. Especially in these circumstances,
preferences are not simply read off some master list
but are constructed on the spot by an adaptive decision
maker.
Different construction can easily lead to different
choices. One important construction strategy that
has received a lot of empirical attention is so-called
anchoring and adjustment, meaning that when decision
makers state a price for a given option, they “anchor”
on the highest possible outcome. Subsequently, decision
makers adjust downward from this anchor toward
the true value. If these adjustments are insufficient,

694———Prejudice
then preference reversals can occur. Another important
construction strategy is to focus on the most important
attribute in the decision process and to select the alternative
that is superior on it. This prominent attribute
weighs more heavily in choice than in other elicitation
procedures.
Implications
One area of research in which the preference reversal
phenomenon might be of particular importance is the
study of consumer behavior, and, more specifically,
consumer choice making. Consumers, like other
decision makers, will have to construct product preferences
right on the spot. This means that product
preferences might reverse depending on numerous
contextual factors such as product descriptions and
time pressure.
Sabrina Bruyneel
See also Behavioral Economics; Consumer Behavior;
Decision Making; Prospect Theory
Further Readings
Bettman, J. R., Luce, M. F., & Payne, J. W. (1998).
Constructive consumer choice processes. Journal
of Consumer Research, 25, 187–217.
Lichtenstein, S., & Slovic, P. (1973). Response-induced
reversals of preference in gambling—Extended replication
in Las Vegas. Journal of Experimental Psychology,
101, 16–20.
PREJUDICE
Definition
Prejudice is defined as an attitude toward people
based on their membership in a group (e.g., their
racial group, gender, nationality, even the college they
attend). Critical to prejudice is an inflexibility in the
reaction to the target person whereby the responses to
the target are not based on the target’s behaviors or
characteristics (good or bad) but instead are based on
the target’s membership in a group. Prejudice is most
often negative, although it is also possible to be positively
prejudiced. Prejudice involves three key components:
an emotional response to members of the
group; beliefs about the abilities, behaviors, and characteristics
of group members; and behaviors directed
at group members. For example, imagine that a person
was negatively prejudiced against people from
country X. That person may feel angry, anxious, or
disgusted when he or she interacts with people from
X. In addition, the person may believe that people
from country X are stupid, lazy, or untrustworthy. The
person may also try to keep people from country X
from visiting his or her own country. A person who is
prejudiced toward a group may not engage in all three
types of responses. For example, it is possible to have
prejudiced thoughts and feelings but never engage in
prejudiced behavior.
Research Into Prejudice
Understanding prejudice and unraveling its causes,
consequences, and potential cures has been of great
interest to social psychologists for more than 50 years.
There continues to be great debate among psychologists
about the origin or cause of prejudice. Some
believe that prejudice is the result of people’s desire
to feel better about the groups to which they belong
(e.g., “We are better than they are!”) and, thereby, better
about themselves. Others believe prejudice comes
from competition between groups for scarce resources
(e.g., food, jobs). Still others argue that prejudice is
an innate human response that developed to protect
humans from dangerous strangers. The list of potential
causes goes on, but like most social psychological
phenomena, there is likely to be more than one
correct answer and many factors likely contribute to
prejudice.
Prejudiced responses toward others can range from
making unfair judgments and harboring unkind feelings
to brutal attacks and, at its most extreme, genocide.
Prejudice can be overt and unmistakable, but it
can also be subtle and difficult to detect. Prejudice
takes many forms, and the nature of prejudice can
change over time. For example, many social psychologists
argue that in response to social and legal pressure,
most White Americans have learned to conceal
overt expressions of prejudice toward Black people
and instead express prejudice in indirect and subtle
ways. Thus, social psychologists argue that prejudice
has gone underground and, therefore, may be particularly
pernicious and difficult to eradicate.
The ultimate goal of those who study prejudice
is to find ways to promote intergroup harmony and

encourage people to treat others based on individual
characteristics and not group membership. Social psychologists
have uncovered some potential routes to
prejudice reduction. For example, forming friendships
with people from another social group is strongly
related to positive attitudes toward that group. Also,
getting people to reframe their views of “us” and “them”
into “we” can decrease prejudice. Although progress has
been made, much remains to be understood about the
elimination of prejudice.
E. Ashby Plant
See also Intergroup Emotions; Intergroup Relations; Racism;
Sexism; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
PREJUDICE REDUCTION
Definition
Prejudice reduction refers to a decrease in (most often)
negative attitudes or evaluations that individuals hold
in relation to other people. These negative attitudes are
based on the groups to which people belong, such as
a White person disliking someone because he or she
is a Black person. Although social psychologists have
linked the idea of prejudice reduction most directly
with changing negative attitudes, this term is also used
to refer to decreasing stereotypic beliefs (such as the
belief that all gay men are promiscuous), outward
expressions of bias, or negative behaviors.
Background and History
Prejudice reduction was first studied only when prejudice
was seen as a social problem in the United
States. Until the 1920s, there was widespread belief
among nonscientists and scientists alike in the racial
superiority of Whites. Indeed, prejudice was considered
perfectly defensible and rationale. Between the
1920s and 1940s, scientists increasingly viewed prejudice
as problematic and certain aspects of World War II
(e.g., anti-Semitism and genocide) underscored this.
Prejudice Reduction———695
Prejudice clearly was a social problem and strategies
for curbing it needed to be understood.
In 1954, Gordon Allport published his book The
Nature of Prejudice, which provided the first comprehensive
analysis of prejudice and laid the foundation
for decades of subsequent research. Allport’s writing
provides many roots of modern work, three of which
are especially important. First, Allport discussed the
natural human tendency to categorize to simplify the
world, noting that this includes categorizing people
into groups. Many mental tricks allow people to place
others into categories and, once categorization occurs,
many other processes naturally occur to make categories
resistant to change. For example, a boy who
tugs on a girl’s pigtails may be viewed as an aggressive
Black boy, whereas the same behavior by a White
boy may be interpreted as playful. Therefore, reducing
prejudice often involves getting people to alter
the nature of the categories in their minds so they can
perceive people differently.
A second root of modern work on prejudice reduction
is Allport’s discussion of the inner conflict that
people can experience in relation to their prejudices and
the motivation that this conflict provides for prejudice
reduction. Here Allport referred to Gunnar Myrdal,
who in 1944 discussed the “American dilemma.” According
to Myrdal, many Americans are prone to a moral
conflict between the ideas of equality on which the
nation was founded and the racist traditions of prejudice
and discrimination. The idea that conflict between
values and prejudiced tendencies can spur people to
reduce their prejudice later became a cornerstone of
various strategies for reducing prejudice.
A third root found in Allport’s work is his intergroup-contact
hypothesis. The idea that contact between
people of different backgrounds and races can help
people realize that some of their beliefs are incorrect
or that they do like people who are different from
themselves is straightforward. However, making contact
between groups work to reduce prejudice is more
complicated. Allport correctly noted this and described
some of the conditions that must be met for contact to
reduce prejudice successfully.
At different points in time, different prejudice
reduction strategies have become more or less important
in the field of social psychology. These changes
often can be traced to the combination of historical
or societal changes and with popular methods within
the field. For example, starting in the 1980s, blatant
prejudice became less accepted and prevalent in the

696———Prejudice Reduction
United States while subtle biases and prejudices
remained quite common. Also, social psychologists
interested in prejudice were adopting many techniques
from cognitive psychology to study the mind’s
use of social stereotypes. The result was the discovery
that prejudiced responses sometimes occur not
because people consciously hold prejudiced beliefs
and attitudes but, rather, because learned prejudices
and stereotypes can be activated and used without
people even being aware that this is happening.
Patricia Devine formally advanced and tested this
argument. A new view of prejudice reduction emerged
from this line of thinking that involved learning to
control and change biases resulting from nonconscious
processes.
Norms
Society’s norms or expectations of what is acceptable
behavior greatly influence when people will try to
reduce their prejudice and why they do so. Not all bias
is looked upon in the same way. For instance, blatant
racial prejudice is not considered politically correct
nowadays; however, other prejudices are considered
acceptable (such as not wanting a convicted sex
offender to babysit a child). As such, the social norms
of a particular time or geographic location in part dictate
what people deem as important prejudices to curb.
If a prejudice is recognized as problematic and labeled
as inappropriate in society, people are likely to act
accordingly and not express bias to avoid violating
important social norms. For example, if an individual
is surrounded by people who value equality among
men and women, this person is likely to reduce his
or her prejudice by also endorsing those values and
acting in ways that are not biased.
Values
Early research by Milton Rokeach highlighted that
people can be motivated to reduce their prejudice when
they are made aware of the conflict between the values
they hold and their actions. In his classic research, he
suggested that people were potentially more concerned
about their own personal freedom than equality for
others. Awareness of this conflict between people’s
values and actions prompted them to change their
behavior and participate in activities promoting equality.
For example, someone may embrace cultural
values like racial equality but still have a preference for
hiring a White applicant over a Black applicant. When
people become aware of this hypocrisy, it can make
them feel dissatisfied with themselves and motivate
them to act in line with their values and reduce their
prejudice. Months after these types of experiences,
people can continue to show positive changes consistent
with equality.
Contact
The idea that intergroup contact may reduce prejudice
was a driving force behind the introduction of laws that
required desegregation of, for example, schools. However,
contact between members of different groups can
increase tension and reinforce prejudice if certain conditions
are not met. Decades of research have revealed
that for contact to reduce prejudice, people in contact
should have equal status (e.g., one is not designated as
the person in charge), they should be working together
on common goals (e.g., a school project) rather than
competing, institutional support should be present
(such as when school officials encourage the contact),
and the contact should be intimate rather than casual so
that friendships can develop. Although all of these conditions
are not always necessary, the more that are met
the greater the potential is for prejudice reduction. An
excellent example of a strategy that meets these conditions
is Elliot Aronson’s jigsaw classroom technique,
where each student working in a group is provided
with a segment of important information from a lesson
to teach the others.
Researchers have also studied how contact can lead
people to view others who are different from themselves
in new ways, such as leading people to view
themselves as members of one large, superordinate
group rather than as members of smaller separate
groups. For example, people of different races in the
United States could focus on their common American
identity.
Individual Efforts
Even if people do not hold prejudices of which they
are consciously aware, they may be in the habit of
responding in biased ways toward members of certain
groups. These more automatic prejudices can be
combated with individual efforts to change what feelings
and thoughts immediately come to mind. One

approach involves spending time thinking about
people who are very different than a stereotype of a
group (such as imagining a strong and independent
woman). Another approach involves intensive training
to think “no” whenever members of stereotypes groups
are paired with stereotypes, such as when a picture of
a Black person is presented along with the word lazy.
Finally, research shows that people who are aware of
their automatic prejudices and who feel bad about
them can learn to associate certain stimuli with prejudiced
responses they have had in the past and their
negative feelings about having had such responses.
When these stimuli are present in a subsequent situation,
they can trigger people to slow down and respond
more carefully so that they can reduce their prejudiced
responses. As these examples of individual effort
strategies illustrate, people must be highly motivated
and vigilant in their attempts to control and change
engrained prejudices.
Margo J. Monteith
Aimee Y. Mark
See also Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Intergroup Relations;
Jigsaw Classroom; Prejudice; Racism; Sexism;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Devine, P. G., & Monteith, M. J. (1999). Automaticity and
control in stereotyping. In S. Chaiken & Y. Trope (Eds.),
Dual process theories in social psychology (pp. 339–360).
New York: Guilford Press.
Dovidio, J. F., Glick, P., & Rudman, L. A. (Eds.). (2005). On
the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Gaertner S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2000). Reducing intergroup
bias: The common ingroup identity model. Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
PRIMACY EFFECT, ATTRIBUTION
Definition
The primacy effect concerns how one’s impressions of
others are formed. Thus, it relates to the field of psychology
known as person perception, which studies
how people form impressions of others. The word
Primacy Effect, Attribution———697
primacy itself is generally defined in the dictionary as
the state of being first in order or importance. In a similar
manner, according to the primacy principle, when
generating impressions of others, what we think and
feel about a person is strongly influenced by our very
first impressions of that person. Therefore, when one is
making judgments of others, first impressions are
more important than later impressions. It seems that
first impressions tend to color or bias later judgments
of a person. They do this in a way that is consistent
with those initial assessments. Thus what someone
first sees, hears, or reads about a person tends to serve
as a primary reference point or anchor for later judgments,
so that later judgments are overly influenced
by a person’s initial judgment. In essence, first impressions
count.
Background and History
Since the early 20th century, psychologists have been
concerned with how the impressions we make of others
are formed. Early on, psychologists tried to see if
there were any stable patterns regarding how people
formed these impressions. However, the primacy principal
was not established by scientific study until the
1940s. Solomon Asch is credited with discovering
the primacy principal. His early experiments were
quite simple: People were read a list of words that one
might use to describe a person. Sometimes these lists
were long, sometimes they were short, and most importantly,
where each word appeared the list appeared
was varied. Sometimes a certain word appeared in the
beginning, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at
the end. After they heard a particular list, participants
in the study were then asked to give their impressions
of what a person who fit the description that they had
just heard might be like. What Asch’s early studies
found was that the order in which people heard the
words mattered greatly. It seemed that people used
these lists to form an overall unified impression of a
person, and the words that people heard first set the
tone for everything else a person heard. So, a list of
words like intelligent, industrious, impulsive, and critical
tended to result in positive ratings when compared
with the same list in reverse order, that is, critical,
impulsive, industrious, and intelligent. In effect, the
early words dominated the impression that people
formed.

698———Primacy Effect, Memory
Summary of Types, Amount,
and Quality of Evidence
Asch’s early work inspired a large number of studies
that supported the primacy effect in person perception.
In addition to overall impressions, it was also
discovered that the primacy effect also affects specific
judgments about others. These judgments include how
generally intelligent and successful we perceive others
to be and how well we expect them to perform in
the future. Assuming that the number of successes and
failures are equal, one might think that whether a person
experiences success early or late shouldn’t matter
when we judge them, but it does. Perceptions of intelligence
along with future expectations of success
depend on the pattern of a person’s successes and failures.
When comparing people who have early success
and then get worse to those who start poorly and then
get better, or have a mixed pattern of success and failure,
people rate those with the early success higher.
Thus, it is better to start strong and finish weak, than
to start weak and finish strong or have a random
pattern of successes and failures. Everything else
being equal, those who have early successes and then
descend in performance are judged to be both smarter
and more likely to perform better than others.
Physical attractiveness can be part of the primacy
effect. When rating others, it has been shown that
physically attractive people tend to receive generally
high ratings regardless of how they perform on a
series of tasks. Those who were physically unattractive,
however, tended to be rated lower even when
their performance was the same as that of the attractive
people. Consistent with the primacy effect, this
only occurred if people knew what the person looked
like before they judged his or her performance.
However, if a person’s performance was judged without
knowing how he or she looked, finding out how
the person looked later didn’t change the ratings.
Being good looking is a generally positive attribute,
but it only seems to affect judgments if people know
about it before initial judgments are made. Like the
word studies discussed earlier, if a judgment of attractiveness
is the first thing in a chain of judgments,
it tends to color subsequent judgments in a manner
consistent with the general goodness that people associate
with physical attractiveness.
Importance of Topic
Besides beginning a whole new field of inquiry in psychology,
the primacy effect has broader implications.
The effect is important because the first thing that we
do when we are making a judgment of another person
is to categorize him or her, and because of the primacy
effect, the category that we first put people into tends
to influence our subsequent judgments about that person.
When we encounter people, the process of categorization
starts with the most noticeable categories
of that person such as sex, race, social class, or age.
We then use this category to make initial assumptions
about the person, and because these initial assumptions
affect our later judgments, they are the most
important assumptions one makes.
Implications
Because of the primacy effect, the judgments others
make about a person may not be accurate, and this
inaccuracy is likely to persist over time. People may
be judged by who they first appear to be, rather than
by who they actually are. If first judgments are positive,
this could give someone an undeserved advantage;
if negative, it could put someone at an unfair
disadvantage.
Gregg Gold
See also Attributions; Person Perception; Primacy Effect,
Memory; Recency Effect
Further Readings
Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology,
1, 1956–1972.
Jones, E. E. (1968). Pattern of performance and ability
attribution: An unexpected primacy effect. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 10, 317–340.
PRIMACY EFFECT, MEMORY
Definition
The primacy effect denotes the phenomenon that after
encountering a long list of items, one will more likely
be able to recall the first few items from that list than
items than from later parts of the list. In a typical
study investigating the primacy effect, participants
are sequentially presented with a list of words, each
being presented for a fixed amount of time. After the
words have been presented, participants are asked to

write down all the words from the list that they recall.
A primacy effect is found when participants correctly
recall words from the first few positions in a list more
often than they recall words from later list positions.
History and Importance
The primacy effect and its counterpart, the recency
effect, which describes a recall advantage for the last
few items of a list compared with items in the middle,
combine to form the U-shaped serial position curve
of list recall. This phenomenon was interpreted as evidence
for two different memory systems—a longterm
store that is the basis for the primacy effect, and
a short-term store that is responsible for the recency
effect. This distinction has influenced many theories
of human memory.
Evidence
The primacy effect has been explained by a rehearsal
advantage for words presented early in the list: They
are rehearsed more often than subsequent words. This
was found in an early study, in which participants
were asked to overtly rehearse the words they were to
memorize. Results showed that the first few words
were rehearsed more often than were words presented
later in the list. The more frequent rehearsal of an item
leads to a stronger long-term memory for that item,
and thus a better chance to recall that item, compared
with less frequently rehearsed items.
Further evidence for the rehearsal-based explanation
of the primacy effect comes from studies that
modify participants’ rehearsal. For example, one study
presented words at a faster rate, thus reducing participants’
opportunity to rehearse. Under those conditions,
the magnitude of the primacy effect is reduced.
Additional evidence showing that rehearsal is the
basis for the primacy effect comes from studies that
modified participants’ rehearsal strategies. When participants
were asked to rehearse only the item that is
currently presented, no primacy effect was found.
The primacy effect is a general phenomenon that
occurs beyond laboratory settings where participants
are explicitly asked to memorize a list of items. A primacy
effect has also been found in studies in which
participants were unaware of a subsequent memory
test. A primacy effect has also been shown in the domain
of television commercials: Participants viewing a
television program that was interrupted by blocks of
commercials showed better memory for the first three
commercials than for commercials broadcast later in
the block.
Christoph Stahl
See also Memory; Primacy Effect, Attribution; Recency
Effect
Further Readings
Glanzer, M., & Cunitz, A. R. (1966). Two storage
mechanisms in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning &
Verbal Behavior, 5, 351–360.
PRIMING
Definition
Priming is the process by which perception (or experience)
of an item (or person or event) leads to an
increase in its accessibility and the accessibility of
related material and behaviors. Priming is a phenomenon
that is enormously influential in people’s
everyday lives, yet people are typically unaware of its
operation and impact. For example, if you pass a telephone
and it reminds you to call your mother, priming
is at work. If middle-aged women make you feel nervous
after watching Desperate Housewives, once
again priming can be blamed. Priming is particularly
important in social psychology because of the inherent
complexity of social information processing—
when many interpretations and behavioral options are
available, the accessibility determined by priming can
constrain perception, cognition, and action.
How Does Priming Work?
Priming———699
Psychologists’ understanding of priming is based on
the idea that information is stored in units (schemas)
in long-term memory, whose activation levels can
be increased or decreased. When the activation of a
schema is increased, it becomes more accessible—
that is, more likely to enter consciousness or direct
behavior. Priming research has capitalized on the
connectionist idea that when schemas are frequently
activated together, connections form between them,
thereby creating networks in the mind. Activation can
spread through these networks such that following
activation of one schema, the activation of associated
schemas in the network is also increased. This is a

700———Priming
very useful tool because it helps prepare the mind for
what it is likely to encounter next, or may have to
think about very soon. When a cat is perceived, for
instance, the “cat” schema will be activated, and activation
will spread to cat-related concepts such as
“cat’s meow” and “cat’s scratch.” This activation
means that potentially important information is then
more accessible, enabling people to behave toward
the cat in an appropriate manner.
Empirically, this priming process would not be
investigated by watching a perceiver’s behavior toward
the cat, but by testing the accessibility of the relevant
schema using techniques such as word recognition
or lexical decision tasks. For example, research has
shown that reading the word bread will prime associated
items such as butter, but not unrelated items such
as bikini. Experiments of this kind confirm that priming
does indeed increase the activation of associated
schemas.
Repetition Priming
Types of Priming
At its simplest level, priming can apply to a single
word: Reading a word once will increase the speed at
which that same word will subsequently be recognized.
This effect is known as repetition priming and
occurs because once a schema has been activated, it
takes less energy to reactivate the construct on a subsequent
occasion. Furthermore, if a schema is frequently
activated, it can become hyperaccessible,
and the rate at which it decreases its activation is
reduced. This pattern is optimal because it keeps
schemas that are encountered frequently activated
for longer, so that they are more easily accessible if
required again.
Associative Priming
Priming is known as associative when it increases
the activation of associated knowledge, such as “bacon”
priming “eggs.” This effect can be subcategorized
according to the type of association through which
the activation has spread, such as through shared perceptual
components, phonological features, or semantic
relations. An example of perceptual priming would
be a facilitated response to the word lost following
presentation of the word most. These two words are
orthographically similar, although they do not sound
the same or have similar meanings. Phonological
priming might occur between the words foul and
trowel because they rhyme even though they do not
share perceptual or semantic qualities. Priming between
words that belong to the same semantic category is
semantic priming, such as between baby and diaper or
leaf and flower.
Semantic priming is the type most often studied
in social psychology because it allows researchers to
investigate semantic links between schemas. For
example, stereotyping research has shown that people
respond more quickly to words such as warm and caring
after being shown stereotypic pictures of women
than men. This suggests that people have developed
associations between women and these traits, associations
that are stored in semantic memory.
An important subtype of semantic priming is affective
priming—the increase in activation of words of
the same valence (i.e., positive or negative) as the
prime. This phenomenon is elicited primarily when
priming stimuli are presented for very short periods,
so for example, if a smiling man is presented for a
short duration, positive traits will be primed more than
with masculine traits. The existence of affective priming
suggests that valence is elicited from stimuli
before priming spreads through more complex semantic
associations, indicating the fundamental importance
of this quality.
Negative Priming
The effects described earlier all concern facilitation
effects: increased activation of concepts related to a
prime. However, in some cases priming can actually
decrease the activation of particular schema, spreading
inhibition rather than activation. This effect may
arise from the way the brain deals with schema that
are competing for attention. For example, making coffee
might prime the milk and sugar schemas, but it is
not physically practical for both to appear simultaneously
in behavior. The solution is for whichever concept
is primary (most highly activated) to decrease
or laterally inhibit the activation of the competing
schema. Stereotyping research has provided examples
of this effect, demonstrating negative priming when
a target person belongs to two stereotypic categories
containing competing information. For example, a
person might belong to the category “mother,” priming
traits such as caring and unselfish, but also be a
member of the “lawyer” category, perhaps priming
opposite traits. To interact effectively with this person,
the perceiver has to make a judgment about which

traits to expect. If the “mother” stereotype is more
highly activated (by contextual cues), then the lawyer
stereotype will be inhibited. As with facilitation
effects, therefore, negative priming can achieve useful
and preparative ends.
Consequences of Priming
As the stereotyping examples suggest, priming is not
just a cognitive phenomenon; its importance stems
from the consequences that it has for people’s thoughts,
behaviors, and interactions with others.
Priming can influence the way in which people
perceive others and interpret their behavior, even
without awareness of the prime. For example, after
subliminal priming with aggressive words like hostile,
participants are more likely to rate ambiguous behaviors
(such as a playful shove) as being aggressive.
In this case, participants’ social perception has been
altered by the increased accessibility of aggressive
traits, without them being aware of the priming experience.
Priming social categories has a similar effect
as priming individual traits because it increases the
activation of all the traits contained within the category
network. For example, presenting either the stereotype
label “vegetarian” or “murderer” before asking
participants to form an impression of a target person
is likely to produce different impressions—the former
presumably less brutal than the latter.
The phenomenon of increased accessibility altering
perception is well-established. However, more
contentious research suggests that even complex social
behaviors can be primed and produced in behavior
without perceivers’ awareness, a phenomenon referred
to as the perception-behavior link. For example,
participants who sit near a gun while giving electric
shocks in an experiment show more aggression than
those who are not near a weapon—the so-called
weapons effect. Participants who have been primed
with behavioral characteristics like “polite” or “rude”
are more likely to behave in line with these traits in
subsequent tasks. Again, this priming can be category
based, so for example, priming with the “accountant”
stereotype can increase conformity because this trait
is contained within the occupational stereotype.
Importantly, behavioral consequences of priming
are elicited in situations that offer a relevant context
for the behavior to be produced. If participants have
been primed with aggression, they are unlikely to randomly
produce aggressive acts. Rather, if they are
put in a situation in which they perceive a potentially
aggressive incident or are forced to choose to
behave with high or low aggression, then the priming
is likely to be influential. This may be why people
are so often unaware of the influence of priming: It
does not change the availability of thoughts or
actions but, rather, alters the accessibility of the
available options.
Sheila Cunningham
C. Neil Macrae
See also Accessibility; Automatic Processes; Schemas; Social
Cognition; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity
of social behaviour: Direct effects of trait construct and
stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 71, 230–244.
Bodenhausen, G. V., & Macrae, C. N. (1998). Stereotype
activation and inhibition. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Advances
in social cognition XI: Stereotype activation and
inhibition (pp. 1–51). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Meyer, D. E., & Schvanevedt, R. (1971). Facilitation in
recognising pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence
between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental
Psychology, 90, 227–234.
Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (1979). The role of category
accessibility in the interpretation of information about
persons: Some determinants and implications. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1660–1672.
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need
no inferences. American Psychologist, 35, 151–175.
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
Prisoner’s Dilemma———701
Definition
Beyond any doubt, Prisoner’s Dilemma is the bestknown
situation in which self-interest and collective
interest are at odds. The situation derives its name
from the classic anecdote about two prisoners who
were accused of robbing a bank. In this anecdote, the
district attorney, unable to prove that the prisoners
were guilty, created a dilemma in an attempt to motivate
the prisoners to confess to the crime. The prisoners
were put in separate rooms, where each prisoner
was to make a choice: to confess or not to confess.

702———Prisoner’s Dilemma
The attorney sought to make confessing tempting
to the prisoners by creating a situation in which the
sentence was determined not only by their own confessing
or not but also by the fellow prisoner’s confessing
or not. Yet irrespective of the fellow prisoner’s
choice, the choice to confess yielded a better outcome
(or less worse outcome) than did the choice not to
confess. Specifically, when the other confessed, confessing
yielded only an 8-year sentence, whereas not
confessing yielded a 10-year sentence. And when
the other did not confess, confessing yielded only a
3-month sentence, whereas not confessing yielded a
1-year sentence. So, from this perspective, it seems
rational for each prisoner to confess to the crime.
However, the crux of the dilemma is that the outcome
following from both confessing (an 8-year sentence)
is worse than the outcome following from both not
confessing (a 1-year sentence). Thus, if both prisoners
were completely trusting of each other, and strongly
committed to supporting or helping each other, neither
would confess, despite the attorney’s attempt to make
confessing attractive. (The four possible sentences
following from both prisoners’ choices are derived
from R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa; some other
sources report slightly different sentences.)
The Single-Trial Prisoner’s Dilemma
This classic Prisoner’s Dilemma describes a situation in
which the prisoners were to make their choices simultaneously,
irrevocably (i.e., they could not undo or take
back their choices), and therefore independently of
one another. The independence of their choices was
also ensured by putting the prisoners in separate cells,
thereby excluding any possibility for communication
relevant to the choices that they were going to make. In
doing so, the attorney created a rather uncommon situation
because people are usually able to interact in
ways that permit them to respond to each other’s behavior
or communicate about their choices.
Nevertheless, some situations that people encounter
in real life resemble aspects of the classic Prisoner’s
Dilemma. For example, it occasionally may be tempting
to prepare less than fully for a working meeting
with a partner to save time and energy for another
activity that is more pressing or interesting. Yet, the
meeting would be more fruitful if both partners invest
time and effort and prepare well for the meeting. More
generally, the Prisoner’s Dilemma represents exchange
situations, which in the real world often occur under
more flexible conditions, where both partners make
choices in turn and every now and then can undo their
choices. An example is the exchange of baseball
cards, or cards of well-known soccer players, where
two children can, at a little cost, provide each other
with the card the other desires very much (e.g., to own
the last card that completes one’s set of cards). In that
sense, the Prisoner’s Dilemma represents a situation
in which people “do business,” exchanging money,
products, or services, that is more desirable to the
other than to the self.
Researchers often use the single-trial Prisoner’s
Dilemma when they want to study how people
approach one another in the absence of a history of
interaction and in the absence of a future of interaction.
Hence, these choices are not influenced by considerations
regarding the past (e.g., retaliation) or the
future (e.g., adopting a strategy so as to obtain mutual
cooperation). In these situations, impressions of the
other play a very important role. In particular, any
information that is relevant to one’s expectations
regarding the other’s probable choice is useful, at least
when one’s own choice depends on what the other is
going to choose. For example, people expect much
more cooperation from another perceived as honest
than from another perceived as dishonest. Also,
people may also derive expectations from stereotypical
information. People expect more cooperation from
a theology student than from student in economics or
public administration.
More recently, it has been shown that choices can
also be influenced in very subtle ways. In this
research, participants typically first engage in a different
task in which they unscramble sentences (putting
scrambled sentences together in the correct order) that
contain words having to do either with morality (e.g.,
honest, dishonest) or might (e.g., strong, weak). This
task, or related task, seeks to activate morality-related
concepts or might-related concepts—rather unconsciously.
As it turns out, people are more likely to
make a cooperative choice when morality was activated
in such a task than when might was activated.
The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
The Prisoner’s Dilemma has often been used to study
repeated choices by which people respond to one
another’s choices, a situation that captures interaction.
Actually, most of the examples discussed so far illustrate
the Prisoner’s Dilemma but do not perfectly

match the features of a single-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma
because there usually is a history or future of interaction
that accompanies working meetings or exchanges
of products (e.g., baseball cards). As such, single-trial
interactions are more common in dealings with relative
strangers rather than with partners, friends, or acquaintances.
In contrast, the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas,
characterized by repeated interaction, is more relevant
to processes that shape people’s interactions with partners,
friends, or acquaintances.
This research has focused on a variety of processes.
One such process is the role of verbal communication.
Often, cooperation can be enhanced if people are able
to communicate before their choices in a Prisoner’s
Dilemma. The more important question is, of course,
how one can persuade the other to cooperate. Some
research has compared the effectiveness of four messages:
(1) “I will cooperate.” (2) “I would like you to
cooperate.” (3) “If you don’t cooperate, then I will
choose so that you can’t win.” (4) “If you now decide
to cooperate and make a cooperative choice,
I will cooperate.” This research has shown that a message
that communicates conditional cooperation
involving threats and promises tend to be somewhat
more effective than those that do not incorporate such
messages. These principles were subsequently used in
designing strategies for building trust and resolving
conflict, as well as further theorizing on these topics.
The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma has also been
used to examine the effectiveness of behavioral strategies.
How should one behave if one seeks to obtain
stable patterns of mutual cooperation? Or how can a
person motivate, through his or her own behavior, the
other person to make cooperative choices? Consider,
for example, the tit-for-tat strategy that begins with a
cooperative choice and subsequently imitates the partner’s
previous choice. This strategy has been shown to
yield greater outcomes than a 100% cooperative or
100% noncooperative strategy. Following early experiments
examining this strategy, Robert Axelrod in
1984 organized a computer tournament in which
several social and behavioral experts submitted programmed
strategies that they believed would, when
pitted against other possible programs, produce the
highest outcomes. Each strategy then played against
(or with) each other strategy. The interesting result
was that tit for tat yielded far better outcomes for itself
than did any of the other strategies.
An important feature accounting for tit for tat’s
effectiveness is its niceness, in that the self is never
Prisoner’s Dilemma———703
first to make a noncooperative choice, and therefore
cannot be perceived as exploitative or aggressive. Tit
for tat is also effective because it is retaliatory: Noncooperative
behavior is responded to with a reciprocal
noncooperative action. Furthermore, tit for tat is forgiving,
in that noncooperative choices by the other in
one situation are easily remedied in subsequent situations.
Finally, tit for tat is also a clear strategy, readily
understood by others, and indeed it tends to be experienced
as directed toward establishing cooperation.
At the same time, tit for tat fails to initiate cooperation
after there has been a lapse in it. Hence, a limitation
of tit for tat is that it may give rise to the
so-called echo effect (or negative reciprocity), that is,
interaction patterns whereby the two persons are
“trapped” in cycles of noncooperative responses. This
limitation is especially important in situations characterized
by noise—when there are discrepancies
between intended and actual outcomes for an interaction
partner because of unintended errors (e.g., not
being able to respond to an e-mail because of a local
network breakdown). In such situations, an unintended
error may lead to misunderstanding (“why
hasn’t he responded to my e-mail”) and eventually a
noncooperative response (“I will make him wait as
well”), which may instigate the echo effect. Indeed,
some recent research indicates that some level of
generosity might be important in overcoming the
detrimental effects of such unintended errors. That is,
when unintended errors are likely to occur with some
regularity, strict forms of reciprocity will give rise to
the echo effect, which can be prevented or overcome
by adding a little generosity to reciprocity: that is, by
consistently behaving a little more cooperatively than
the other did in the previous interaction.
Moreover, the Prisoner’s Dilemma also often
operates in situations involving more than two individuals
(the so-called N-person Prisoner’s Dilemma; also
referred to as social dilemma). For example, everyone
enjoys clean public places, such as clean parks or
sports stadiums. Yet people often find litter in such
places, indicating that it is somewhat tempting to
litter. As another example, whether or not to exercise
restraint in the use of energy represents such a dilemma
because overuse eventually leads to depletion of natural
resources. In N-person Prisoner’s Dilemmas,
threats or promises, or tit for tat, are generally less
effective because there are so many people involved so
that they are harder or even impossible to implement
(to whom should I give tit for tat?). Typically, the level

704———Procedural Justice
of cooperation is much lower in N-person Prisoner’s
Dilemmas than in two-person Prisoner’s Dilemmas.
Also different mechanisms tend to underlie behavior
in N-person situations. For example, feelings of perceived
efficacy, the feeling that one can make a difference
and affect collective outcomes in a positive
manner, feelings of personal responsibility (feeling
responsible for a positive collective outcome), and
feelings of identifiability (whether to feel anonymous
or identifiable such that others can tell who cooperated
and who did not) are all important ingredients of cooperation.
These and other findings may be effectively
used in public campaigns, which emphasize that people
can make a difference (“all pieces help” to enhance
perceived efficacy), or that people need to do so out of
moral obligation or concern with the group (to enhance
feelings of responsibility).
And finally, there are Prisoner’s Dilemmas between
groups, or between representatives of two groups.
Two companies may compete for the same clients,
even though they both enjoy the public attention for
their new products. Nations also often face such
conflicts between their own group’s interest and
both groups’ interests. Frequently, interactions between
groups (or their representatives) are often less cooperative
than are interactions between individuals. One
reason is that groups do not tend to trust each other as
much as individuals do, in that groups often rely on
a scheme of distrust—which is not too surprising
because groups often do compete in everyday life.
A second reason is that group members tend to support
their representative, and one another, for actions
that serve the interest of their group (and themselves),
but not that of the two groups together. The Prisoner’s
Dilemmas of this sort have received relatively little
attention, but may well be one of the most challenging
to manage.
See also Cooperation; Social Dilemmas; Trust
Further Readings
Paul A. M. Van Lange
Anthon Klapwijk
Dawes, R. M. (1980). Social dilemmas. Annual Review of
Psychology, 31, 169–193.
Hamburger, H. (1979). Games as models of social
phenomena. San Francisco: Freeman.
Kelley, H. H., Holmes, J. W., Kerr, N. L., Reis, H. T., Rusbult,
C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003). An atlas of interpersonal
situations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pruitt, D. G., & Kimmel, M. J. (1977). Twenty years of
experimental gaming: Critique, synthesis, and suggestions
for the future. Annual Review of Psychology, 28, 363–392.
Van Lange, P. A. M., Ouwerkerk, J., & Tazelaar, M. (2002).
How to overcome the detrimental effects of noise in social
interaction: The benefits of generosity. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 768–780.
PROCEDURAL JUSTICE
Procedural justice is the study of people’s subjective
evaluations of the justice of decision making of conflict
resolution procedures—whether they are fair or
unfair, ethical or unethical, and otherwise accord with
people’s standards of fair processes for interaction and
decision making. Procedural justice is usually distinguished
from subjective assessments of the fairness
of outcomes (distributive justice) and the degree to
which people feel that they are gaining or losing
resources in the group (outcome favorability). Subjective
procedural justice judgments have been the focus
of a great deal of research attention by psychologists
because people are widely found to be more willing to
defer to others when they act through just procedures.
John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker presented the
first system set of experiments designed to show the
impact of procedural justice. Their studies demonstrate
that people’s assessments of the fairness of
third-party decision-making procedures shape their
satisfaction with their outcomes. This finding has
been widely confirmed in subsequent laboratory and
field studies of procedural justice.
What do people mean by a fair procedure? Four elements
of procedures are the primary factors that contribute
to judgments about their fairness: opportunities
for participation, having a neutral forum, trustworthy
authorities, and treatment with dignity and respect.
People feel more fairly treated if they are allowed
to participate in the resolution of their problems or
conflicts. The positive effects of participation have
been widely found. People are primarily interested in
presenting their perspective and sharing in the discussion
over the case, not in controlling decisions about
how to handle it.
People are also influenced by judgments about
neutrality—the honest, impartiality, and objectivity of
the authorities with whom they deal. They believe that
authorities should not allow their personal values and
biases to enter into their decisions, which should be
made based on consistent rule application and the use

of objective facts. Basically, people seek a level playing
field in which no one is unfairly disadvantaged.
Another factor shaping people’s views about the
fairness of a procedure is their assessment of the
motives of the third-party authority responsible for
resolving the case. People recognize that third parties
typically have considerable discretion to implement
formal procedures in varying ways, and they are concerned
about the motivation underlying the decisions
made by the authority with which they are dealing.
They judge whether that person is benevolent and caring,
is concerned about their situation and their concerns
and needs, considers their arguments, tries to do
what is right for them, and tries to be fair. In other
words, people assess the degree to which they trust the
authority.
Studies suggest that people also value having
respect shown for their rights and for their status
within society. They want their dignity as people
and as members of the society to be recognized and
acknowledged. Because it is essentially unrelated to
the outcomes they receive, the importance that people
place on this affirmation of their status is especially
relevant to conflict resolution.
See also Conflict Resolution; Distributive Justice
Further Readings
Tom R. Tyler
Lind, E. A. & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The social psychology of
procedural justice. New York: Plenum.
Thibaut, J., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural justice.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tyler, T. R. (2000). Social justice: Outcome and procedure.
International journal of psychology, 35, 117–125.
Tyler, T. R., & Smith, H. J. (1998). Social justice and social
movements. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),
The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 2,
pp. 595–629). New York: Oxford University Press.
PROCRASTINATION
Definition
Procrastination refers to wasting time before a deadline.
The tendency to procrastinate involves putting
off work that must be completed to attain a certain
goal, such as watching television instead of working
Procrastination———705
on a term paper. Procrastination has a negative impact
on the quality of one’s work and is linked to a variety
of negative physical and psychological outcomes.
History and Background
Procrastination lies at the heart of the psychological
study of goal attainment. To attain a goal, people must
have adequate motivation and ability to perform the
necessary actions involved in satisfying the goal.
Procrastination is particularly relevant in cultures that
are industrialized and place a high priority on adherence
to schedules. Philip DeSimone has shown that
procrastination becomes a more salient concept as a
society becomes more industrialized. Although some
researchers have argued that procrastination is a
completely modern phenomenon, similar words and
concepts related to procrastination have existed
throughout history. Ancient Egyptians used words
related to procrastination to describe both useful habits
of avoiding unnecessary work and harmful habits
indicative of laziness that preclude the possibility of
completing an important activity. The Oxford English
Dictionary states that the word procrastination was
frequently used by the early 17th century to describe
situations in which people intelligently chose to
restrain their behavior to arrive at a better conclusion.
Procrastination began to be used as a means of the
negative consequences of squandering time before a
deadline during the mid-18th century, which coincides
with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution.
Thus, the tendency to procrastinate has existed for
many years but became problematic when societies
placed a high priority on faithfulness to schedules.
Consequences
Procrastination is a difficulty that is pervasively
reported in everyday settings among people who are
otherwise psychologically healthy. As many as 20%
of nonclinical adult men and women report that they
chronically procrastinate. And although procrastination
may offer people a temporary break from an
upcoming deadline, the consequences of procrastination
are almost uniformly negative. Chronic procrastination
has been linked to low self-esteem, self-control,
and self-confidence. Other research has shown that
chronic procrastinators are more likely than are nonprocrastinators
to have increased levels of depression,
anxiety, perfectionism, self-deception, and noncompetitiveness.
Compared with nonprocrastinators, chronic

706———Procrastination
procrastinators also show signs of dysfunctional
impulsivity, suffer more ill health effects, and tend
to score low on measures of the Big Five factor of
Conscientiousness. People who procrastinate on a
regular basis make inaccurate predictions of the
amount of time needed to complete activities and tend
to focus on past events rather than anticipating future
events. Thus, chronic procrastination is related to a
wide variety of negative physical and psychological
outcomes.
Causes
In addition to documenting the consequences of
procrastination, psychologists have investigated the
possible reasons why people procrastinate. One explanation
is that people procrastinate to protect their
self-images from the negative consequences that
accompany poor performance. From this perspective,
placing a barrier in the way of completing a task (by
procrastinating) can allow the person to explain the
causes of their behavior in a positive or negative manner.
If the person procrastinates and performs well on
a task, then the person can explain the causes of the
successful performance as having the ability to overcome
an obstacle. If the person procrastinates and performs
poorly, in contrast, then the person can explain
his or her performance by the procrastinating behavior
that caused the person to perform at a suboptimal
level. Some research has shown that behavioral procrastination
is related to the extent to which people
place barriers in the way of completing activities
to manipulate whether their performance can be
explained positively or negatively. Joseph Ferrari and
Dianne Tice showed that chronic procrastinators
engaged in procrastination when an upcoming task
was evaluative and potentially threatening. Thus, one
possible cause of procrastination is that people place
barriers in the way of their goal to minimize the
negative impact of possible poor performance.
Another possible cause of procrastination is a
sense of self-uncertainty early in life. According to
this perspective, the bonds that people form with their
primary caregiver from an early age can influence
the degree to which people procrastinate later in life.
People who grow up knowing that their caregiver is
loving and responsive are less likely to procrastinate
later in life, whereas people with a less secure attachment
to their primary caregiver are more likely to
procrastinate later in life. Other research has demonstrated
that children raised by overcontrolling parents
are more likely to procrastinate later in life than are
children who were raised by noncontrolling parents.
These findings suggest that insecure attachment to
primary caregivers at an early age is associated with a
tendency to procrastinate later in life.
Prevention
Researchers have recently begun to explore prevention
strategies that may reduce the negative consequences
of procrastination. One strategy is to teach
chronic procrastinators to restructure their mistaken
thoughts regarding goal completion. Chronic procrastinators
rely on thoughts that either increase task
anxiety (e.g., “It’s hopeless to complete this task”) or
decrease task anxiety (e.g., “I’ll do it tonight, so
I don’t have to worry”). Teaching chronic procrastinators
to identify and challenge these anxiety-producing
thoughts may reduce the likelihood of continued procrastination.
Another treatment strategy has been to
boost concern and forethought for behaviors. As noted
earlier, chronic procrastination is associated with low
scores on the Big Five factor of Conscientiousness.
Ferrari and colleagues have demonstrated that putting
emphasis on the existent pattern of self-deceptive
thinking aids in the reduction of procrastination
among people low in Conscientiousness. The findings
from these prevention strategies, though still preliminary,
offer evidence that procrastination and its negative
effects can be reduced.
Dianne M. Tice
C. Nathan DeWall
See also Anxiety; Attachment Styles; Big Five Personality
Traits; Goals; Planning Fallacy; Self-Defeating Behavior;
Self-Handicapping
Further Readings
Ferrari, J. R., Johnson, J. L., & McCown, W. G. (1995).
Procrastination and task avoidance: Theory, research,
and treatment. New York: Plenum.
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal study
of procrastination, performance, stress, and health: The
costs and benefits of dawdling. Psychological Science, 8,
454–458.

PROJECTION
Definition and History
Many biases affect the impressions people form of
each other, and a great deal of work by social psychologists
explores those biases. For example, people
often do not take into account how others’ behaviors
are constrained by the situations they are in (the fundamental
attribution error). Impressions can also be
biased and distorted because of the influence of
stereotypes. Yet another bias—and a more subtle
one—is the tendency for people to see in others characteristics
that they are motivated to deny in themselves.
For example, a woman tempted to cheat on a
test might accuse others of dishonesty, a man with
unwanted sexual fantasies and desires might become
obsessed with the immorality of his neighbors, and
another with an urge to commit violence against
someone might come to believe that the other person
is the potential aggressor. All these hypothetical cases
are examples of projection—specifically, defensive
projection (also sometimes referred to as direct or
classical projection).
Sigmund Freud provided some of the earliest
descriptions of projection, and his daughter Anna Freud
further elaborated on his ideas. As a result, defensive
projection is strongly associated with psychoanalytic
theory. For psychoanalysts, projection was one
of many defense mechanisms (along with repression,
denial, reaction formation, and others)—psychological
processes used to help people avoid becoming aware
of anxiety-provoking thoughts or feelings.
Outside of psychoanalytic circles, though, the phenomenon
was long viewed with a great deal of skepticism.
Experimental social psychologists in particular
doubted the very existence of defensive projection.
The difficulty of figuring out how to study projection
in a careful and systematic way was only part of the
problem. Further complicating matters was confusion
about how to define the phenomenon. For example,
some argued that projection of a trait required actually
possessing that trait. Unfortunately, it is not clear how
to establish that a person can unambiguously be characterized
by traits such as dishonesty, lustfulness, or
aggressiveness. Still other researchers insisted that
lack of awareness was a necessary characteristic of projection.
It was never clear, though, what the awareness
Projection———707
criterion referred to: Not being aware that one has a
characteristic? Not being aware that one despises the
characteristic? Not being aware that one is attributing
the characteristic to another person? Not being aware
that one’s attribution of the trait to another person is a
function of one’s own motivation to deny the trait?
Contemporary Research
In the 1990s, however, projection was revived as a
topic of study, and several studies support a general
account of how it comes about. Although many unfavorable
traits are almost universally disliked, individual
people might be motivated to avoid and deny some
of them more than others would. One person might
desperately want not to be seen as incompetent; another
might be most motivated to steer clear of dishonesty;
still another might most despise cowardliness. Unfortunately,
human behavior being as complex, ambiguous,
and multidetermined as it is, it is hard to avoid
ever doing, saying, thinking, or feeling anything that
might be seen as evidence that one has a hated trait.
One way of dealing with the distress that results is to
simply try not to think about that evidence—that is, to
suppress thoughts about the trait and about the possibility
that it might at least to some extent characterize
one’s behavior. For example, one might try to forget
about a nasty comment one just made and try to avoid
thinking about how making such a comment suggests
at least a certain amount of nastiness. Unfortunately, a
great deal of research suggests that thought suppression
can backfire. In other words, directly trying not to
think about something can lead those thoughts to be
harder to avoid than if one had never tried to suppress
them. As a result, thoughts about the trait will have a
tendency to pop into mind when interacting with other
people, and therefore, it will dominate the impressions
one forms of others. It should be noted that this
account does not require a person to objectively possess
a trait before he or she can project it; it is enough
that people just be strongly motivated to deny it and be
vigilant for any traces of it in their behavior.
Research supports the claim that efforts to deny a
trait increase the likelihood that people will come to
believe that others can be labeled with that very trait.
In addition, people with a general and long-standing
tendency to suppress thoughts (people known as
repressors) project more than others. Finally, recent
research has begun to address the possibility (long

708———Propinquity
suggested by students of intergroup relations) that
stereotypes and prejudices can develop as a result of
defensive projection.
Projection is seen as a defense mechanism. That
can mean at least two different things. Projection is
related to defense in that it results from people’s
efforts to defend themselves against the possibility of
perceiving themselves in certain ways. In other words,
it comes about as a result of the suppression of threatening
thoughts. But does projection itself work as a
defense—that is, do people feel better about themselves
and experience less anxiety as a result of projecting
unwanted traits onto others? Recent research
suggests that projection can be considered to be a
defense in that sense as well. People have been found
to report more positive self-concepts and less distress
after they are led to project.
Many people seem to have pet peeves about the
deficiencies of their fellow human beings. Some
people gripe about others’ stupidity and laziness,
some are struck by others’ cruelty, and others are flabbergasted
at the selfishness they see around them.
Research on defensive projection suggests that these
tendencies often are more revealing of the observers’
anxieties and fears about themselves than they are about
the nature of the people that arouse their disgust.
Leonard S. Newman
See also Defensive Attributions; Fundamental Attribution
Error; Ironic Processes; Meta-Awareness; Social
Projection; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Newman, L. S., & Caldwell, T. L. (2005). Allport’s “Living
Inkblots”: The role of defensive projection in stereotyping
and prejudice. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. A. Rudman
(Eds.), On the nature of prejudice: 50 years after Allport
(pp. 377–392). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Newman, L. S., Duff, K. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997).
A new look at defensive projection: Thought
suppression, accessibility, and biased person perception.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
72, 980–1001.
Schimel, J., Greenberg, J., & Martens, A. (2003). Evidence
that projection of a feared trait can serve a defensive
function. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
29, 969–979.
PROPINQUITY
Definition
Propinquity refers to the proximity or physical closeness
of one person to another. The greater the degree
of propinquity, the more likely that two people will
be attracted to each other and become friends.
Propinquity is usually thought of in terms of functional
distance—that is, the likelihood of coming into
contact with another person—rather than sheer physical
distance.
Background and Modern Usage
Research on the effects of propinquity rests on the
common-sense premise that one is unlikely to become
friends with someone whom one has never met. Beyond
this simple principle, however, is a set of observations
and implications with considerable relevance for
understanding how people move from initial encounters
to the development of friendship. The power of
propinquity is illustrated by a well-known finding
from the Maryland State Police Training Academy.
When aspiring police officers were asked to name their
best friend in their training class, most named someone
whose name, when placed in alphabetical order, was
very close to their own. This result is readily attributed
to the use of alphabetical name position for dormitory
assignments and training activities.
Among the various explanations for propinquity
effects, two have received the most support. One is
termed the mere exposure effect. All other things
being equal, the more often a person is exposed to a
particular stimulus, the more favorably that stimulus
tends to be evaluated. This has been shown with
abstract paintings, letters of the alphabet, names,
faces, and people. Thus, according to the mere exposure
explanation, propinquity influences attraction
because physical closeness increases familiarity and
hence liking for other persons.
A second explanation is more interactive in nature.
Physical proximity increases the frequency of encounters,
and thereby creates opportunities for interaction.
Because most of our interactions tend to be on the
positive side of neutral, propinquity breeds positive
experiences, which in turn foster attraction and friendship.
In other words, propinquity creates opportunities

to interact with others; more often than not, these
interactions are rewarding and enjoyable in a way that
promotes friendship formation. This explanation
suggests an important exception to the propinquityattraction
rule: In circumstances in which people are
predisposed in a more negative way—for example,
because of substantial value differences, bias, or competing
interests—propinquity should increase the
likelihood of disliking. Research has shown that this is
indeed the case.
The idea that functional distance may matter more
than simple physical proximity reflects both of these
explanations. Many factors other than sheer distance
affect the frequency with which people encounter one
another—for example, the physical and temporal layout
of everyday routines such as going to work, health
clubs, and recreation. Moreover, in the modern world,
propinquity may also be cultivated electronically,
such as by e-mail, instant messaging, and cell phones.
Although the principle of propinquity may be timeless,
the ways in which propinquity is established are
ever-changing.
Harry T. Reis
See also Attraction; Contact Hypothesis; Mere Exposure
Effect; Personal Space; Positive–Negative Asymmetry
Further Readings
Bornstein, R. F. (1989). Exposure and affect: Overview and
meta-analysis of research, 1968–1987. Psychological
Bulletin, 106, 265–289.
Segal, M. W. (1974). Alphabet and attraction: An unobtrusive
measure of the effect of propinquity in a field setting.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
30, 654–657.
PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR
Definition
Prosocial behavior is voluntary behavior intended to
benefit another. Thus, it includes behaviors such as
helping, sharing, or providing comfort to another.
Prosocial behavior is evident in young children but
changes in frequency and in its expression with
age. Individual differences in prosocial behavior are
Prosocial Behavior———709
caused by a combination of heredity, socialization,
and situational factors. Prosocial behaviors can be
preformed for a variety of reasons, ranging from selfish
and manipulative reasons (e.g., helping get something
in return) to moral and other-oriented reasons
(e.g., helping because of moral principles or sympathy
for another’s plight). Prosocial behavior that is not
performed for material or social rewards (e.g., rewards,
approval), but is based on concern for another or moral
values, is usually labeled “altruism.”
A topic of attention in the social psychological
literature is whether there is true altruism—that is, if
people ever help others for reasons that are not really
selfish. Although people sometimes assist others even
when they receive no social or material benefits, some
psychologists argue that there is always a selfish reason
underlying altruistic motives. For example, they
argue that people actually help because of the psychological
merging of the self with another, the desire to
elevate one’s own mood or to avoid negative feelings
or a negative self-evaluation (for not helping). People
sometimes help others to alleviate their own feelings
of distress when dealing with someone else in distress
or need, or primarily because of personal ties to needy
others. Nonetheless, C. D. Batson has provided evidence
that people often assist for other-oriented
sympathy, and there is likely at least some selfless
motivation for some types of prosocial actions.
Importance
Prosocial behavior is relevant to both the quality of
close interpersonal relationships and to interactions
among individuals and groups without close ties.
People, as individuals or as members of a group, often
assist others in need or distress, as well as others whose
needs are relatively trivial. Charities and societies
depend on people helping one another. In addition,
prosocial behavior has benefits for the benefactor. For
example, children who are more prosocial tend to be
better liked by peers, and adults who engage in helping
activities tend to have better psychological health.
Personal Characteristics Associated
With Prosocial Behavior
As is evident in everyday life, some people are more
prosocial than others. Prosocial children and adults
tend to be prone to sympathize with others. They also

710———Prosocial Behavior
are more likely to understand others’ thoughts and
feelings and to try to take others’ perspectives. In
addition, people who tend to assist others often hold
other-oriented values (e.g., value others’ well-being)
and tend to assign the responsibility for actions such
as helping to themselves. Prosocial children tend to be
positive in their emotional expression, socially competent,
well adjusted, well regulated, and have a positive
self-concept. In both childhood and adulthood,
people who reason about moral conflicts in more
mature ways (e.g., use more abstract moral reasoning,
with more sophisticated perspective taking and a
greater emphasis on values) are also more likely than
their peers are to help others. Of particular note, preschool
children who engage in spontaneous, somewhat
costly prosocial behaviors (e.g., sharing a toy
they like) engage in more prosocial behavior as adolescents
and tend to be sympathetic and prosocial as
adults. Thus, there appears to be some continuity in
prosocial responding from a fairly early age.
Situational Factors
Even though some people are more prone to help than
are others, situational factors also can have a powerful
effect on people’s willingness to help. For example,
people are less likely to help when the cost of helping
is high. They also are more likely to help attractive
people and to help if they are the only ones available
to help (e.g., there are no other people around who see
an individual who needs assistance). People in good
moods are likely to assist others more than are people
in neutral moods, although sometimes people in bad
moods seem to help others to raise their moods.
People also are more likely to help if they are exposed
to models of prosocial behavior. Moreover, the interaction
of situational factors with personality characteristics
of potential helpers is important; for example,
sociable people seem more likely to provide types
of helping that involve social interaction whereas shy
individuals often may tend to help in situations in
which they do not need to be outgoing or socially
assertive.
Origins
Prosocial behavior is a complex behavior affected by
numerous factors, both biological and environmental.
Findings in twin studies support the view that heredity
plays a role: Identical twins (who share 100% of
their genes) are more similar to each other in prosocial
behavior, as well as sympathetic concern, than are
fraternal twins (who share only 50% of their genes).
Heredity likely affects aspects of temperament or personality
such as self-regulation, emotionality, and
agreeableness, which contribute to people engaging in
higher levels of prosocial behavior.
Considerable evidence also indicates that individual
differences in prosocial behavior also are linked to
socialization. For example, adults are more likely to
help others if, as children, their parents were models of
prosocial behavior. Warm, supportive parenting, especially
if combined with the use of positive discipline
(e.g., the use of reasoning with children about wrongdoing),
has also been linked to prosocial tendencies in
children, whereas punitive parenting (e.g., parenting
involving physical punishment, the deprivation of privileges,
or threats thereof) has been inversely related.
Parents who help their children to attend to and understand
others’ feelings tend to foster prosocial tendencies
in their offspring. Appropriate levels of parental
control, when combined with parental support, prosocial
values, and behaviors that help children to attend
to and care about others’ needs, seem to foster prosocial
responding.
Age and Sex Differences
Even very young children, for example, 1-year-olds,
sometimes help or comfort others. However, the frequencies
of most types of prosocial behavior increase
during childhood until adolescence. It currently is
unclear if prosocial tendencies increase or not in
adulthood. This increase in prosocial behavior with
age in childhood is likely caused by a number of factors,
including increased perspective-taking skills and
sympathy, internalization of other-oriented, prosocial
values, greater awareness of the social desirability of
helping, and greater competence to help others.
There also are sex differences in sympathy and
prosocial behavior. In childhood, girls tend to be
somewhat, but not greatly, more likely to engage in
prosocial behavior. Girls also are more empathic or
sympathetic, albeit this sex difference is small and
depends on the method of assessing empathy or sympathy.
Women are perceived as more nurturant and
prosocial, although they likely help more only in certain
kinds of circumstances. Indeed, men are more
likely to help when there is some risk involved (e.g.,
interactions with a stranger on the street) or if chivalry
might be involved.
Nancy Eisenberg

See also Altruism; Empathy; Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis;
Gender Differences; Helping Behavior; Kin Selection;
Moral Reasoning; Twin Studies
Further Readings
Eisenberg, N. (1992). The caring child. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. (Also in published in Japanese)
Eisenberg, N., & Mussen, P. (1989). The roots of prosocial
behavior in children. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. (Also published in Japanese by Kaneko
Shobo, 1991)
Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., & Schroeder, D. A.
(2005). Prosocial behavior: Multilevel perspectives.
Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365–392.
Schroeder, D. A., Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., & Piliavin, J. A.
(1995). The psychology of helping and altruism: Problems
and puzzles. New York: McGraw-Hill.
PROSPECT THEORY
Definition
Prospect theory is a psychological account that
describes how people make decisions under conditions
of uncertainty. These may involve decisions
about nearly anything where the outcome of the decision
is somewhat risky or uncertain, from deciding
whether to buy a lottery ticket, to marry one’s current
romantic partner, to undergo chemotherapy treatment,
or to invest in life insurance.
Prospect theory predicts that people go through two
distinct stages when deciding between risky options
like these. In the first phase, decision makers are
predicted to edit a complicated decision into a simpler
decision, usually specified as gains versus losses.
Purchasing a car is simplified into losing $20,000 and
gaining a car, whereas buying a lottery ticket is simplified
into losing $1 and gaining a small chance to win
$100,000. A key feature of this editing phase is that the
way in which people edit or simplify a decision may
vary from one moment to the next, depending on situational
circumstances. A person may think of a lottery
as a .001% chance to gain $1 million, for instance, or
as a 99.999% chance to lose $1. People make decisions
based on these edited prospects, and the way that
prospects are edited is therefore a critical determinant
of the decisions they will make.
In the second phase, decision makers choose
between the edited options available to them. This
Prospect Theory———711
choice is based on two dimensions: the apparent
value of each attribute or option and the weight (similar,
although not identical to, the objective likelihood)
assigned to those values or options. These two
features—overall value and its weight—are then combined
by the decision maker, and the option with the
highest combined value is chosen by the decision
maker.
The most interesting feature of prospect theory for
most psychologists is that it predicts when (and why)
people will make decisions that differ from perfectly
rational or normative decisions, and has therefore figured
prominently in explanations of why people make
a variety of transparently bad decisions in daily life.
Background and History
Decision-making research before the 1970s was
dominated by normative theories that prescribe how
people “ought” to make decisions in a perfectly rational
way, and many implicitly assumed that most
people, in daily lives, followed these normative rules.
Prospect theory was a notable departure from these
existing theories because it offered a descriptive theory
of how people actually make decisions, rather
than providing a perfectly rational account of how
they ought to do so.
The simplest way to choose between risky options
is to choose the option with the highest expected
value—the likelihood that an option will occur, multiplied
by the value of that option. Imagine, for
instance, that you are deciding whether to pay $1 for
a lottery ticket that offers a 10% chance of winning
$10. The expected value of this lottery ticket is $1 (0.1
× $10), the same as the cost of the ticket. Rationally
speaking, you should therefore be perfectly indifferent
about buying this ticket or not. The problem, noted by
both economists and psychologists, is that rational
theories did not always describe people’s actual
behavior very well. Few people, for instance, would
actually purchase the lottery ticket in the last example.
The certain loss of $1 simply does not compensate for
the 10% chance of winning $10 and a 90% chance of
winning nothing. In general, research found that
people were more averse to taking risks than the
expected value of outcomes would predict.
The inability of expected value calculations to
explain people’s decisions then led to the development
of expected utility theory, which essentially incorporated
people’s attitude toward risk into their expected
value calculations. Expected utility theory assumed

712———Prospect Theory
that attitudes toward risk were stable within individuals,
were not influenced by the way a particular decision
was described (or framed), and was not
influenced by the mood or situational context of the
decision maker. However, experiments again revealed
that decision makers often violate the predictions
made by expected utility theory. For instance, a terminal
cancer treatment with a 1 in 10 chance of saving
the patient’s life is identical to a cancer treatment with
a 9 in 10 chance of death (assuming people can only
live or die), and yet terminally ill cancer patients
themselves would likely be more interested in pursuing
this treatment when described as the likelihood of
living than when described as the likelihood of dying.
Prospect theory was motivated by these failures of
rational models to describe actual decision making in
everyday life. Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders
of prospect theory along with the late Amos Tversky,
won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, at least in
part, for this work.
Value and Weighting Functions
Prospect theory’s central prediction is that choices
between uncertain outcomes are determined by the
combination of an outcome’s apparent value (predicted
by the value function) and the importance or
weight assigned to a particular outcome (called the
weighting function).
Value Function
There are three critical aspects of the value function
(see Figure 1). First, value is assigned to changes
in value rather than to absolute value. Almost no
attribute can be judged in isolation, but can be judged
only in relation to something else. A person is tall,
for instance, only in comparison with others who are
shorter. Or a person is happy only in relation to those
who are sadder. So too, prospect theory predicts that
the value assigned to an option is determined only by
comparison with other options, and the option used in
this comparison is therefore of critical importance.
Winning an all-expenses-paid trip to Florida might
sound wonderful compared with an all-expenses-paid
trip across the street. But that trip to Florida might
not sound nearly as wonderful when compared with
an all-expenses-paid trip to Fiji. This comparison in
prospect theory is called a reference point, and the
value of an object is determined by the change in
Losses
Value
Figure 1 A Hypothetical Value Function
Gains
value between an object under consideration and that
reference point, rather than by the absolute value of an
object. This means that people might accept an option
in one situation that they reject in another.
Second, the value function is S-shaped (see Figure
1), and predicted to be concave for gains above the
reference point and convex for losses below the reference
point. This means that differences between
small gains or losses close to the reference point are
assigned a high value, whereas differences farther
away from the reference point are assigned smaller
values. The difference between winning $5 versus $10
seems rather large, for instance, but winning $1,000
and winning $1,005 seems relatively small, even
though the objective difference ($5) is identical.
Third, the value function is steeper for losses than
for gains (see Figure 1). This means that a loss is
assigned greater value than is a gain of an objectively
identical amount. The prospect of losing $10 in a
gamble, for instance, seems worse than the prospect
of gaining $10 seems good. This difference helps
explain why few people are interested in betting
money on the outcome of a fair coin, even though
the probability of winning money on this gamble is
identical to the probability of losing money.
These two features of the value function have at
least three profound effects on decision making. First,
the S-shape of the value function means that minor
changes near a reference point are likely to have a
much more dramatic influence on decisions than are
equivalent changes further from the reference point.

A person might drive across town, for instance, to buy
a $10 book on sale for $5, but would not do so to buy
a $1,005 TV on sale for $1,000. Or a person might be
very enthusiastic about taking a new drug that reduces
his or her risk of contracting a disease from 5% to 1%,
but much less enthusiastic about a new drug that
reduces the risk from 50% to 46%. Second, the asymmetry
between gains and losses means that people
will generally be loss-averse, which explains why
people are not indifferent to gambles that have an
equal probability of losing versus winning the same
amount of money. What is more, this asymmetry
explains why framing a decision in terms of gains or
losses can have such a profound influence on behavior.
People are unlikely to choose an option framed as
a loss from a reference point compared with the same
option framed as a gain from a reference point. Third,
the asymmetry between gains and losses means that
people are likely to be risk seeking in the domain of
losses, but risk averse in the domain of gains. Because
the prospect of losses hurts more than the prospect of
gains feels good, people are likely to take greater risks
to avoid a foreseeable loss than to ensure a foreseeable
gain. People who fear falling short of a goal, for
instance, may choose to adopt a riskier course of
action to eventually achieve that goal (that may leave
them even further from their goal), compared with
people who believe they will exceed their goal.
Weighting Function
Rational models of decision making assume that
people multiply the perceived value of an outcome by
the objective likelihood that the outcome will occur.
Prospect theory modifies this slightly and predicts that
instead, people multiply the perceived value of an
outcome by a decision weight. The major difference
between the decision weights and objective probabilities
is observed with extreme probabilities (either very
low, e.g., 1%, or very high, e.g., 99%). For instance,
moving from having no chance of contracting a terminal
illness to having a 1% chance has a much larger
effect on one’s decision making than moving from a
50% chance to a 51% chance. Although the increase
in the likelihood of contracting a terminal illness is the
same (1%), the influence this increase has on one’s
decision—considered its weight in the decision—
is not. In general, people tend to overweight lowprobability
events in judgment, which helps explain
the irrational appeal of gambling and insurance for
Prospect Theory———713
very low-probability events. At the other extreme,
people tend to underweight highly certain outcomes.
People will pay much less, for instance, for a lottery
in which they have a 99% chance of winning $1,000
than they will for a lottery in which they have a 100%
chance of winning $1,000, but there is little difference
between the amount people would pay for a 50% versus
51% chance of winning $1,000. Again, the objective
difference in probabilities (1%) is identical, but its
impact on one’s decision is not.
Evidence
Support for prospect theory can be found in a wide
variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology,
and many areas within economics. Much of the
empirical support comes from studies in which people
make hypothetical or real choices between gambles.
These gamble studies are ideal because they allow
researchers to clearly specify the value and probabilities
associated with each gamble, and provide an analogy
to many, if not all, risky decisions made in daily
life. Substantial empirical support exists for the major
tenets of prospect theory: the importance of reference
points in decision making, the asymmetry between
gains and losses of equivalent magnitudes, and the
weighting function that overweights low-probability
events and underweights high-probability events.
Recent advances in prospect theory involved demonstrations
in field settings (such as with New York taxi
drivers), and the more complicated treatment of decisions
with a very large number of possible outcomes
(called cumulative prospect theory). None of these
recent advances challenged the major tenets of the
original formulation.
Importance for Social Psychology
At its heart, social psychology investigates how
situations—typically social situations—influence
judgment and behavior. Prospect theory explains how
situational variability in the way a decision is framed
can have a dramatic impact on the decisions people
make. These decisions are not restricted to any particular
domain. They can be decisions to accept a financial
gamble as much as they can be decisions about
whether to marry one’s high-school sweetheart,
whether to fund social welfare policies, or whether to
help a person in need.

714———Prototypes
In particular, the overall prediction from prospect
theory that judgments and decision are determined by
comparisons to an existing reference point has figured
prominently in many areas of social psychology. For
instance, White Americans in public opinion surveys
typically report that racial conditions have improved
significantly more than Black Americans do. One of
the reasons for this difference appears to be that
minority groups frame their progress as falling short
of a goal compared with majority groups and, therefore,
are more likely to consider what still needs to
be accomplished rather than what has already been
gained. Research on social comparisons similarly
highlights the importance of reference points for determining
one’s self-concept, and research on social
judgment shows that people often use their judgments
as a reference point for others’ judgments.
The asymmetry between gains and losses has similarly
influenced several areas of social psychology.
For instance, people tend to react much more strongly
to threatening social cues in the environment than to
helpful or supportive social cues. This pattern has
been termed the negativity bias and is both informed
by, and an extension of, the gain–loss asymmetry documented
by prospect theory. The gain–loss asymmetry
has also figured prominently in theories of
motivation and goal pursuit. Focusing on preventing a
loss versus achieving a gain activates very different
kinds of psychological states and behaviors, a line of
research clearly inspired by the insights of prospect
theory. Finally, people’s tendency to be risk seeking in
the domains of losses but risk averse in the domain of
gains has been applied to political attitudes for change
versus stability and has therefore shed light on the
origins of conservative versus liberal social attitudes.
One very specific phenomenon that has been of
particular interest to social psychologists is the
endowment effect. Empirical evidence demonstrates
that people are more reluctant to give up or sell an
item once they own it than they are interested in
acquiring it if they do not. In the most common experimental
demonstration, participants were randomly
assigned to either receive a mug to take home or to
receive no mug. Those who received a mug later state
the amount of money they would ask to sell the item,
and those who do not have a mug indicate the amount
they would spend to buy the object. Despite being randomly
assigned to own the mug, results show repeatedly
that selling prices are higher than buying prices.
The reason is that buyers are gaining an object and
therefore value it less than do sellers who are losing an
object. The power of this situational influence, unfortunately,
is generally lost on buyers and sellers themselves
who instead explain the other role’s behavior as
an instance of greed—not wanting to pay or sell an
object for what it is “really” worth.
Ayelet Gneezy
Nicholas Epley
See also Behavioral Economics; Consumer Behavior;
Decision Making; Mere Ownership Effect
Further Readings
Eibach, R. P., & Ehrlinger, J. (2006). Keep your eyes on the
prize: Reference points and racial differences in assessing
progress toward equality. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 32, 66–77.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory:
An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica,
47, 263–291.
Rottenstreich, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2001). Money, kisses, and
electric shocks: On the affective psychology of risk.
Psychological Science, 12, 185–190.
Thaler, R. H. (1980). Towards a positive theory of consumer
choice. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization,
1, 39–60.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (2000). Advances in prospect
theory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty. In
D. Kahneman & A. Tversky (Eds.), Choices, values,
and frames (pp. 44–65). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Van Boven, L., Dunning D., & Loewenstein G. (2000).
Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers:
Misperceptions of the endowment effect. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 66–76.
PROTOTYPES
Definition
A prototype is the best or most central member of a
category. An object can be described in terms of prototypicality,
which refers to the degree to which it is a
good example of a category. For example, baseball is
a more prototypical sport than is billiards or bullfighting,
and an automobile is a more prototypical vehicle
than is a sled or skateboard.

Background
The idea that category members differ in how well
they fit their category is an important component of
what is known as the natural view of categories, which
emerged in the 1950s with the publication of Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Radically
transforming how categories were understood, the
natural view replaced the classical view, a perspective
originating from Aristotle’s thinking about categories
that had been the accepted belief for two millennia.
According to the classical view, a category, like a
formal set, has specific defining characteristics that
make the determination of category membership
unambiguously clear. Objects that possess all the
defining characteristics are category members and
objects that do not are nonmembers. Having an
absolute criterion for category membership implies
that there is no gradation among category members.
All objects that meet the standard for inclusion are
equivalently good category members. The classical
view also assumes that categories are arbitrary, as
expressed in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s writing on language
and thought, which portrays categorization as a
linguistic community’s agreement about how to organize
its otherwise chaotic reality. In this view, a category
is merely sociolinguistic convention, without any
inherent order or constraint in which attributes cluster
together to define it.
The Natural View and Categorization
Despite its longevity, the classical view ultimately
gave way because the natural view better describes
how people actually categorize objects. The natural
view recognizes that most categories are not defined
by a set of specific properties that are true of all category
members. Instead, category members are linked
by family resemblance, a group of related characteristics
that category members will likely, but not necessarily,
possess. For example, a number of things are
typically found on vehicles, such as wheels and a
motor. However, none of these typical attributes are
found on all vehicles, and there is no essential characteristic
that an object must possess to be categorized
as a vehicle.
Family resemblance implies that category members
may not be equivalent. When individual category members
possess some but not all of the category’s common
features, an object with more of these common features
Prototypes———715
will be considered a better example of the category than
one that has fewer. Natural categories have an internal
structure, with the prototype, or best example of the category,
at the center and less prototypical objects radiating
away from it. Although the category’s center is
clear, its boundaries are fuzzy. There is no definite point
at which one can say the category ends. People will
agree about the status of most objects. Things like cars
and bicycles are clearly vehicles, but coffeepots and
neckties are obviously not. However, at the margins of
a category, there will be objects whose status is unclear.
People will disagree about whether things like a wheelbarrow,
an elevator, or a pair of skates can be considered
a vehicle. According to the natural view, no
absolute boundary divides the things that are vehicles
from those that are not.
The natural view rejects the idea that categories are
arbitrary. It contends that a category’s common attributes
are things that naturally belong together. For
example, it is not merely chance that attributes like
feathers, beaks, laying eggs, and the capacity to fly
are characteristic of the category “bird.” They form a
meaningful category because these things naturally
occur together. Creatures that possess any one of these
attributes are also very likely to have the others.
Substantial empirical evidence indicates that the
natural view provides a more accurate account of
categorization than does the classical view, much of
which was obtained by Eleanor Rosch and her collaborators
in the 1970s. For example, research participants
uniformly find it to be an easy and reasonable
task to rate whether an object is a better or worse
example of a category. There is remarkable consensus
in their ratings, and their level of agreement is usually
greatest for the most typical category members. Consistent
with the idea of family resemblance, objects
that possess more of a category’s common attributes
are judged to be more prototypical. When listing members
of a category, people generate the highly prototypical
examples first, and less prototypical examples
come later, if they are produced at all. People recognize
category membership more quickly for highly
prototypical objects than for less prototypical objects.
Similarity ratings between high and low prototypicality
objects are asymmetrical, with less prototypical
objects being seen as more similar to highly prototypical
objects than vice versa; for example, people more
strongly endorse the statement “a sled is similar to
a car” than “a car is similar to a sled.” Interestingly,
prototypicality effects also extend to categories with

716———Psychological Entitlement
specific defining characteristics, such as geometric
shapes or even numbers. People reliably judge 4 to be
a “better” example of an even number than 104, though
they equally satisfy the formal definition of an even
number.
Categorization involves making generalizations
that are essential for people to organize and make
sense of the information they encounter. However,
that people readily generate highly prototypical examples
when thinking about categories can be problematic
for social judgments. Many members of a social
group will not share all the characteristics of the most
prototypical member. Failure to recognize this may
contribute to pervasive errors in social judgment, such
as overestimating the degree to which group members
possess certain characteristics, underestimating the
variability among group members, and focusing on
category membership at the exclusion of relevant
information such as base rates.
Mark Hallahan
See also Need for Closure; Representativeness Heuristic;
Schemas; Subtyping
Further Readings
Brown, R. (1976). Reference: In memorial tribute to Eric
Lenneberg. Cognition, 4, 125–153.
Brown, R. (1986). Language and thought. In Social
psychology: The second edition (Chap. 13, pp. 467–494).
New York: Free Press.
Khorsroshahi, F. (1989). Penguins don’t care, but women do:
A social identity analysis of a Whorfian problem.
Language in Society, 18, 505–525.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What
categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Mervis, C. B., & Rosch, E. (1981). Categorization of natural
objects. Annual Review of Psychology, 32, 89–115.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought and reality: Selected
writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (J. B. Carroll, Ed.).
Cambridge: MIT Press.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ENTITLEMENT
Definition
Psychological entitlement refers to a general belief
that one deserves more or is entitled to more than
others are. Psychological entitlement is defined as a
general belief because it is consistent over time and
across different situations.
Context and Importance
The concepts of entitlement and deservingness play
an important role in much of social life. They both
reflect the commonly held idea that when individuals
contribute to a situation, they should get something
back in return. When individuals do not get what they
feel they are entitled to or deserve, they consider the
situation unjust or unfair, and may get upset or angry
and seek redress.
Entitlement and deservingness are similar but have
slightly different meanings. Entitlement usually refers
to a reward that a person should receive as the result
of a social contract. For example, a person would say
that she is entitled to receive a pension because she
worked at a job for a set number of years. In the United
States, government programs like Social Security are
actually called entitlement programs. Deservingness,
in contrast, usually refers to a reward that a person
should receive as a result of his or her efforts or character.
For example, a person may say that he deserves
a larger salary because he is such a hardworking
employee and keeps such a positive attitude in the
workplace.
Psychological entitlement encompasses the experience
of both entitlement and deservingness across
time and across situations. In this sense, psychological
entitlement can be considered an individual difference
variable. That is, it reflects a very general difference
between persons in beliefs and behaviors: Some individuals
have chronically high levels of psychological
entitlement, others have moderate levels of psychological
entitlement, and still others have low levels of
psychological entitlement. Individuals who have high
levels of psychological entitlement think that they
deserve more than do others in most situations. For
example, a student with a high level of psychological
entitlement will think that she deserves an A in a
class, even if it is clear to the professor and the other
students that she does not. Furthermore, this same student
will likely feel that she deserves A’s in all of her
classes because psychological entitlement is a general
trait and not limited to one specific situation. In contrast,
another student with a low sense of psychological
entitlement would not think that he deserved an A
if he did not clearly earn it.

An individual’s level of psychological entitlement
is typically measured with a self-report scale, the
Psychological Entitlement Scale. This scale asks individuals
to rate the extent that they agree with certain
statements. These include “I deserve more things in
my life,” “People like me deserve an extra break now
and then,” and “I feel entitled to more of everything.”
Individuals who have high levels of psychological
entitlement are more likely to agree with these and
similar statements.
Psychological entitlement has a wide range of
important and often negative consequences for human
thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In the workplace, for
example, individuals who have high levels of psychological
entitlement often believe that they should be
paid more than are others in similar positions. This
can potentially lead to conflict or divisiveness at work
and leave the psychologically entitled person constantly
dissatisfied. In romantic relationships, psychological
entitlement is also related to many negative
consequences. Individuals who have high levels of
psychological entitlement report responding more
negatively to conflict in the relationships, being less
empathic, less respectful, and less willing to take their
partners’ perspective. They also report being more
selfish and more game-playing. Finally, individuals
who have high levels of psychological entitlement are
more prone to aggression. These individuals believe
that they deserve special treatment, so they are particularly
likely to be aggressive toward those who criticize
them. In short, individuals who have high levels
of psychological entitlement often feel shortchanged
by others. This is linked to feelings of resentment or
anger, selfish and self-centered behaviors, and even
hostility and aggression.
Although psychological entitlement is usually
linked with negative outcomes, it may also benefit
individuals in some situations. For example, employees
who have high levels of psychological entitlement
may actually end up making more money at work
simply because they ask for it. Likewise, students who
think they deserve higher grades and demand them
might in some cases actually receive higher grades.
Of course, these benefits of psychological entitlement
may be short-lived. Individuals who constantly demand
more resources or better treatment than they truly
deserve might well gain bad reputations and eventually
be avoided by others.
Finally, psychological entitlement might also operate
at the level of social groups. When there is conflict
between groups, excessive levels of psychological
entitlement by one group may be blamed. In the
United States (and this certainly occurs in other countries),
many social groups have been referred to as
“entitled.” These include CEOs, celebrities, professional
athletes, the young, the old, the poor, and the
rich. In each of these cases, the label “entitled”
applied to a social group implies that members of that
group believe that society owes them special treatment.
Furthermore, the implication is often that this
special treatment is not deserved. For example, if a
professional athlete is caught committing a crime, the
comment is often made that it is typical of these entitled
athletes to think that the rules that apply to everyone
else do not apply to them.
See also Narcissism; Narcissistic Entitlement
Further Readings
W. Keith Campbell
Laura E. Buffardi
Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., &
Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological entitlement:
Interpersonal consequences and validation of a new
self-report measure. Journal of Personality Assessment,
83, 29–45.
PSYCHOLOGY OF TERRORISM
See TERRORISM, PSYCHOLOGY OF
PUBLIC GOODS DILEMMA
Public Goods Dilemma———717
Definition
Public goods dilemma refers to a real-world decision
whereby the outcome for any individual depends on
the decisions of all involved parties. More specifically,
these dilemmas are decisions in which individuals
must weigh personal interests against the collective
interest, which is typically a communal resource, a
public good.

718———Public Goods Dilemma
Examples of Public
Goods Dilemmas
Real-world public goods dilemmas are quite common.
For example, the existence of public radio stations is
based on listener donations, but any one individual
can save money by listening without contributing.
Voting, actions by the United Nations, and many environmental
problems are all examples of public goods
dilemmas.
One of the original public goods dilemmas is
Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons.” In his
example, a community uses a common pasture to
graze sheep. As long as each rancher uses the pasture
for a small number of sheep, the pasture provides
plenty of grazing. However, because each rancher sees
the logic in adding a few more sheep (a large benefit
for each rancher, only minor impact on the pasture),
soon the pasture is well beyond its capacity and unusable
by all.
Empirical Study
Public goods games are used to study these dilemmas
in the laboratory. In one version, players are given
some amount of money either to keep for themselves,
or contribute to a shared pool. Typically, any contributions
to the shared pool are multiplied to reflect the
shared benefit of such contributions. The total amount
that a player receives is the sum of (a) the amount that
the player kept for himself or herself, and (b) that
player’s share of the shared pool.
By varying the specifics of these games, much has
been learned about how people make public goods
decisions. For example, punishments for noncontributors
tend to increase contributions. Anonymous players
tend not to contribute, whereas players who know
each other are more likely to contribute. Similarly, a
sense of belonging to a team tends to increase contributions,
especially when one’s team is competing
against another team in a different game.
Strategies
It may be easiest to illustrate the strategies and payoffs
in a public goods game with an example. Imagine a
simple four-player game in which players are given
$10 to keep or contribute (with no partial contributions),
and contributions get multiplied by 2. Each
player’s profit is the $10 he or she kept or an equal
share of the total contributions. Assume that Players 2,
3 and 4 will all make the same choice. Table 1 shows
Player 1’s total profit. Regardless of whether the other
players keep or contribute the money, Player 1 profits
most by keeping the money, and profits least by contributing
it. Thus, although it is illogical for any one
player to contribute, if all players contribute, the total
benefit for the group is greatest. Hence, the dilemma:
Contributing is risky, but it can lead to a larger benefit
for the group as a whole.
Table 1 Player 1’s Total Profit
Player 1
Travis Carter
See also Altruism; Cooperation; Intergroup Relations; Social
Dilemmas; Social Loafing
Further Readings
All Other Players
Keep Contribute
Keep $10 $25
Contribute $0 $20
Baron, J. (2000). Thinking and deciding (3rd ed.). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Rapoport, A. (1987). Research paradigms and expected utility
models for the provision of step-level public goods.
Psychological Review, 94, 74–83.

QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
Definition
A quasi-experimental design is a research methodology
that possesses some, but not all, of the defining
characteristics of a true experiment. In most cases,
such designs examine the impact of one or more independent
variables on dependent variables, but without
assigning participants to conditions randomly or
maintaining strict control over features of the experimental
situation that could influence participants’
responses.
Example of a
Quasi-Experimental Design
Quasi-experimental designs are most often used in natural
(nonlaboratory) settings over longer periods and
usually include an intervention or treatment. Consider,
for example, a study of the effect of a motivation intervention
on class attendance and enjoyment in students.
When an intact group such as a classroom is singled
out for an intervention, randomly assigning each person
to experimental conditions is not possible. Rather,
the researcher gives one classroom the motivational
intervention (intervention group) and the other classroom
receives no intervention (comparison group).
The researcher uses two classrooms that are as similar
as possible in background (e.g., same age, racial composition)
and that have comparable experiences within
the class (e.g., type of class, meeting time) except for
the intervention. In addition, the researcher gives participants
in both conditions (comparison and motivation
Q
719
intervention) pretest questionnaires to assess attendance,
enjoyment, and other related variables
before the intervention. After the intervention is
administered, the researcher measures attendance and
enjoyment of the class. The researcher can then determine
if students in the motivation intervention group
enjoyed and attended class more than the students in
the comparison group did.
Interpreting Results From a
Quasi-Experimental Design
How should results from this hypothetical study be
interpreted? Investigators, when interpreting the
results of quasi-experimental designs that lacked random
assignment of participants to conditions, must be
cautious drawing conclusions about causality because
of potential confounds in the setting. For example, the
previous hypothetical example course material in the
intervention group might have become more engaging
whereas the comparison group started to cover a more
mundane topic that led to changes in class enjoyment
and attendance. However, if the intervention group
and comparison group had similar pretest scores and
comparable classroom experiences, then changes on
posttest scores suggest that the motivation intervention
influenced class attendance and enjoyment.
The Pros and Cons of Using
Quasi-Experimental Designs
Quasi-experiments are most useful when conducting
research in settings where random assignment

720———Quasi-Experimental Designs
is not possible because of ethical considerations or
constraining situational factors. In consequence, such
designs are more prevalent in studies conducted in natural
settings, thereby increasing the real-world applicability
of the findings. Such studies are not, however, true
experiments, and thus the lack of control over assignment
of participants to conditions renders causal conclusions
suspect.
Jeni L. Burnette
See also Ecological Validity; Experimentation;
Nonexperimental Designs; Research Methods
Further Readings
Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (1979). Quasi-experimental:
Design and analysis issues for field settings. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002).
Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for
generalized causal inference. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

RACIAL RESENTMENT
See SYMBOLIC RACISM
RACISM
Definition
Racism is the systematic implementation of a doctrine
of racial supremacy that maintains the superiority of
one race over another.
Background, Components,
and Modern Usage
Racial supremacy is the hallmark of racism, but it is
also often characterized by a belief that racial groups
are genetically isolated, biologically based entities
that exist in nature. Racists believe that the biology
of their group has afforded them greater intellect and
moral fiber than the biology of other groups, and,
therefore, they must control the behaviors of members
of lesser groups to maintain the purity (and
supremacy) of their own group.
Racism builds upon prejudice and discrimination,
phenomena that have been studied in social psychology
for more than 100 years. Prejudice is the affect or
emotion, usually negative, an individual feels toward
members of a particular racial group. For instance, the
negative attitudes regarding Arab Americans that surfaced
in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist
R
721
attacks can be thought of as prejudice. Discrimination
is treating people differently from one another based on
their racial group membership, often resulting in the
relative advantage of one group. For example, if an
individual owns a store and decides that he or she will
only sell goods to members of one racial group, then he
or she is discriminating against all the other racial
groups. Violent hate crimes, such as lynching, are the
most extreme form of discrimination. Racism, prejudice,
and discrimination can each take three forms:
interpersonal, institutional, and cultural. Consider, for
instance, discrimination. Individual discrimination is
the unfair treatment of one individual by another, such
as attempting to keep a member of a different race from
joining your fraternity. Institutional discrimination is
the unfair treatment of members of an entire race that is
sanctioned by societal institutions, norms, or governing
bodies. The Jim Crow laws of the U.S. South that mandated
separate public facilities for Whites and Blacks,
such as drinking fountains and bathrooms, constituted
institutional discrimination. Cultural discrimination
entails the promotion and normalization of the practices,
values, and products of one race, coupled with the
marginalization of those of other races. The use of a
White norm for “skin colored” pantyhose and bandages
is a form of cultural discrimination.
Many scholars argue that prejudice and discrimination
transform into racism when the members of the
discriminating group have societal power over the members
of the discriminated group. Such societal power
allows the dominant group to define racial category
boundaries; promote and communicate stereotypes
about the other racial groups in schools, churches, and
the media; and control the minority groups’ access to

722———Rape
educational, economic, and other societal resources. In
other words, racism presupposes the power to affect
individuals’ lives on a large scale.
J. Nicole Shelton
Jennifer A. Richeson
See also Contact Hypothesis; Prejudice; Sexism; Stereotypes
and Stereotyping; Subtyping; Symbolic Racism
Further Readings
Allport, G. (1979). The nature of prejudice. Reading, MA:
Perseus Books. (Original work published in 1954)
Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (Eds.). (1986). Prejudice,
discrimination, and racism. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press.
RAPE
Rape occurs when one individual forces another
into sexual intercourse against his or her will. Other
instances in which one of the individuals participates
in sexual acts without fully consenting to them (e.g.,
unwanted kissing) are encompassed within the more
general term sexual coercion. Males are much more
frequently than females the perpetrators of rape and
sexual coercion, not only in humans but also in nonhuman
animals. In a recent review of research literature,
the researchers could not find one animal species
(other than human beings) where females actually
force sex on males.
Although there are differences among studies,
partly depending on how questions are asked and who
the participants are, survey data on average indicate
that almost half of all college women have experienced
at least one sexual coercion incident since age
14, and 6% to 15% of college women have experienced
rape. About 15% to 30% of male college students
report having engaged at least once in some level of
actual sexual aggression, and about a third of college
men avow some likelihood of raping if they could be
assured that no one would know. Acquaintance rape
(e.g., by dates and boyfriends) is reported to be as
common as stranger rape and usually does not lead
to similar adjustment difficulties in the aftermath.
Compared with other types of physical assaults, victims
of rape suffer relatively higher trauma from sexual
assaults, even when the degree of actual physical
severity of the act remains constant. Young women
are raped more frequently than are other women and
experience the greatest psychological distress following
the rape.
Compared with criminologists, who primarily study
characteristics of incarcerated rapist populations,
social psychologists have focused their research on
college students and participants from the general
community. The distinctive types of populations they
have focused on may help explain some differences
between criminologists and social psychologists regarding
the proposed characteristics of sexual aggressors.
Criminologists have generally concluded rape is typically
the result of the same types of characteristics
and factors that cause other antisocial acts such as
stealing, killing, and cheating. In other words, incarcerated
rapists appear to be criminal generalists who
commit many different types of antisocial acts.
Accordingly, criminologists have found convicted rapists
to be comparable with other types of violent criminals
on most measures of antisocial traits and behaviors,
and the criminal records of rapists often resemble those
of other offenders. In contrast, social psychologists
have discovered that men in the general population
who self-identify as having committed sexual coercion
are more specialized in their coercive tendencies. For
these men, sexually aggressive behaviors are much
less likely to correlate significantly with measures of
general antisocial behavior (e.g., drug use, lying,
hitting, kicking, fraud, or killing).
An important objective of social psychological
research has been to identify risk factors associated
with an increased probability of committing sexual
coercion among noncriminal populations. Several
researchers have found a relation between men’s hostile
masculinity characteristics and the likelihood of
committing sexually coercive acts. Such hostile masculinity
includes callous attitudes toward women (e.g.,
rape myth acceptance and acceptance of interpersonal
violence against women), feelings of hostility toward
women, and sexual gratification from dominating and
controlling women. Related research indicates that
being sexually aroused by forced sex, even in fantasy,
correlates with self-reported likelihood of raping and
actual sexual coercion, and that for such males, but not
other participants, the addition of power cues in a simulated
relationship with a woman makes females over
whom they have power more sexually attractive to them.
Notably, if a man has a hostile masculinity profile,
and he also has a generally promiscuous or impersonal
sexual lifestyle, then the combination makes him

considerably more likely to be sexually coercive. Men
who possess a promiscuous sexuality are identified by
certain prior experiences. These men generally have
had sexual intercourse at a relatively early age as well
as quite a few short-term sexual relationships, without
much personal attachment or intimacy. Individuals
who come from homes where there was much conflict,
including aggression by the parents against each
other or sexual abuse of the child, have also been
found to be more likely to adopt an impersonal sexual
lifestyle. It has also been found that engaging in delinquent
acts in adolescence or having close friends who
participate in such delinquent acts during adolescence
also increases the likelihood of developing an impersonal
sexual lifestyle.
Although no single risk factor is strongly predictive
of actual sexual aggression, if a man possesses
several of these risk factors, these, in combination,
can become quite predictive of his propensity to sexually
aggress. The risk for sexual coercion is further
exacerbated if significant alcohol consumption occurs
by either individual on a date or during other social
interactions, because inhibitions are likely to be
reduced by drinking.
Importantly, risk factors for sexual aggression can
be counteracted by certain cultural and individual
variables. To illustrate, it has been found that among
Asian American men but not European Americans,
early risk factors for rape (e.g., abuse and violence in
the family of origin) are tempered by the importance
one assigns to the preservation of his own social
integrity. For example, those males who are more concerned
about being shamed by their actions are less
likely to commit acts of sexual aggression. This result
probably reflects differing norms between Asian and
European cultures. Because concerns about losing
face and upsetting interpersonal harmony are more
characteristic of Asian culture, those Asian men who
highly identify with norms of societal interdependency
are expected to have this identification as an
added cultural incentive not to sexually aggress.
Likewise, certain personality traits can serve as possible
inhibitory factors against the commission of sexual
aggression. For instance, some research has found
that males who were otherwise at high risk for sexual
coercion were less likely to aggress if they also possessed
high levels of empathy and compassion for the
feelings of others.
Neil Malamuth
Mark Huppin
See also Date Rape; Hostile Masculinity Syndrome;
Narcissistic Reactance Theory of Sexual Coercion
Further Readings
Abbey, A., Parkhill, M. R., BeShears, R., Clinton-Sherrod,
A. M., & Zawacki, T. (2006). Cross-sectional predictors
of sexual assault perpetration in a community sample of
single African American and Caucasian men. Aggressive
Behavior, 32, 54–67.
Lalumière, M. L., Harris, G. T., Quinsey, V. L., & Rice, M. E.
(2005). The causes of rape: Understanding individual
differences in the male propensity for sexual aggression.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Malamuth, N., Huppin, M., & Bryant, P. (2005). Sexual
coercion. In D. Buss (Ed.), Evolutionary psychology
handbook (pp. 394–418). New York: Wiley.
REACTANCE
Definition
Reactance———723
Broadly, reactance refers to the idea that people
become upset when their freedom is threatened or
eliminated, so much so that they attempt to reassert
their lost freedom. The theory is relevant to the idea
that humans are motivated to possess and preserve as
many options and choices as possible. When people’s
options are restricted, they experience aversive emotional
consequences. Reactance is very similar to a
layperson’s idea of reverse psychology: Humans will
tend to do the opposite of what they are told to. Being
ordered to do something by an external person or
source implies that someone is trying to reduce one’s
freedom. Reactance also refers to the idea that people
will want something more if they are told they cannot
have it. As a result, humans may act in a manner that
will oppose a resistance presented to their freedom.
Background and History
Psychological reactance theory was first proposed by
the social psychologist Jack Brehm in 1966. Reactance
theory is still considered to be one of the basic psychological
theories; it has withstood decades of testing
and can be applied to many aspects of human
behavior.
Reactance theory is important because it highlights
people’s need for control, freedom of action and
choice, as well as people’s desire to preserve as many

724———Reactance
options as possible. Indeed, the theory was devised
during a decade when people were constantly advocating
and rallying about freedom of choice and
action. Brehm observed that humans react strongly to
having options taking away by external forces; they
become quite upset and will take action to preserve or
regain their lost options.
Many psychologists have noted that humans have
a very strong aversion to loss, both in options and
choices. Essentially, humans value freedom greatly.
They like having options so much that they will incur
costs to their own self just to maintain options, even if
the options they keep open aren’t that important or
profitable. Think about what would happen if you
woke up one day and heard on the news that you no
longer have the right to vote; most likely you would
become very upset—people value the ability to vote in
a democratic society. Though this may seem like an
extreme example, even people who do not exercise
the right to vote would be upset. Indeed, many people
would immediately revolt because someone else is
trying to infringe on one of their basic freedoms.
Reactance theory highlights the simple, but important,
fact that people value their freedom: When this
freedom of behavior and choice is threatened, people
will engage in motivated behavior, designed to take
steps that will reassert and regain that freedom. In
the former example, citizens will rally, petition, they
may even become aggressive, if necessary, to try and
regain freedom or options they feel are jeopardized.
A subtler example can be demonstrated by one of
the original studies on reactance. Participants were
asked to rate a series of records and then list the three
they desired the most. Importantly, participants were
promised that they could keep one of the records.
After ranking their top three choices, participants
were told that their third choice was unavailable. The
researchers found that when participants were asked
to rate the records again, the choice that was no longer
available (their third choice) would then be rated as
more attractive than it originally was. Simply because
the option was no longer available, people actually
valued it more.
Consequences
When people react, they become aroused. That is,
they become upset, distressed, angry, or emotionally
charged. Over the decades, researchers have been able
to identify three main ways that people direct this
arousal. These are known as the main consequences of
psychological reactance.
First, an object, action, or freedom becomes more
attractive after it has been eliminated or threatened.
That is, the desire for that behavior or object will
increase, as seen in the previous example. This consequence
also applies to things such as people and
behaviors, not just objects. For example, teenagers
who are told by their parents that they cannot attend a
party on the weekend want to go to that party more
than before their parents restricted the teenagers’
behavior. Even if the teenagers originally had no
intention of attending the party, once they are told
they cannot, they will desire going to the party more
than before.
Second, people will engage in behavioral attempts
to reassert the threatened or eliminated freedom. That
is, a person will try to regain his or her freedom or
options. According to reactance theory, when parents
forbid teenagers to attend the party, the teenagers will
engage in behaviors that they think will increase their
chances of regaining their options. For example, they
may begin arguing with their parents about the benefits
(e.g., social acceptance) and costs (e.g., exclusion,
being the only one in the class not attending) of
attending the party. Hence, the teenagers will try to
regain the ability to attend the party.
Often people will even engage exactly in the same
behavior that was threatened or eliminated. Thus, if
the teenagers cannot convince their parents to let them
go, they may go anyway, either by sneaking out of the
house or pretending to do something else, such as
going to a respected friend’s house.
Finally, reactance may lead people to feel or act
aggressively toward the person who is attempting to
restrict their freedom. For example, in times of war,
citizens whose country is being occupied may feel
intense hatred toward the enemy (occupiers) such that
they have aggressive thoughts, and sometimes even
aggressive actions, toward the enemy.
Influences on Degree of Reactance
The magnitude of reactance is not exactly the same
for each person, nor for each situation. Rather, it
depends on several key factors. First, the importance
of the action or choice determines the degree of reactance
to the loss. That is, when something that is very
important to a person is in jeopardy, that person will
probably experience stronger reactance (i.e., more

arousal, increased attempt to regain). For example,
students wishing to enroll in a course would probably
value enrolling in it more if it is required to graduate
than if it is only an elective. Consequently, if it is
required to graduate and they are unable to enroll in
it because the course is full, they will react more
strongly than if they had wanted to take it simply as an
elective. Moreover, the students who value it more
will probably try and reassert their ability to take that
course by pleading their case to the professor or
department, whereas those students who wanted to
take it as an elective might just attempt to enroll in the
course next semester (though, to be sure, they will
probably want to take the course more than before).
If an option or behavior has not been taken away,
but has only been threatened to be taken away, the perceived
magnitude of the threat (that is, if only a threat
exists) will determine the strength of the reactance
experienced by the person. If the threat is blatantly
strong, then the person will experience stronger psychological
reactance in response to the threat.
Importance
Having control over their actions and behavior is one
of human beings’ most important and valued needs.
Indeed, people become distressed, angry, and even
aggressive to actual loss of freedom, even perceived
infringement on freedom. For example, after a couple
breaks up, the person who initiated the end of the relationship
is better able to cope and often feels a maintained
sense of control. The person who did not have
control over the termination of the relationship, however,
will typically want his or her ex-partner back
even more. That person also tends to feel a lack of
control over the situation, which can be accompanied
by wanting the ex-partner back more, being unable to
think about anything else, and taking extreme steps to
try and win that person back.
Men who are refused by women they believe they
should have the opportunity to sleep with may become
angry and coercive, even to the point of raping her.
Moreover, sometimes reactance will produce behavior
that is opposite of what was intended. This could be
one reason why restrictions on violent video games
and movies, pornographic material, or unhealthy
behaviors such as smoking or drinking underage leads
to the opposite of the intended effect. Humans will
even use this basic knowledge to their advantage. For
example, some parents may try to have their children
cooperate by using reverse psychology on them.
Nicole L. Mead
See also Free Will, Study of; Narcissistic Reactance Theory
of Sexual Coercion
Further Readings
Realistic Group Conflict Theory———725
Brehm, J. W., & Brehm, S. S. (1981). Psychological
reactance. New York: Wiley.
REALISTIC GROUP CONFLICT THEORY
Definition
Between the borders of Pakistan and India lies a fertile
valley known as Kashmir. Since 1947, India and
Pakistan have fought three wars over this valuable
territory. Unfortunately, the wars have contributed
to hostilities and prejudice experienced by people
on both sides. These tensions can be described by the
realistic group conflict theory (RGCT). RGCT is a
well-established theory with robust research support
from both laboratory and field studies. It is used to
understand many of the local and global intergroup
conflicts that besiege the world. That a solution to end
conflict is incorporated within this theory makes it
one of the most applicable and compelling social
psychological theories existing today.
This theory emerged in the 1960s to describe how
perceived competition for limited resources can lead
to hostility between groups. Unlike theories that use
psychological factors such as personality or value differences
to explain conflict and prejudice, RGCT
focuses on situational forces outside the self. When
valuable resources are perceived to be abundant, then
groups cooperate and exist in harmony. However, if
valuable resources are perceived as scarce (regardless
of whether they truly are), then these groups enter into
competition and antagonism ensues between them.
The resources in question can be physical (such as
land, food, or water) or psychological (such as status,
prestige, or power).
One group need only believe that competition
exists for hostile feelings and discriminatory behavior
to follow. For example, if ethnic group A believes that

726———Realistic Group Conflict Theory
members of ethnic group B pose a threat to them by
“stealing jobs,” then regardless of whether this is true,
ethnic group A will feel resentment and hostility. The
extent to which ethnic group A holds any power to follow
through on its hostile feelings determines if unfair
or discriminatory behavior toward ethnic group B will
occur. At the very least, negative stereotypes about the
other group will be created and mistrust and avoidance
will result. How long and how severe the conflict
becomes is determined by the perceived value and
scarcity of the resource in question.
RGCT is unique because it does not discuss any
personal features of the individuals engaged in the
conflict. Other psychological theories use personality
factors (such as authoritarianism) or ideologies (such
as social dominance orientation) to explain why these
hostilities exist. In RGCT, if individuals in a group
believe that the two groups share a zero-sums fate,
meaning that the other group’s success feels like a
failure or loss for one’s own group, then no matter
what outside group members say or do, feelings of
resentment and discriminatory behavior will result. As
the conflict unfolds, the members of each group will
close ranks with their fellow members and will come
to believe that their fate is connected with each other.
Classic Study
Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment is a
demonstration of this theory. Sherif is credited as one
of the most important social psychologists of his time.
With his colleagues, he set up a 2-week experiment
involving White, middle-class, 12-year-old boys at a
summer camp. At first, the boys interacted only with
their own group members because Sherif wanted them
to develop a sense of group identity. The boys did
develop a group identity and called themselves the
Eagles or the Rattlers. In the second phase of the
study, the boys were introduced to the other group and
were required to engage in a series of competitive
activities. Rewards and prizes were handed out to the
winning team. Sherif and his colleagues purposely set
up these games and rewards so that the boys would
have reason to compete intensely. During these fierce
competitions, both groups became suspicious of and
hostile toward one another. As tensions increased, the
boys demonstrated allegiance to their group by discouraging
one another from establishing friendships
across group lines. No one wanted to be seen as a traitor,
so the boys stuck to their own groups. Hostility
increased to the point that physical fights and acts of
vandalism broke out. Despite direct interventions by
adults, the two groups could not seem to reconcile.
Unity was restored only when Sherif and colleagues
created situations requiring both groups of boys to
depend on each other to achieve important goals
equally valued by both groups. In other words, harmony
was restored when both groups were equally
invested in achieving a goal that required everyone’s
help and cooperation. For example, Sherif set up a situation
in which a truck carrying their food supply
broke down and the help of all the boys was needed
to bring the food to camp. After completing a series of
such tasks requiring interaction and everyone’s
involvement, positive behavior toward the other group
members increased. The boys began to behave more
like individuals rather than group members and formed
friendships across group lines. Psychologically, they
began as two distinct groups, but when the perception
of threat was replaced by cooperation and interdependence,
the groups reestablished themselves as one
large group. Therefore, the group distinctions made
between Eagles and Rattlers disappeared and everyone
felt as if they belonged to the same group.
Research Support
RGCT has received support from both psychological
and sociological studies. For example, RGCT has
been used to explain Whites’ opposition to civil rights
policies for Blacks. This research indicates that for
some Whites, losing certain privileges is at the root of
their resistance to racial policies rather than a dislike
for Blacks. There has also been cross-cultural research
using RGCT to analyze conflict between different
ethnic and religious groups of people. These studies
show that violence between different groups will
escalate in societies experiencing shortages in vital
resources. Research has shown that competition can
lead to hostile behaviors in children, adolescents, and
adults alike.
Saera R. Khan
Viktoriya Samarina
See also Intergroup Relations; Prejudice; Robbers Cave
Experiment; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Jackson, J. (1993). Realistic group conflict theory: A review
and evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature.
Psychological Record, 43, 395–413.

REASONED ACTION THEORY
Definition
The theory of reasoned action (TRA) is a model for
predicting people’s behavior, which states that the
best predictor of people’s behavior in any given situation
is their intention to perform the behavior. Not
surprisingly, the best predictor of whether people will
actually do something is whether they intend to do it.
The intention to perform the behavior is influenced by
a person’s own attitude toward (feelings or evaluations
of) the behavior as well as the attitudes of people who
are important to the person and the associated perceived
social pressures (subjective norms).
Background and Importance
Social psychologists have demonstrated that knowledge
of people’s attitudes and feelings frequently
allows one to predict their behavior. However, research
also indicates that sometimes people’s behavior is not
consistent with their attitudes. For example, students
might believe that studying for exams is good because
it leads to better grades; however, they still might not
study. Therefore, more variables must be influencing
the behavior than just attitudes. The TRA was an
attempt to identify other factors, such as social pressures,
that could be useful in predicting behavior. The
result was the better prediction of behavior.
Components of the
Theory and Evidence
According to the TRA, individuals’ intention to perform
a behavior (their behavioral intention) determines
what they do, and it is based on two things: their own
attitudes about the behavior and perceived social pressures
from people whom they want to please (technically
referred to in the theory as subjective norms).
Usually, people intend to perform behaviors that they
feel positively about or that are popular with other
people, and they do not intend to perform behaviors
that they feel negatively about or that are unpopular
with other people. Once the intention to behave a certain
way is determined, people tend to follow through
with the intention and engage in the behavior.
Research demonstrates that people tend to perform
behaviors about which they have positive attitudes
and avoid behaviors toward which they have negative
Reasoned Action Theory———727
attitudes. The TRA states that attitudes toward specific
behaviors are based upon expectations or beliefs about
what the likely consequences of the behavior will be.
If people believe that primarily positive consequences
will result from the behavior (and negative consequences
seem unlikely), they will have positive
attitudes toward the behavior. If they believe that primarily
negative consequences will result from the
behavior (and positive consequences seem unlikely),
they will have negative attitudes toward the behavior.
For example, a student might believe that studying will
lead to better grades but also to missed opportunities to
socialize with friends. If socializing is more important
to the student than are good grades, or if the student is
not confident that he or she would get good grades
even with more studying, the student would probably
have a negative attitude toward studying. On the other
hand, if getting better grades is more important to the
student than socializing, and if the student is confident
that studying will lead to better grades, he or she will
probably have a positive attitude toward studying.
Although research demonstrates that people’s own
attitudes concerning a behavior significantly influence
whether they intend to do it, research has also shown
that attitudes are not always sufficient for predicting
behavior. According to the TRA, behavioral intentions
are also influenced by perceived social pressures. For
example, even if a student has a positive attitude
toward studying, if the student’s friends have negative
attitudes toward studying, it is likely that the student
will not study much either because of conformity
pressures. Whether the student conforms to perceived
social pressures will depend largely on the extent to
which the student is concerned about what those individuals
think. In other words, the perceived social
pressure is the result of the beliefs of other people
(friends, family, etc.) concerning how the individual
should behave as well as how motivated the individual
is to comply with those people. For example, even
if there is perceived pressure from parents to study,
the student may be more motivated to comply with
friends’ wishes. Studies have demonstrated that the
consideration of perceived social pressures in addition
to attitudes enhances the prediction of behavioral
intention, and thus behavior. However, research shows
that some people, as well as some behaviors, are more
influenced by social pressure than others.
Typically, TRA researchers ask participants to report
their attitudes concerning a specific behavior, including
its likely consequences, the perceived social pressures
from important others concerning the behavior,

728———Recency Effect
and their intention toward performing the behavior.
Researchers then contact participants later to ask them
whether they have actually engaged in the behavior.
Such research generally supports the theory. Behavioral
intentions are better predictors of behavior than
are attitudes alone, and considering perceived social
pressures in addition to attitudes usually increases prediction
of a person’s behavioral intention. Therefore,
all the components of the TRA are important.
Implications
The TRA has been used to predict a wide range of
behaviors relating to health, voting, consumer purchases,
and religious involvement. Although the TRA
predicts behavior more successfully than do models
that only consider attitudes, the TRA is only applicable
to behavior that is deliberate and under the person’s
control. In instances when there are barriers to
engaging in a behavior (for example, students who
just do not have enough time to study even though
they and their friends have positive attitudes toward
studying), a recent extension of the TRA, the theory of
planned behavior, must be applied.
Laura A. Brannon
Valerie K. Pilling
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Attitudes;
Normative Influence; Theory of Planned Behavior
Further Readings
Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1975). Belief, attitude, intention
and behavior: An introduction to theory and research.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (1980). Understanding attitudes and
predicting social behavior. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
Sheppard, B. H., Hartwick, J., & Warshaw, P. R. (1988). The
theory of reasoned action: A meta-analysis of past research
with recommendations for modifications and future
research. Journal of Consumer Research, 15, 325–343.
RECENCY EFFECT
Definition
The recency effect is an order of presentation effect
that occurs when more recent information is better
remembered and receives greater weight in forming a
judgment than does earlier-presented information.
Recency effects in social psychology have been most
thoroughly studied in impression formation research.
Typically, researchers investigate how impressions are
formed on the basis of sequentially presented information.
For example, a recency effect occurs if a person
who is described in terms of three positive traits followed
by three negative traits is subsequently evaluated
more negatively than is a person described by
exactly the same traits but presented in a reverse order
(negative traits followed by positive traits). The opposite
of a recency effect is a primacy effect, when early
information has a disproportionate influence on subsequent
impressions compared to more recent information.
Both recency and primacy effects have important
consequences in many everyday impression formation
judgments. One might wonder, for example, whether
the most effective strategy in a job interview is to present
your best points first (expecting a primacy effect),
or present your best points last (expecting a recency
effect)? To answer such questions, we need to understand
the mechanisms that produce recency effects.
Mechanism
The most plausible explanation of recency effects
emphasizes memory processes: More recent information
is simply better remembered and so more available
to be used when forming a judgment. Numerous
studies have found that immediate past events are usually
better remembered than are more distant past
events. There are, however, a number of specific conditions
that influence the likelihood of recency effects.
Facilitating Conditions
Two kinds of factors seem to influence the presence
and strength of recency effects in impression formation:
(1) how the task is structured and presented (task
factors) and (2) how judges process the available information
(processing factors). Task factors include the
length and distribution of the information array over
time. When the information array is long, or there is a
long delay or other activity interposed between early
and late items of information, or judgments are formed
immediately after the presentation of the last information,
recency effects are more likely, simply because
judges will disproportionately rely on recent and better
remembered details. In contrast, when the information

sequence is short and is presented without interruption,
primacy effects are the more likely result.
The way judges process the available information
is also important in explaining recency effects. When
judges are instructed to use step-by-step processing
and update their impressions after each piece of information
is received, primacy effects are reduced and
recency effects become more likely. Recency effects
are also more likely when judges do not know that
they need to form an impression until after all the
information is received. In the absence of an a priori
impression formation goal, judges must rely on their
memories for input into the impression formation
judgment. Under such circumstances recent, better
remembered information receives more weight and a
recency effect results. In contrast, when judges know
from the beginning that impression formation is the
goal, a primacy effect is more likely.
Simon Laham
Joseph P. Forgas
See also Heuristic Processing; Memory; Person Perception;
Primacy Effect, Memory
Further Readings
Jones, E. E., & Goethals, G. R. (1972). Order effects in
impression formation: Attribution context and the nature
of the entity. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelly,
R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution:
Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 27–46).
Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM
Altruism refers to behaviors that are performed for the
sake of benefiting others at a cost to oneself. Reciprocal
altruism is when altruistic behaviors are performed
because they increase the likelihood of repayment in
the future. For quite some time the presence of altruistic
behaviors in animals and humans was a genuine
puzzle for the Darwinian account of evolution through
natural selection. It seemed impossible for an organism
that acts unselfishly for the sake of another (nonrelated)
organism to benefit in any way that would
encourage that organism’s reproductive success. This
is simply because selfish (non-altruistic) individuals
Reciprocal Altruism———729
would on average have more resources than altruistic
individuals. After many generations, natural selection
seemed to dictate that any genetic basis for altruistic
behavior should be eliminated from a population. The
theory of reciprocal altruism was first described by
the evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, as a solution
to the problem of how altruistic behaviors directed
toward nonkin could have emerged through natural
selection.
Trivers’s insight was that often an individual could
act in such a manner (e.g., by sharing food) as to
increase its chance of survival if it could depend on
similar altruistic behavior from another individual at
some point in the future. For the strategy of reciprocal
altruism to work, however, a few conditions must be
met: Individuals must interact more than once (so that
the opportunity to be repaid can arise), individuals
must be able to recognize other individuals reliably,
and individuals must be able to remember the past
behavior of those with whom it interacts. Because of
these constraints, reciprocal altruism is less common
than is kin-directed altruism, where individuals act for
the good of individuals who share their genes.
Reciprocal altruism is often discussed in the
context of game theory, particularly the Prisoner’s
Dilemma Game. This Prisoner’s Dilemma provides an
elegant way to test cooperative behavior in the simplified
context of a game. An influential analysis by the
political scientist Robert Axelrod and the evolutionary
biologist William Hamilton demonstrated that in this
game, in which two isolated “prisoners” must decide
whether to “cooperate” and refuse to confess, or to
“defect” and confess for a lesser sentence, the most
effective strategy (submitted by the mathematical psychologist
Anatol Rapoport)—that is, the strategy with
the best payoff across repeated interactions—was a
tit-for-tat strategy—a strategy that repays in kind. If
your partner cooperates, you return the favor. If he
or she cheats, you do the same. Because this strategy is
essentially reciprocal altruism, Axelrod and Hamilton’s
analysis was able to demonstrate that evolution could
easily have selected for genes that might encourage
such altruistic behavior.
It is often remarked that reciprocal altruism is not
genuine altruism because it has the seemingly selfish
goals of repayment, whereas true altruism is usually
defined as self-sacrifice for the sole sake of benefiting
others. The fact that altruistic behaviors could emerge
through natural selection via the mechanism of reciprocal
altruism, however, says nothing about the motives

730———Reciprocity Norm
of the organism engaged in the altruistic act. It is
important to recognize that reciprocal altruism is a
theory of how cooperation could have evolved, not a
theory of the psychological states of the altruist.
David A. Pizarro
See also Altruism; Evolutionary Psychology; Helping Behavior;
Moral Reasoning; Prisoner’s Dilemma; Prosocial Behavior
Further Readings
Pizarro, D. (2000). Nothing more than feelings? The role of
emotions in moral judgment. Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour, 30, 355–375.
Trivers, R. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism.
Quarterly Review of Biology, 46, 35–37.
RECIPROCITY NORM
Definition
Reciprocity norm is the rule of human interaction that
says people need to reciprocate the action of another
person. Simply, this means that when a person is given
a gift (which can take any number of forms) by
another, the person must repay the gift. Every investigated
society has a version of the reciprocity norm.
The reciprocity norm has also been termed a web of
indebtedness by cultural anthropologists.
The reciprocity norm’s presence in every investigated
society points to its importance and function.
The reciprocity norm has many benefits for society,
such as reciprocal altruism. There are also important
sanctions for those who do not follow the norm in its
prescribed mannerisms (which can vary from society
to society). It is important that one is aware of how the
norm can be abused.
Aspects of the Norm
The fact that the norm is present in every investigated
society suggests that it is a vital component of human
interaction. Evolutionary psychologists have suggested
that reciprocity was clearly present in human
beings’ ancestral past and has contributed to human
survival. They point to various experiments where
reciprocity helps explain the mystery of altruism. “If
you scratch my back, I will scratch yours” is common
colloquialism that is based on reciprocity.
Reciprocity will occur regardless of whether the
reciprocation is done publicly or privately. Studies
have investigated the extent to which people will reciprocate
even if the original gift-giver is completely
unable to tell if the gift was reciprocated. It has been
found that people reciprocate the gift, although gift
recipients donated slightly less than they might have
in a more public situation.
People are very good at detecting cheating in social
situations, such as receiving a favor without repaying
it. Humans excel in tasks in which the problem is set
up as a social cheating scenario, whereas the same
task set up as a purely numerical task results in much
worse performance.
Other limits on the potential for cheating are
enforced by society. Societies have various sanctions
for people who break the reciprocity norm, ranging
from calling someone a “mooch,” to social isolation,
to serious legal consequences, which includes death in
some cultures. Third parties will often intervene on
behalf of someone who has just been shorted by a
violation of the reciprocity norm, even if it means
incurring some penalty of their own.
Abuses of the Norm
Importantly, the reciprocity norm itself does not have
rules of interaction in most cultures (but see the crosscultural
section later for an important caveat); instead,
the norm simply says that the gift must be reciprocated
in some fashion. This leaves open the potential
for very uneven exchanges.
Dennis Regan clearly demonstrated this effect by
setting up an experiment that was purportedly on art
appreciation. In this experiment, a participant would
come in and rate a painting. Another “participant” (who
actually was working for the experiment—also known
as a confederate) was also there to rate art. During the
course of the experiment, the confederate gave the
participant an unsolicited gift of a can of Coca-Cola.
The confederate later asked the participant to purchase
raffle tickets. Regan found that the gift of the
Coke doubled the number of tickets purchased over a
control condition. This is important because the cost
of the Coke was significantly less than the cost of a
single ticket. In fact, the confederate was able to get a
500% return on the cost of the gift in terms of raffle
tickets purchased.
Also, it does not matter if the original gift was not
wanted, or even forced onto the receiver; they are still
obligated to reciprocate. This has been demonstrated

in a number of experimental studies; however, perhaps
the best example is the Hare Krishnas.
The Hare Krishnas are a religious organization
that used reciprocity very effectively in the 1970s and
1980s. The Krishnas would give a small gift to a traveler,
often a flower, and then solicit the traveler to
make a donation to their religion. The travelers would
begrudgingly give the donation, and then could often
be seen throwing the flowers away in disgust. As evidenced
by their facial expressions and the frequency
they threw the flowers away, the travelers had been
forced into giving a donation to a religion that most
did not support through the reciprocity norm.
To date, it appears that there is only one limit on
reciprocity: when the gift-giver asks the receiver to
participate in an antisocial activity. In these cases, the
norm of reciprocity does not increase compliance
with the request. However, this occurs only in a
strictly antisocial activity, such as abetting cheating on
a test. More ambiguous circumstances show the
increase in compliance to a reciprocity-based request.
Cross-Cultural Aspects
Another important topic when discussing reciprocity
norm is its cross-cultural relevance. It appears that reciprocity
occurs in every known society; however, not
all societies have the same rules regarding reciprocity.
Some have formal, ritualized rules that parse out the
debts. For instance, Vartan Bhanji is a ritual form of
gift exchange in Pakistan and India. This system
ensures that there are no outstanding debts left unpaid.
The gifts that are exchanged are often weighed out to
ensure the equality of the exchange. Other societies,
such as the one in the United States, do not have formalized
rules. Despite the lack of formalized rules,
there is a clear norm of reciprocation, and when one
breaks the norm, there are consequences.
John Edlund
See also Cheater-Detection Mechanism; Conformity; Norms,
Prescriptive and Descriptive; Persuasion
Further Readings
Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice.
Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment
and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25,
63–87.
Regan, D. (1971). Effects of a favor and liking on
compliance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
7, 627–639.
REDUCTIONISM
Definition
Reductionism———731
Reductionism means that complex principles can be
reduced to simpler or more fundamental principles.
Social psychologists often oppose reductionism and
emphasize instead the social context that surrounds
the individual. There are two basic types of reductionism:
psychological and methodological.
Psychological Reductionism
One can often identify reductionism with the mindbody
problem, which is the question about the relationship
between mental and physiological processes.
Psychological reductionism is the idea that one can
completely explain the human psyche by breaking it
down into several general principles. Social reductionism
explains social events in terms of the qualities
of the individuals who are involved. For example, a
social reductionist would explain the aggression of a
football crowd by saying that it is made up of aggressive
individuals, whereas another explanation might
be that when you take ordinary, non-aggressive people
and place in them in a certain social context, they act
as an aggressive group.
Proponents of the neuronal reductionism argue that
thoughts and feelings consist simply of electrical or
chemical changes in the brain, whereas proponents of
genetic reductionism argue that genes alone determine
human behavior. Reductionism in social psychology
also tries to explain social psychological group
processes by looking at individual differences (e.g.,
type A personality) rather than at contextual factors
(e.g., frustrations).
Sociobiology embraces several reductionistic
approaches to explain human behavior. Some social
psychologists, however, argue that breaking psychological
processes to individual, neuronal, or genetic
levels disregards meaningful information about the
social context and history of an individual. The constant
tension between those who emphasize basic
principles and those who emphasize social context has
led to divergent streams of investigation throughout
history.

732———Reference Group
Methodological Reductionism
Methodological reductionism deals with the selection
of one theory among other competing theories.
All other things being equal, the best theory is the
most parsimonious one. Methodological reductionism
is often identified with Ockham’s razor (named
after William of Ockham), which proposes that if
competing theories have equal predictive powers,
you should choose the one that makes the fewest
assumptions, shaving off those theories that make
no difference in the observable predictions of the
explanatory hypothesis.
Modern Developments
In the recent past, there has been a movement within
social psychology toward an interactionist approach,
which acknowledges the interaction of individual factors
(e.g., brain activity, genetics) with the social factors.
For instance, social neuroscience proposes the
multilevel analysis of psychological factors, trying to
combine psychobiological knowledge with social psychological
knowledge. This idea is different from the
traditional reductionism, in which lower-level processes
replace upper-level social processes.
In general, one can also see the current tendency
toward using multiple methods in social psychology
as an effort to bring together sociobiological knowledge
with the knowledge gained through the traditional
experiments or surveys.
See also Social Cognitive Neuroscience, Social
Neuroscience; Sociobiology
Further Readings
Igor Grossmann
Brad J. Bushman
Ariew, R. (1976). Ockham’s razor: A historical and
philosophical analysis of Ockham’s principle of
parsimony. Urbana: University of Illinois.
Berntson, G. G., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004). Multilevel
analyses and reductionism: Why social psychologists
should care about neuroscience and vice versa.
In J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson (Eds.), Essays
in social neuroscience (pp. 107–120). Cambridge:
MIT Press.
REFERENCE GROUP
A reference group is any group that people use as a
point of comparison to form their own attitudes, values,
beliefs, and behaviors. For example, new college
students may use older (and presumably wiser) college
students as a reference group to form their attitudes
about politics, what clothes to wear, how much
alcohol to drink, what music to listen to, what restaurants
to frequent, and so on. In one classic study, college
women attending Bennington College in Vermont
between 1935 and 1939 reported their political attitudes.
These women came from politically conservative,
wealthy families who could afford to send their
daughters to a private college during the Great Depression.
At Bennington, these women encountered faculty
members and older students who were much
more politically liberal than their parents were. The
new students used these faculty and older students
(rather than their parents) as a reference group for
their own political attitudes. The students in the study
consistently voted against their families’ political
ideology, even 50 years later.
People also use reference groups to evaluate other
people. For example, a student might find a professor
to be unintelligent. That judgment is not made in comparison
with the entire population (relative to which
that professor may be quite smart) but, rather, in comparison
with other professors (relative to whom that
professor may not be very smart). In evaluating
members of stereotyped groups people tend to use
members of that group, rather than the population as a
whole, as the reference group.
Finally, people use reference groups to evaluate
themselves. When people are trying to self-enhance,
they tend to compare themselves with others who are
less skilled than they are. When people are trying to
gain an accurate understanding of their abilities, they
tend to compare themselves with others who are more
skilled than they are.
Although people use different reference groups for
different purposes, they are probably not aware they
are doing this. Comparisons with different reference
groups occur largely at an unconscious level.
The reference group effect can pose significant
problems when researchers design psychological questionnaires.
For example, questionnaires designed to
measure people’s independence by asking them how

independently they feel or behave do not work well
across different cultures. This is because behavior that
would be considered independent in collectivist societies
(e.g., Japan, China), would be considered much
less independent in individualist societies (e.g., United
States, Western Europe). However, a person filling out
a survey asking how much the person agrees with the
statement “I tend to act independently” is not thinking
about how independent he or she is relative to other
people in general, but rather in comparison with other
people in their society.
Michael E. W. Varnum
Brad J. Bushman
See also Bennington College Study; Cultural Differences;
Person Perception; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Heine, S. J., Lehman, D. R., Peng, K., & Greenholtz, J.
(2002). What’s wrong with cross-cultural comparisons
of subjective Likert scales?: The reference-group
effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
82(6), 903–918.
Sherif, M., & Sherif, C. W. (1964), Reference groups:
Exploration into conformity and deviation of adolescent.
New York: Harper & Row.
REGRET
Definition
Regret is the negative emotion that people experience
when realizing or imagining that their present situation
would have been better had they decided or acted
differently. Regret thus originates in a comparison
between outcomes of a chosen option and the nonchosen
alternatives in which the latter outperforms the
former. This painful emotion reflects on one’s own
causal role in the current, suboptimal situation. The
emotion regret is accompanied by feelings that one
should have known better, by having a sinking feeling,
by thoughts about the mistake one has made and the
opportunities lost, by tendencies to kick oneself and to
correct one’s mistake, by desires to undo the event and
get a second chance, and by actually doing this if given
the opportunity. Put differently, regret is experienced
Regret———733
as an aversive state that focuses one’s attention on
one’s own causal role in the occurrence of a negative
outcome. It is thus a cognitively based emotion that
motivates one to think about how the negative event
came about and how one could change it, or how one
could prevent its future occurrence.
Relation to Decision Making
As such, regret is unique in its relation to decision
making and hence to feelings of responsibility for the
negative outcome. One only experiences regret over a
bad outcome when at some point in time one could
have prevented the outcome from happening. Of course,
other emotions can also be the result of decisions; for
example, one may be disappointed with a decision outcome,
or happy about the process by which one made
a choice. But, all other emotions can also be experienced
in situations in which no decisions are made,
whereas regret is exclusively tied to decisions. For
example, one can be disappointed with the weather
and happy with a birthday present, but one cannot
regret these instances (unless the disappointing present
was suggested by oneself). Thus, in regret, personal
agency and responsibility are central, whereas in other
aversive emotions such as anger, fear, and disappointment,
agency for the negative outcomes is either undetermined,
in the environment, or in another agent.
Hence, regret is the prototypical decision-related emotion
in the sense that it is felt in response to a decision
and that it can influence decision making.
The relation between regret and decision making is
also apparent in regret’s connection to counterfactual
thinking. Counterfactual thoughts are thoughts about
what might have been. It is important to note that not
all counterfactual thoughts produce regret, just specifically
those that change a bad outcome into a good
one by changing a decision or a choice. Thus, when it
rains on the way home from work and a person gets
wet, the person feels regret when he or she generates
a counterfactual thought in which the person brought
an umbrella, but not when he or she generates a counterfactual
in which it would be a beautiful day. In
the latter case, counterfactual thoughts about better
weather that could have been would result in disappointment
but not in regret (there was nothing the person
could have done about the weather, so there is
nothing to regret).

734———Regret
Intensity of Reaction
Experiences of regret can be the result of a negative
outcome that was produced by a decision to act or
a decision not to act. In other words, one may regret
sins of omission and sins of commission. Early regret
research focused on whether people regret their actions
(commissions) more than their inactions (omissions).
This research indicated that people tend to regret their
actions more than their inactions. Later research
showed that which type of regret is most intense
(action regret or inaction regret) depends on the time
that has elapsed since the regretted decision. In the
short run, people tend to feel more regret about
their actions (the stupid things they did or bought), but
in the long run, they tend to feel more regret over their
inactions (the school they never finished, the career or
romance never pursued). This temporal pattern to
regret is mainly of the result of several factors that
decrease the regret for action over time (e.g., people
take more reparative action and engage in more psychological
repair work for action regrets than for inaction
regrets), and factors that increase the regret for
inaction over time (e.g., over time people may forget
why they did not act on opportunities, making the
inaction inexplicable). An additional factor producing
this temporal pattern is that people forget regrettable
actions easier than regrettable failures to act, resulting
in a greater cognitive availability for failures to act.
Another factor determining the intensity of regret
is the justifiability of the decision. People feel most
regret over decisions that are difficult to justify. Decisions
that are based on solid reasons produce less regret
than do decisions that are not well thought through.
This justifiability may also explain when actions are
more regretted than inactions and when the reverse is
true. Consider the following example. There are two
coaches of soccer teams. One of them decides to field
the same players as last week; the other decides to
change the team. Now both teams play and lose. Which
coach would feel most regret? Research showed that
participants point at the active coach, the one who
changed his or her team, as the one who will feel most
regret. This clearly shows more regret for action than
for inaction (replicating the traditional action-inaction
difference). But now consider the same situation, but
with the additional information that the current decision
to change the team or not follows a prior defeat.
Who would now feel most regret, the coach who
actively tries to better the situation by changing the
team, or the coach who simply fields the same players
that lost the previous game? In this case, participants
point to the passive coach as the one feeling most
regret. This decision was clearly ill justified and therefore
produces more regret. A losing record calls for
action, and inexplicable inaction produces more regret
in situations that call for action. Thus, both decisions
to act and decisions to forgo action may result
in regret. The intensity of regret depends on the time
since the decision and the justifiability of this decision.
Influence
Psychologists became interested in studying regret
partly because it is a passive emotional reaction to bad
decisions, but also because it is a major influence on
day-to-day decision making. This influence can take
two forms. First, the experience of regret may produce
a behavioral inclination to reverse one’s decision or
undo the consequences. Second, decision makers may
anticipate possible future regret when making decisions,
and choose in such a way that this future regret
will be minimal.
The influence of experienced retrospective regret on
ensuing behavior can be functional. The aversive experience
prompts people to undo the cause of the regret.
For example, after buying a product that proves to be
suboptimal, regret can motivate a person to ask for his
or her money back, or it may result in apologies in the
case of interpersonal regrets. In both instances regret
can help people satisfy their needs. It protects people
from wasting money and helps them maintain good
social relationships. In addition, regret can be functional
in the sense that the painful self-reflective nature
of the experience is one of various ways by which
people learn. The feeling of regret over bad decisions
and wrong choices makes them stand out in people’s
memory and helps people make better decisions in the
future. This is also shown by the finding that people
tend to feel most regret about things that they can
still improve in the future, sometimes referred to as
the opportunity principle in regret. Another functional
aspect of regret is that it stems from its influence on
cognitions. Instead of going back to the shop to undo
the regretted purchase or apologizing to the person central
in the regret, the person can imagine various ways
in which the current situation could have been more
favorable to him or her. So regret motivates people to
engage in reparative action and helps them remember
their mistakes and missed opportunities; by making

cognitively available counterfactual worlds in which
one would have arrived at a better outcome, it also prepares
people to behave more appropriately when they
are confronted with similar choices in the future.
The idea that people, when making decisions,
might consider future emotional reactions to possible
decision outcomes has some history in research on
decision making, starting with economists studying
rational choice in the early 1980s. We now know that
the influence of anticipated future regret on current
decision making can take several forms. First, people
may avoid deciding so they can avoid making the
wrong decision. However, this inactive attitude may
result in regret as well because in the long run inactions
produce most regret. People may also avoid or
delay their decisions because they want to gather
more information so they can make better decisions.
Another way in which anticipated regret can influence
decision making is related to post-decisional feedback.
Regret stems from comparisons between outcomes
of the chosen and nonchosen options, so decision makers
can try to avoid regret by avoiding feedback about
nonchosen options. In real-life decisions, people may
occasionally receive information about foregone outcomes.
For example, people choosing to invest in particular
stocks will learn about future stock prices for
the chosen stocks, but also for the nonchosen stocks.
Likewise, gamblers who decide not to bet on the long
shot in a horse race will learn after the race is over the
position at which this horse finished and, thus, whether
this option would have been better. In these cases, one
can expect to feel regret if the decision goes awry. For
some quite important life decisions, however, such
feedback is often not present. If a person decides to go
into business with someone or to marry someone, the
person will never find out how successful each enterprise
would have been had he or she chosen another
partner or spouse, or none at all. In these cases, there is
only feedback on the chosen option.
The knowledge that this future feedback will or
will not be present influences current decision making,
as revealed in the following example. Imagine
that you have the choice between a sure $100 or a
50% chance of $200 (depending on the toss of a coin).
If you opt for the sure thing (the $100), you normally
do not learn whether the gamble (the 50% of winning
$200) would have been better. If you opt for the gamble,
you will always learn the outcome of the gamble
and the outcome of the sure thing. Hence, you will
always know whether the sure thing would have been
better. Thus, the sure thing protects you from regret,
whereas the gamble carries some risk of regret. In this
case, the anticipation of regret promotes a preference
for the sure thing, revealing risk aversion. However,
when the outcome of the gamble will become known
irrespective of one’s choice (e.g., the coin will always
be tossed), one may also end up regretting the choice
for the sure $100. This may lead to an increased preference
for the gamble, revealing risk seeking. Thus,
the anticipation of regret may produce risk-seeking and
risk-avoiding choices, depending on which alternative
minimizes the future regret. Research has shown that
these anticipations of regret can influence many reallife
decisions, such as stock market investments,
salary negotiations, lottery play, prenatal screening
decisions, and condom use.
Implications
Regret is an aversive emotional state that is related to
counterfactual thoughts about how one’s present situation
would have been better had one chosen or acted
differently. Therefore, people are motivated to avoid
or minimize post-decisional regret. This has several
implications for decision making because people may
employ different strategies to prevent regret from happening
or to cope with regret when it is experienced.
In principle, the effects of regret can be considered
rational because they protect the decision maker from
the aversive consequences of the experience of regret.
There might be cases, however, in which an aversion
to regret leads one to avoid counterfactual feedback
and, hence, results in reduced learning from experience.
This might be considered irrational. But, irrespective
of this rationality question, regret has shown
to be a fundamental emotion in the behavior decisions
of most, if not all, people.
Marcel Zeelenberg
See also Counterfactual Thinking; Decision Making;
Emotion; Moral Emotions
Further Readings
Regret———735
Gilovich, T., & Medvec, V. H. (1995). The experience of
regret: What, when, and why. Psychological Review,
102, 379–395.
Landman, J. (1993). Regret: The persistence of the possible.
New York: Oxford University Press.

736———Regulatory Focus Theory
Loomes, G., & Sugden, R. (1982). Regret theory: An
alternative theory of rational choice under uncertainty.
Economic Journal, 92, 805–824.
Roese, N. J. (2005). If only. New York: Broadway Books.
Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2007). A theory of regret
regulation 1.0. Journal of Consumer Psychology,
17(1), 3–18.
REGULATORY FOCUS THEORY
For centuries, the hedonic principle that people
approach pleasure and avoid pain has been the dominant
motivational principle for many disciplines and
across all areas of psychology. Even when Sigmund
Freud discussed the need to go beyond the pleasure
principle because people were controlled by the
reality principle—environmental demands—he was
simply modifying the pleasure principle such that
avoiding pain became almost equal in importance to
approaching pleasure. But is that the end of the story
of motivation? How does the hedonic principle itself
work? Might not there be different ways to approach
pleasure and avoid pain that tell us something about
motivation beyond the hedonic principle per se?
Regulatory focus theory was developed in response to
these questions.
Evolutionary Perspective
Regulatory focus theory starts with an evolutionary
perspective on motivation. What are the survival
motives? To survive, people (and other animals) need
both nurturance and security, support or nourishment
from the environment (often provided by others), and
protection from dangers in the environment (social
and nonsocial dangers). Regulatory focus theory
proposes that two distinct regulatory systems have
developed to deal with each of these distinct survival
concerns. When people succeed in satisfying a concern
they experience pleasure, and when they fail they
experience pain. Thus, both of these regulatory systems
involve approaching pleasure and avoiding pain.
But this does not mean that the motivational principles
underlying these systems are the same. Regulatory
focus theory emphasizes the motivational significance
of the differences in how actors approach pleasure and
avoid pain when they regulate within these distinct
systems.
Regulatory focus theory associates the nurturance
motive with the development of promotion focus concerns
with accomplishment, with fulfilling hopes and
aspirations (ideals). It associates the security motive
with the development of prevention focus concerns
with safety, with meeting duties and obligations
(oughts). Once again, people can succeed or fail to fulfill
their promotion or prevention focus concerns. But
the emotional and motivational consequences of success
or failure in these two regulatory focus systems
are not the same. When people are in the promotion
focus system (either from a chronic predisposition to
be in that system or from a current situation activating
that system), they experience cheerfulness-related
emotions following success (e.g., happy, joyful) and
dejection-related emotions following failure (e.g., sad,
discouraged). The pleasure of success and the pain of
failure are not the same in the prevention focus system.
People experience quiescence-related emotions following
success (e.g., calm, relaxed) and agitationrelated
emotions following failure (e.g., nervous,
tense). Individuals in a promotion focus also appraise
objects and events in general along a cheerfulnessdejection
dimension more readily than along a
quiescence-agitation dimension, whereas the opposite
is true for individuals in a prevention focus.
Strategic Preferences
Success and failure in promotion versus prevention is
also not the same motivationally. To understand why
this is, a critical difference between promotion and
prevention proposed by regulatory focus theory needs
to be introduced. Regulatory focus theory proposes
that when people pursue goals, their strategic preferences
are different in a promotion versus a prevention
focus. The theory proposes that individuals in a promotion
focus prefer to use eager strategies to pursue
goals—strategies of advancement (a gain), which
move the actor from neutral (the status quo) to a positive
state. In contrast, individuals in a prevention focus
prefer to use vigilant strategies to pursue goals (a nonloss)—strategies
of carefulness, which stop the actor
from moving from neutral to a negative state. Why
this difference in strategic preferences? Research has
found that individuals in a promotion focus experience
a world of gains and nongains because their concerns
are about accomplishments and aspirations. Strategic
eagerness is also about ensuring gains and not wanting
to miss gains, so eagerness should fit a promotion

focus. Individuals in a prevention focus, however,
experience a world of nonlosses and losses because
their concerns are about safety and meeting obligations.
Strategic vigilance is also about trying to be
careful and not wanting to commit mistakes that produce
a loss, so vigilance should fit a prevention focus.
Indeed, many studies have found that individuals in a
promotion focus prefer to use eager strategies to pursue
goals whereas individuals in a prevention focus
prefer to use vigilant strategies.
This difference in strategic preferences when
people are in a promotion versus a prevention focus is
why success and failure in promotion versus prevention
is not the same motivationally (or emotionally).
When individuals succeed in a promotion focus, it
increases their eagerness (experienced as highintensity
joy). In contrast, when individuals succeed in
a prevention focus, it reduces their vigilance (experienced
as low-intensity calmness). When individuals
fail in a promotion focus, it reduces their eagerness
(experienced as low-intensity sadness). In contrast,
when individuals fail in a prevention focus, it increases
their vigilance (experienced as high-intensity nervousness).
Evidence indicates that this regulatory focus
difference in the motivational impact of success and
failure influences postperformance expectations as
well. Consistent with people attempting to maintain
the strategic state that sustains their focus, individuals
in a promotion state raise their expectations for the
next trial after success on the initial trial of a task much
more than do those in a prevention state (because
optimism increases eagerness but reduces vigilance),
whereas individuals in a prevention state lower their
expectations for the next trial after failure on the initial
trial much more than do those in a promotion state
(because pessimism increases vigilance but reduces
eagerness).
Regulatory focus differences in strategic preferences
have other effects as well. Often the differences
are revealed when there is a conflict between different
choices or different ways to proceed on a task. One
conflict is between being risky or conservative when
making a judgment. When people are uncertain, they
can take a chance and accept something as true,
thereby risking an error of commission. Alternatively,
they can be cautious and reject something as true.
Studies on memory and judgment have found that
individuals in a promotion focus take more risks than
do those in a prevention focus. Consistent with individuals
in a promotion focus being more willing to
Regulatory Focus Theory———737
consider new alternatives under conditions of uncertainty
rather than simply sticking with the known
(albeit satisfactory) current state of affairs, evidence
shows that they are more creative than are those in a
prevention focus and are more willing to change and
try something new when given the opportunity. The
trade-off, however, is that prevention focus individuals
are more committed to their choices and thus stick
to them even when obstacles arise.
Other Conflicts and Implications
Another conflict on many tasks is between speed (or
quantity) and accuracy (or quality). Individuals in a
promotion focus emphasize speed more than accuracy
whereas individuals in a prevention focus emphasize
accuracy more than speed. A third conflict concerns
whether to represent objects or events in a more global
and abstract manner or in a more local and concrete
manner. Evidence indicates that individuals in a promotion
focus are more likely to represent objects and
events in a global and abstract manner (as well as more
temporally distant) than in a local and concrete manner,
whereas the opposite is true for those in a prevention
focus.
There are additional implications of the difference
between a promotion focus on gains versus a prevention
focus on nonlosses. Studies have found, for example,
that promotion focus individuals perform better
when success on a task is represented as adding points
toward a desired score or as attaining some desired
prize rather than when it is represented as not subtracting
points or as maintaining some desired prize. Other
studies have found that the nature of ingroup versus
outgroup bias varies by regulatory focus. For individuals
in a promotion focus, ingroup members are treated
with a positive bias (“promoting us”), but there is little
bias regarding outgroup members. For individuals in
a prevention focus, however, outgroup members are
treated with a negative bias (“preventing them”), but
there is little bias regarding ingroup members.
Motivational theories in psychology have mostly
emphasized people’s needs and desires for particular
outcomes, from physiological needs to belongingness
needs to achievement needs to autonomy needs. Most
generally, the emphasis has been on the hedonic needs
for pleasure and against pain. Regulatory focus theory
differs from this traditional emphasis in highlighting
people’s desires to use certain strategies in goal
pursuit—an emphasis on the how of goal pursuit rather

738———Rejection
than on the consequences of goal pursuit. Studies that
have tested regulatory focus theory have shown that
promotion and prevention strategic preferences are a
major determinant of the motivational and emotional
lives of people.
E. Tory Higgins
See also Emotion; Goals; Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Self-
Discrepancy Theory
Further Readings
Crowe, E., & Higgins, E. T. (1997). Regulatory focus and
strategic inclinations: Promotion and prevention in
decision-making. Organizational Behavior and Human
Decision Processes, 69, 117–132.
Forster, J., Higgins, E. T., & Idson, L. C. (1998). Approach
and avoidance strength during goal attainment: Regulatory
focus and the “goal looms larger” effect. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1115–1131.
Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American
Psychologist, 52, 1280–1300.
Higgins, E. T., Friedman, R. S., Harlow, R. E., Idson,
L. C., Ayduk, O. N., & Taylor, A. (2000). Achievement
orientations from subjective histories of success:
Promotion pride versus prevention pride. European
Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 1–23.
Liberman, N., Idson, L. C., Camacho, S. J., & Higgins, E. T.
(1999). Promotion and prevention choices between
stability and change. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 77, 1135–1145.
REJECTION
Definition
Defined broadly, social rejection refers to one’s perceived
reduction of social acceptance, group inclusion,
or sense of belonging. Social psychologists study real,
imagined, and implied rejection in a variety of forms
and contexts. Explicit rejection, exclusion, and ostracism
are different kinds of rejection than can occur within
groups or dyadic relationships of a romantic or platonic
nature. Rejection typically produces negative
immediate effects and leads to either antisocial
or prosocial behavior, depending on the context of
subsequent interactions.
History
Even though philosophers, writers, and laypeople have
contemplated the nature of social rejection for centuries,
social scientists had not formulated cohesive
theories about social rejection and acceptance until
relatively recently. In the 1950s, psychologists such as
Stanley Schachter began examining the motivations
that underlie social contact, and Abraham Maslow, in
particular, argued that individuals seek relationships
to fulfill a need to belong—belonging being a fundamental
need secondary only to nourishment and safety
needs. By the 1960s, psychologists began fleshing out
attachment theories, which argued that parental rejection
powerfully influences children’s thoughts, feelings,
and behaviors. Notwithstanding this early work
on belonging needs and attachment, social psychological
research examining the characteristics, antecedents,
and consequences of rejection has only come of age in
the last decade.
Complexities of Rejection
Contemporary social psychologists study rejection
in an array of forms and contexts. Rejection may be
active or passive and involve physical or psychological
distancing or exclusion. For example, individuals
may be actively rejected when others voice negative
views of them or tell them that their presence is not
wanted. In comparison, individuals may be passively
rejected when others pay little attention to them or
ignore them altogether (e.g., the silent treatment).
Physical exclusion from a group elicits feelings of
rejection in most circumstances (e.g., when an individual
is purposefully left out), and psychological
exclusion (e.g., when one’s opinions are discounted or
ignored) is also experienced as a rejection.
Rejection may be derived from individuals or
groups, and the nature of these relationships influences
the severity of the rejection. Romantic partners, friends,
acquaintances, strangers, and group members can all
serve as a source of rejection. Although the causes and
characteristics of these rejections are arguably different
on average (e.g., a stranger’s insult has different
connotations than that of a friend), the most powerful
rejections are dispatched by individuals or groups that
are important to a person. In other words, the more
important a relationship is to a person, the more painful
its weakening or dissolution will be.

Similarly, the further one falls in liking after a
rejection, the more robust the consequences. In other
words, the change in a person’s opinion of another has
more impact than the absolute level of that opinion.
When an individual’s positive initial opinion of
another person dwindles to a negative opinion over
time, this person will feel worse than had the individual
always thought poorly of him or her. Likewise,
even a drop in positive regard can feel like a rejection.
A close friend who is suddenly treated like a casual
acquaintance may feel rejected even though general
liking remains. Consequently, initial liking needs to
be taken into account when considering the impact of
a rejection.
As discussed previously, social rejection (as well
as social acceptance) is a multifaceted term that
encompasses a number of behaviors and experiences
that occur in a variety of contexts. To predict rejection
outcomes with the most accuracy, a researcher would
require knowledge of the source, the individual’s relationship
with the source, the nature of the rejection,
and so forth. Most researchers find this narrow vision
too restrictive and instead choose to blend or mix
these variants of rejection together in an effort to generate
broad theories that speak to the nature of social
rejection more generally. Most of this research has
addressed the responses to and consequences of social
rejection.
Responses to Rejection
Immediate reactions to rejection are typically negative.
Rejected individuals report feeling worse about
themselves in general. In addition to lowered selfesteem,
people usually describe their feelings as hurt.
Furthermore, people seem to experience social pain
and distress after a rejection much like physical pain,
according to recent neuroscientific evidence. Rejection
also hinders individuals’ ability to rein in impulses
and make difficult decisions. Given their impoverished
decision-making abilities, rejected individuals
tend to perform more self-defeating behaviors such as
procrastinating and making risky, irrational choices
than do accepted individuals. Moreover, rejection
impairs individuals’ logic and reasoning abilities, and
this results in poor performance on tasks that require
complex intelligent thought.
The negative consequences of rejection are not confined
to the individual who experienced the rejection.
Rejection———739
In addition to hurting themselves, rejected individuals
also perform antisocial behaviors that hurt others.
After being rejected, individuals are especially likely
to lash out against the rejecter and to aggress against
innocent bystanders as well. Roy Baumeister, Jean
Twenge, and colleagues have shown, for instance, that
study participants who were told that no one wanted to
work with them in a group were more willing to blast
innocent others with loud, uncomfortable bursts of
noise than were participants who were told that they
were accepted into the group. These researchers also
demonstrated that rejected individuals feel less empathy
for others and are, consequently, less willing to
cooperate with and help them. When given an opportunity
to cooperate with an unknown partner, rejected
individuals choose to cheat the partner instead.
Despite these negative initial reactions, rejection
also elicits prosocial behaviors under some circumstances.
Rejected individuals try to strengthen social
bonds with others by working harder on group tasks,
publicly agreeing with others’ opinions, and displaying
positive, affiliative nonverbal behavior (e.g., smiling,
making eye contact, mimicking others’ actions). To
make subsequent social interactions smoother, rejected
individuals pay more attention to subtle social cues
like facial expressions and vocal tones than accepted
individuals do. When rejected individuals are unable to
form new social attachments or mend broken social
bonds (e.g., when interaction partners are not available),
they attempt to regain a sense of belonging by
other means. In comparison with accepted individuals,
those who are rejected reflect upon and affirm their
own relationships to a greater extent and prefer tasks of
a social nature (e.g., looking at photographs of loved
ones) rather than those of a nonsocial nature (e.g.,
looking at a magazine). Among individuals with a
strong need to belong, rejected individuals can find
companionship with their pets and even atypical targets
such as favorite television characters.
On the whole, research on rejection indicates that
the consequences of rejection are mixed. Some studies
find evidence of antisocial behavior following rejection
whereas others find evidence of prosocial behavior.
The literature currently suggests that rejected
individuals will act in prosocial ways (e.g., being
agreeable) when they foresee future interactions with a
partner and in antisocial ways (e.g., being aggressive)
if they expect little or no contact with a partner. An
aim of ongoing and future research is to uncover the

740———Rejection Sensitivity
circumstances under which social rejection elicits
more prosocial than antisocial effects and vice versa.
Long-Term Consequences
Even though individuals can recover from a single
rejection, the experience itself is unpleasant and detrimental
in many ways. Individuals who experience
rejections repeatedly, however, suffer even more serious
consequences. Such individuals may internalize
these rejections and behave in self-fulfilling ways that
actually elicit subsequent rejection. In other words,
perpetually rejected individuals will come to expect
rejection and will push away potential friends and
partners and choose to isolate themselves. Stuck in
this vicious circle, these individuals’ feelings of loneliness,
helplessness, and worthlessness will bring about
poor mental and physical health outcomes.
Megan L. Knowles
Wendi L. Gardner
See also Need to Belong; Ostracism; Rejection Sensitivity;
Self-Esteem; Social Exclusion
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to
belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a
fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin,
117, 497–529.
Leary, M. R (2001). Interpersonal rejection. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Williams, K. D., Forgas, J. P., & von Hippel, W. (2005). The
social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion, rejection, and
bullying. New York: Psychology Press.
REJECTION SENSITIVITY
Definition
Everyone desires acceptance and dislikes rejection
from people who are important to them. Some people,
however, are more concerned with rejection, a quality
known as rejection sensitivity. Thus, rejection sensitivity
refers to a trait that makes some people different
from others. Rejection-sensitive people (unlike, or more
than, other people) come into new situations feeling
anxious and expecting rejection. For example, when
Kate attends a party where she knows only the host,
she gets sweaty palms (i.e., indicating high anxiety)
and doesn’t think anyone will want to talk with her
(i.e., rejection expectancy). Rejection-sensitive individuals
also perceive rejection in situations more often
than others do, tending to read rejection into others’
actions and words. Luke is a reserve player on the
school’s basketball team. Sometimes when his teammates
only pass him the ball a few times in a game, he
believes they don’t like him. Rejection sensitivity also
shows itself in how a person reacts to a rejection.
Rejection-sensitive people often react to rejection with
strong hostility and aggression or severe anxiety and
withdrawal. Anna gave her professor low ratings on the
teacher evaluation form after she found out she didn’t
do well on the final. Jake didn’t leave the house all
summer after his girlfriend broke up with him. The
rejection sensitivity model was developed to explain
all of these elements—expectation of rejection, perception
of rejection, reaction to rejection.
Context and Background
Psychology has long emphasized the importance of
a relationship of trust between children and their
primary caregivers. One of the most influential models
of the link between early relationship experiences
and later interpersonal functioning is John Bowlby’s
attachment theory. This theory suggests that early experiences
cause children to create mental representations
(i.e., ideas or images of what close relationships are
like) that influence subsequent social interactions. If
they can trust their caregiver to meet their needs, they
form secure representations. If their needs are met with
rejection through the form of unavailability or nonloving
responses, then they will become insecure and
unsure in their relationships. Other researchers have
proposed that these early relationship representations
carry over into adulthood, particularly in intimate relationships.
Early experiences of rejection can lead to
rejection sensitivity as an adult.
Research on rejection sensitivity illuminates how
insecure attachment may play out in everyday life.
Anticipating and fearing rejection influence people’s
thoughts and feelings, which in turn influence their
behavior in social situations.
In general, rejection sensitivity is correlated with
low self-esteem. However, rejection sensitivity involves

insecurity about relationships with others more than
about the doubt about one’s worth as an individual.
Evidence and Implications
Research has documented support for the various links
of the rejection sensitivity model. Studies of childhood
experiences have established that anxious expectations
of rejection are associated with exposure to family violence,
emotional neglect, harsh discipline, and conditional
love by parents. Experiments have shown that
anxious expectations of rejection predict a readiness
to perceive rejection in others’ behavior. Perceiving
rejection predicts cognitive, emotional, and behavioral
reactions that damage significant relationships and can
trigger withdrawal or aggression.
These reactions of hostility and depression may
lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy (a prediction that
becomes true through its influence on people’s
thoughts and behavior). This is because rejectionsensitive
people perceive rejection in ambiguous situations
and overreact to it, making it more likely that
their partners will actually reject them. Rejection sensitivity
can also hinder people from forming close,
meaningful relationships. When combined with other
factors, rejection sensitivity may put people at risk for
clinical syndromes such as depression, social anxiety,
and borderline personality disorder.
Status-Based Rejection
Rejection sensitivity was originally conceptualized as
a tendency to believe potential rejection was caused by
personal characteristics. Further work has expanded
rejection sensitivity research to address rejection
based on group membership such as race or gender. If
you believe you may be or are rejected because you
are a member of a stigmatized minority group, this
can affect how you interact with members of the
majority group or social institutions such as schools
or workplaces. One study showed that for African
American students entering a predominantly White
college, higher levels of race-based rejection sensitivity
were associated with less racially diverse friendships,
less trust that the school had their best interests
in mind, more anxiety about seeking help from teachers,
and lower grades by the end of the year. Similarly,
recent evidence suggests that women who are sensitive
to being rejected because of their sex may have
Rejection Sensitivity———741
more trouble coping well in environments that have
traditionally been dominated by men, such as math or
engineering.
Rejection Sensitivity Measure
The original Rejection Sensitivity Questionnaire
(RSQ) assesses anxious interpersonal rejection expectations
using 18 scenarios relevant to a college student
population. The measure asks participants to imagine
themselves in various situations in which they need to
ask something of a valued other, such as, “You ask
someone you don’t know well out on a date.” They are
then asked to answer the following questions:
How concerned or anxious would you be about how
the other person would respond?
Very 1 2 3 4 5 6 Very
unconcerned concerned
How do you think the other person would be likely to
respond?
I would expect that the person would want to go out
with me.
Very 1 2 3 4 5 6 Very
unlikely likely
The expectation answer is reverse scored (subtracted
from 7) so that higher numbers mean more
expectation for rejection. Then for each scenario, the
anxiety number and the expectation number are multiplied,
and an average is taken across the 18 scenarios.
This total RSQ score has a possible range of 1 to
36, with higher numbers indicating greater rejection
sensitivity.
The original RSQ has been adapted for an adult population
and for group-based rejection sensitivity in the
form of the RS-Race questionnaire and the RS-Gender
questionnaire. The RS measures can be found at http://
www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/socialrelations/.
Jan Kang
Geraldine Downey
See also Attachment Theory; Individual Differences;
Rejection; Social Exclusion

742———Relational Models Theory
Further Readings
Downey, G., & Feldman, S. (1996). Implications of rejection
sensitivity for intimate relationships. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1327–1343.
Social Relations Laboratory. Columbia University
Department of Psychology. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/socialrelations/
RELATIONAL MODELS THEORY
Definition
The relational models theory describes the four fundamental
forms of social relationships: communal
sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and
market pricing. People in communal sharing relationships
feel that they have something essential in common,
whereas outsiders are different. Participants in
an authority ranking relationship see themselves as
ordered in a legitimate linear hierarchy. In an equality
matching relationship, people keep track of whether
each separate individual is treated equally. In market
pricing, people use ratios or rates, according to some
standard of due proportions, such as price. People in
all cultures use combinations of these four models to
organize nearly all interactions, from close relationships
to casual and distant ones. The relational models
are innate and intrinsically motivated. But children
rely on cultural prototypes and precedents to discover
how to implement them in culture-specific ways.
Relational models theory integrates classical theories
of social relations and society, and it connects
natural selection, neurobiology, child development,
cognition, emotion, communication, psychological disorders,
norms and ideology, religion, social and political
structures, and culture. The theory is supported by
ethnographic and comparative cultural studies, and by
psychological experiments using a variety of methods.
Alan Page Fiske formulated the theory; Nick Haslam
did much of the early experimental work on it and
developed the theory in relation to clinical psychology
and social cognition. Research using relational models
theory has provided insights into political psychology,
cross-cultural interaction, attitudes toward immigration,
behavioral and anthropological economics, the
social systems of classical Greece, sociolinguistics,
business management, group and family processes,
moral judgment, social motives and emotions, gifts and
other exchanges, time perspectives, tobacco use, personality
disorders, autism, schizophrenia, and vulnerability
to other psychological disorders.
Communal Sharing
Four Relational Models
In communal sharing, everyone in a group or dyad
is all the same with respect to whatever they are
doing: They all share some food, or living space, or
responsibility for some work. If one has a problem, it
concerns them all. Outsiders treat them as collectively
responsible for what they do, punishing any or all
of them indiscriminately. Communal relationships
involve a sense of oneness and identity, which can be
as strong as the connection between mother and child
or romantic lovers, or as weak as national or ethic
identity. The most intense communal sharing relationships
are based on participants’ feeling that their
bodies are essentially the same or connected because
they are linked by birth, blood, appearance, and body
marking or modification such as a form of circumcision
or excision. Synchronous rhythmic movement
can also connect people in this way, for example, in
military drill or ritual dance. Sharing food, drink, or
substances such as tobacco also underlies communal
relationships. So does physical contact, such as caressing,
cuddling, kissing, or sleeping close. By making
their bodies alike or connected, people create communal
relationships, and at the same time communicate
the existence and intensity of their relationship.
People also think of themselves as the same; their
cognitive and emotional representation of the relationship
corresponds to the ways they express it. Infants
intuitively respond to these expressions of communal
sharing, which is how they connect and identify with
their families and caretakers.
Authority Ranking
In authority ranking, people are linearly ordered in
a proper hierarchy of privileges and responsibilities.
Superiors are entitled to deferential respect, but have
pastoral responsibility to represent, stand up for, and
protect subordinates. In an authority ranking relationship,
people think of their superiors as above, greater
than, in front of, having more power or force than, and
preceding them. Subordinates are perceived as below,
lesser than, following behind, weaker than, and coming

after. This cognitive representation of social ranking
corresponds to the social displays of rank that people
use to communicate their relative positions, for example,
when a person bows to superiors or waits for
them to start eating first. In many languages, people
respectfully address or refer to superiors using plural
forms and use singular forms when speaking to subordinates
(for example, French vous vs. tu). Children
intuitively recognize the meaning of being bigger or
higher, being in front, or going first.
Equality Matching
Equality matching is the basis of turn-taking, equal
rights, even sharing, voting, decision by coin flip or lottery,
and balanced reciprocity whereby people return
the same kind of thing they received. This is the universal
structure of games and sports, where opponents
have equal numbers of players or pieces, employ a fair
way to decide who chooses first, play on a symmetrical
field or board, take turns, have equal time to play, and
often use dice or other devices that add uncertain but
equal chances. In an equality matching relationship, the
participants may be even or uneven at any given point,
but when they are uneven, they know how to even
things up again—for example, by taking the next turn.
In equality matching, people use concrete matching
operations to demonstrate equality, such as starting a
race side by side, flipping a coin, or lining up the
opposing teams one-to-one. These concrete operations
are procedural demonstrations of equality: The actions
show that the sides are manifestly equal. Casting ballots
is an operational definition of equality in political
choice; setting up the two corresponding sets of chess
pieces and punching the clock at the end of each move
are operational definitions of a fair game. Adhering to
these rules makes the game a demonstrably fair and
proper game. For children and adults, equality matching
is intrinsically important; people get very upset
when they have less than their peers.
Market Pricing
Market pricing is a relationship governed by ratios,
rates, or proportions. The most obvious examples are
prices, wages, rents, taxes, tithes, and interest. But market
pricing is also the basis for formal and informal
cost–benefit analyses in which people make decisions
on the basis of what they are investing in proportion to
the returns they can expect to get out. Market pricing
Relational Models Theory———743
always involves some universal standard by which the
values of everything in the relationship can be compared.
This need not be money; utilitarianism is the
moral philosophy based on giving the greatest good to
the greatest number, where all good and evil is compared
in a metric of utility. Similarly, grades and grade
point averages are the product of ratio-based calculations
that combine all aspects of academic performance
in a single score. People also measure social
ratios in terms of time or effort. Market pricing transactions
rely on abstract conventional symbols, such as
numbers or linguistic descriptions of the features of an
item or the terms of a contract. The arbitrary symbols
in a used car ad, for example, are totally unintelligible
to anyone unfamiliar with the arbitrary conventions of
the specific market system: “2000 Ford Mustang GT
39M, conv, auto, lthr, alrm, Alpine snd syst, BBK air
intake, Flowmasters, 18 X 10 Saleen whls, new pnt,
body kit & more, slvg, pp, $9,500.” The most abstract
conventional symbols are prices, which represent the
ratios of exchange of all valued features of all commodities
in a market system.
Four Ways of Organizing
Any Interaction
These four relational models are the components for
all kinds of coordinated interactions and social institutions.
For example, moral evaluations and sentiments
can be based on the communal sense that everyone in
the group feels the suffering of everyone else: one for
all and all for one. Another form of morality is obedience
to superiors such as elders, religious leaders, or
gods; conversely, superiors have pastoral responsibilities
to protect their flocks. Another moral framework
is equality: equal rights, equal opportunities, equal
shares, or equal outcomes. Finally, there is justice as
proportionality: giving each person what he or she
deserves, either punishment in proportion to the crime
or reward in proportion to merit. However, the four
relational models also structure aggressive, hostile,
and violent interactions. When people try to “purify” a
group or nation to rid it of others whom they view as
inherently different, communal sharing may result in
ethnic cleansing and genocide. Acting in an authority
ranking system, rulers punish dissidents, kill rebels
and traitors, and make war to extend their dominions.
Feuding and retaliation typically take the equality matching
form of “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth,
hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning,

744———Relational Models Theory
wound for wound” vengeance. And the planning of
modern warfare is often based on kill ratios and other
rational cost–benefit calculations. The relational models
also organize the social meanings of material
things. Studies show that the economic value that
people place on objects depends on the social relationships
that the objects signify. Indeed, objects such as a
wedding ring may have virtually infinite economic
value—people refuse to sell them. Cultural and historical
research shows that land can be held communally,
shared by all: a village commons or a park. Land can
be a feudal dominion, such that all who reside on it are
subjects of the king and the lord of the manor. People
may be entitled to equal plots of land, as represented
by homesteading laws, or land can also be what makes
people equal, as when owning land is a requirement for
voting. Or land can be a commodity that people invest
in for the rent or appreciation in market value. In virtually
every domain of social life in every culture,
people use the four relational models to generate their
own actions, to understand others’ actions, to evaluate
or sanction their own and others’ actions, and to coordinate
joint activities.
Complex, long-term social relationships and institutions
are composed of combinations of discrete relational
models. For example, a dean has an authority
ranking relationship with a professor, who in turn has
an authority ranking relationship with students. But
the dean should treat professors equitably, and professors
should give each student the same opportunities
and apply the same standards to all, according to
equality matching. Similarly, within each department,
faculty may have equal teaching loads. At the same
time, students pay tuition and buy textbooks, and professors
receive a salary. Yet professors and students
have communal access to the library and the Internet
services that the university provides; deans, professors,
and students also have a shared identification
with the university and its teams.
Research on Relational Models
Ample and diverse evidence supports relational models
theory, including ethnographic participant observation,
ethnologic comparison across cultures, research
on naturally occurring social cognition in everyday
life, and experimental studies using rating scales and
artificial stimuli. One set of studies analyzed social
errors when people called someone by the wrong
name, directed an action at the wrong person, or misremembered
with whom they had interacted. In five
cultures, when people make these types of errors, they
typically substitute another person with whom they
have the same type of relationship. So, for example, I
may call Susan, Gwen, because I have communal sharing
relationships with each of them. Other studies have
shown that people intuitively categorize their own
relationships into groups roughly corresponding to the
four relational models, and judge any two of their relationships
to be most similar when the relationships are
organized by the same relational model.
People interacting with each other may use different
models without realizing it. When this happens,
they are likely to get frustrated or disappointed, and to
feel that the others are doing something wrong. For
example, if Tom assumes that he and Alesha are doing
the dishes in a communal framework, he expects them
both to wash dishes whenever they can. But suppose
Alesha implicitly assumes that dish washing should
be based on equality matching. When Tom is busy and
Alesha is not, he will be angry if Alesha fails to do
the dishes, but if she sees it as his turn, she’ll be angry
that he fails to do them. Studies of families, research
groups, corporations, and inter-ethnic relations show
that mismatching of relational models produces distress
and recriminations: Everyone perceives themselves
to be acting properly in accord with the
relational model they are applying, whereas others are
transgressing that model. Research also indicates that
some people persistently try to apply relational models
in ways that are inconsistent with prevalent cultural
expectations; this leads to chronic problems associated
with personality disorders and vulnerability to other
psychological disorders.
Alan Page Fiske
See also Authoritarian Personality; Awe; Communal
Relationships; Culture; Deindividuation; Dominance,
Evolutionary; Envy; Equity Theory; Ethnocentrism;
Exchange Relationships; Group Cohesiveness; Group
Identity; Groupthink; Ingroup–Outgroup Bias; Mere
Ownership Effect; Milgram’s Obedience to Authority
Studies; Minimal Group Paradigm; Moral Emotions;
Moral Reasoning; Need for Affiliation; Need for Power;
Need to Belong; Outgroup Homogeneity; Power; Power
Motive; Public Goods Dilemma; Reference Group; Social
Dominance Orientation
Further Readings
Fiske, A. P. (1991). Structures of social life: The four
elementary forms of human relations. New York: Free Press.

Fiske, A. P., & Haslam, N. (2005). The four basic social
bonds: Structures for coordinating interaction. In M.
Baldwin (Ed.), Interpersonal cognition (pp. 267–298).
New York: Guilford Press.
Fiske, A. P., Haslam, N., & Fiske, S. (1991). Confusing one
person with another: What errors reveal about the
elementary forms of social relations. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 656–674.
Haslam, N. (Ed.). (2004). Relational models theory: A
contemporary overview. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Relational Models Theory. Retrieved April 5, 2007, from
http://www.rmt.ucla.edu
RELATIONSHIP VIOLENCE
See INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE
RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY
Definition
Religion and spirituality refer to a search for the
sacred dimension of life. The sacred refers to a transcendent
realm of experience, one often seen as
including a God or a Higher Power, that addresses
existential questions about life’s meaning and purpose.
Religion refers to socially organized forms of
the sacred search. Spirituality refers to a personal side
of the sacred search, one that may or may not involve
organized religion.
History and Background
Historically, spiritual topics have been neglected
within psychology. As a group, psychologists are less
religious than is the general population, and many
social scientists see religious topics as inappropriate
for empirical study. Indeed, with the exception of
Gordon Allport’s research on religion and prejudice
and Daniel Batson’s work on religion and helping,
most religious topics are just beginning to receive
attention within mainstream social psychology.
Socialization and Religious Faith
Social factors are a major predictor of religious belief
and practice. Although cultural factors, peer groups,
Religion and Spirituality———745
and religious education all predict religious commitment,
parental religiosity (by both mothers and fathers)
is a particularly strong predictor. Several studies suggest
that people’s images of God mirror their images
of their fathers.
Religious doubts and questions are common,
particularly in the adolescent and early adult years.
Religious doubts have many sources, including unanswered
prayers, hypocrisy by religious leaders, and
unresolved questions about the reasons for suffering
and evil. Religious doubts often lead to fluctuations
in faith. Although there are exceptions, most people
who permanently abandon religious faith come from
homes where religion was not strongly emphasized.
Religion and Well-Being
During the past decade, many studies from medicine
and social science have demonstrated positive associations
between religious involvement and health,
including both physical and mental health. The association
appears to be the result of at least three factors.
First, religious involvement often provides a sense of
community and ongoing social support. Social support,
in turn, predicts better health. Second, most religious
belief systems include codes of moral behavior
that, if followed, reduce risky health behaviors. For
example, most major world religions include prohibitions
against sexual promiscuity, poorly controlled
anger, and the abuse of alcohol and other drugs. Third,
religion and spirituality can provide a sense of meaning
or purpose to life while offering answers for deep
existential questions. This overarching sense of meaning
can help people make decisions, set goals, and
find comfort in difficult times. Many people turn to
religion as a means of coping with stressful life
events, ranging from everyday hassles to bereavement
or trauma. The constructive use of religious coping
can, in turn, lead to better adjustment.
Followers of virtually all world religions have
some means of trying to connect with a sacred or transcendent
realm of experience. However, some traditions
(typically Western ones) also contend that
people can connect with God on a deeply personal
level. Studies suggest that when people see themselves
as having a loving, close relationship with God,
this perception can help to meet attachment needs.
Yet, it cannot be assumed that this relationship will
always be positive. Many people have negative
images of God, viewing God as cruel, uncaring, punitive,
or untrustworthy. In the wake of negative life

746———Representativeness Heuristic
events, people often become angry toward God. They
may also have difficulty trusting God, believing that
God is punishing, rejecting, or abandoning them.
These negative feelings toward God can lead to crises
of faith. Studies are now beginning to use frameworks
from social psychological research to explore
the dynamics of people’s perceived relationships with
God, including the potential for both intimacy and
conflict.
Religion and Social Behavior
In social terms, several sources of evidence demonstrate
that religious involvement leads to higher levels
of altruistic giving and volunteerism. In addition,
most religions include a code of moral behavior that
focuses on helping and serving others. Religious institutions
can be a powerful source of socialization,
meaning that people who are strongly committed to a
particular religious system are likely to internalize its
moral principles. For example, research has demonstrated
a consistent connection between religiosity
and the value assigned to humility and forgiveness.
Yet, as demonstrated across many areas of psychology,
the translation from values and principles to
actual behavior tends to be imperfect. Therefore,
although highly religious people may be especially
likely to believe that they should be kind, helpful, or
forgiving, they often behave similarly to nonreligious
people in controlled laboratory situations. Other
personality factors, such as agreeableness or dispositional
guilt, may be better predictors of social behavior
than religiosity.
As described earlier, religious systems provide
meaning systems for answering existential questions.
These meaning systems can be helpful in psychological
terms. However, believing that one’s beliefs are
rooted in divine revelation can also promote conflict
with groups who hold different beliefs. As such,
strongly held religious identities can foster ingroup–
outgroup thinking and negative attitudes toward other
groups, particularly when people are convinced that
their group possesses the only correct view. For example,
some studies suggest a positive link between
religious fundamentalism and prejudice. The evidence
is mixed, however, and depends partly on how prejudice
is framed. Fundamentalists and highly religious
persons sometimes appear prejudiced because they
express disapproval of behaviors that violate their
religious beliefs (e.g., drug abuse; certain sexual
behaviors). However, this behavioral disapproval does
not necessarily translate to prejudice on nonbehavioral
domains such as race. A much clearer association
has emerged between prejudice and right-wing
authoritarianism—a tendency toward rigidity, conventionality,
and unquestioning obedience toward authority.
Although right-wing authoritarians tend to score high
on fundamentalism measures, it seems to be authoritarianism—
rather than religiosity or fundamentalism
per se—that predicts prejudice.
Julie Exline
See also Beliefs; Prejudice; Search for Meaning in Life;
Values
Further Readings
Hill, P. C., & Pargament, K. I. (2003). Advances in the
conceptualization and measurement of religion and
spirituality. American Psychologist, 58, 64–74.
Spilka, B., Hood, R. W., Jr., Hunsberger, B., & Gorsuch, R.
(2003). The psychology of religion: An empirical
approach (3rd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
REPRESENTATIVENESS HEURISTIC
Definition
According to some social psychologists, human
beings have the tendency to be cognitive misers—that
is, to limit their use of mental resources when they
need to make a quick decision or when the issue about
which they must make a decision is unimportant to
them. People have several strategies they can use to
limit their use of mental resources; one such group of
strategies is heuristics. Heuristics are cognitive shortcuts
or rules of thumb that are used when one must
make a decision but lacks either ample time or the
accurate information necessary to make the decision.
Heuristics are advantageous in that they aid in quick
decision making, but the use of heuristics can lead to
inaccurate predictions. In general, heuristics are automatic
cognitive processes; that is, people use them in
decision-making situations without necessarily being
aware that they are doing so.
One common heuristic is the representativeness
heuristic, a rule of thumb used to determine whether a
person or an event should be put into a certain category
by judging how similar the person or event is to
the prototypical person or event of that category. The

prototypical person or event of a given category is the
one that possesses the highest number of representative
characteristics of that category; for example, the
prototypical chair might have four legs, a seat, and
some sort of back. If the person or event one is judging
is similar to the prototype, then the person or event
is likely to be placed in that category. If there is no
similarity to the prototype, then the person or event
may be judged as unlikely to be a member of the category.
For example, in a freshman psychology course,
Andrew meets Anne. Andrew notices that Anne is petite,
blonde, and very outgoing. Andrew tells his friend Jeff
that he met Anne in class, and Jeff asks if Andrew met
Anne the cheerleader or Anne the biology major.
Andrew matches the petite, blonde, outgoing Anne he
met to prototypes from the categories “cheerleader”
and “biology major” and matches Anne to the “cheerleader”
category because the prototypical cheerleader
is petite, blonde, and outgoing. Because she fits the
prototype of one category, Andrew may quickly categorize
her and subsequently ignore information that
would lead him to place Anne more accurately. Conversely,
Andrew meets Heidi, who is tall, has short dark
hair, and wears glasses. Because Heidi does not match
the prototype of “cheerleader,” Andrew will likely
assume that Heidi is not a cheerleader and may ignore
evidence that indicates that she is a cheerleader.
Representativeness Heuristic
and Decision Making
The representativeness heuristic can hinder accurate
judgments of probability by emphasizing aspects of
the event in question that are similar to the prototype
or by masking other diagnostic information that demonstrates
the event’s dissimilarity to the prototype. For
example, in the previous Andrew and Anne scenario,
Andrew assumes Anne is a cheerleader because she
closely matches his prototype of that category. However,
Andrew has ignored important information that
might cause him to make a different judgment of
Anne; in particular, he has ignored base rates, or the
rate at which any one type of person or event occurs
in the population at large. At any given university, the
number of cheerleaders is typically quite small. On
the other hand, the number of biology majors at any
given university is much larger than the number of
cheerleaders. If Andrew had used base rates instead of
the representativeness heuristic as a basis for determining
category membership, it is far more likely that
he would determine that Anne is a biology major
rather than a cheerleader. This example demonstrates
the danger of relying on the representativeness heuristic
when making decisions about category membership
because the desire to use cognitive shortcuts may
supersede the desire to seek accurate and complete
information. Andrew’s dismissal of Heidi as a cheerleader
is equally erroneous; it is just as likely that
Heidi is a cheerleader as it is that Anne is a cheerleader,
but because she does not appear to represent
the cheerleader category, Andrew is unlikely to judge
that she belongs to that category.
Representativeness Heuristic
and Social Psychology
The representativeness heuristic is typically mentioned
in the contexts of social cognition (the way people
think about the people and situations with which they
interact) and categorization (the process of classifying
people and events based on their prominent attributes).
Jennifer A. Clarke
See also Base Rate Fallacy; Decision Making; Fast and
Frugal Heuristics; Heuristic Processing; Illusory
Correlation; Prototypes; Social Cognition
Further Readings
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1972). Subjective probability:
A judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology,
3, 430–454.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the psychology of
prediction. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky
(Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and
biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Probabilistic
reasoning. In A. I. Goldman (Ed.), Readings in philosophy
and cognitive science. Cambridge: MIT Press.
RESEARCH METHODS
Research Methods———747
Definition
Research methods are the ways in which researchers
measure variables and design studies to test hypotheses.
For example, if a researcher wants to study whether
people in a happy mood are more likely to offer help
to a stranger than are people who are not happy, the
researcher might measure or manipulate how research

748———Research Methods
participants feel and then measure how likely people
are to offer help.
Overview
Researchers can choose among many different ways
to measure variables. They can directly observe
people’s behaviors, directly ask people for their perceptions,
or infer people’s perceptions on the basis of
behaviors or responses that only indirectly relate to
the variables of interest. In most areas of social psychology,
researchers want to learn what causes the
phenomenon of interest (in the example, whether differences
in mood causes differences in helping). Thus,
whenever possible, researchers seek to manipulate
variables of interest (e.g., mood) in an effort to make
confident claims about causes (e.g., happy mood causing
larger amounts of helping). Of course, for some
variables or in some settings, the researcher cannot or
chooses not to manipulate variables but instead looks
at the relations between presumed cause and effect
variables (such as mood and helping, respectively, in
the example).
Measurement techniques will be discussed first and
then research designs. Social psychologists commonly
use a variety of measurement techniques including
self-report, behavioral observation, response latency
(time to answer), and physiological measures. Each
type of measure has its strengths and limitations, but
the extent to which one can draw conclusions from
measured data is also a function of the type of research
design employed. Social psychological research designs
can be broadly classified into experimental and nonexperimental
research methods. Nonexperimental
approaches are well-suited for identifying associations
among variables; however, these approaches are less
well-suited to determining cause-and-effect relations.
However, experimental designs can demonstrate
causal relations because of random assignment to
conditions and greater control over variables that
may covary (go along) with the cause variables under
study.
Measurement Techniques
Whenever possible, researchers try to collect supporting
evidence using more than one type of measure. By
doing this, the strengths of some measures can offset
the weaknesses of other measures. Researchers often
have greater confidence in the research conclusions
when a particular theory can be supported by more
than one type of measure.
Self-Reports
Self-reports are perhaps the most widely used
measurement technique in social psychology. Selfreport
measures ask people to directly report their
feelings, behaviors, or thoughts. In some cases, selfreport
questions may require open-ended responses
(e.g., “What is your current mood state?”). Other
types of self-reports may require people to respond
according to a provided scale (e.g., “Please rate your
current mood state.” 1 = negative mood to 7 = positive
mood). Using a set of items that all tap into the variable
of interest (e.g., asking people to rate mood on measures
of how negative/positive, bad/good, and unpleasant/
pleasant their mood is) generally provides a better measure
than using only a single item (e.g., only the negative/
positive question). The primary advantage of self-report
measures is that variables of interest can be directly
measured from the source of those experiences.
However, at times, people may not be able or willing
to provide accurate reports. When this is true, data
collected from self-reports may be inaccurate or misleading.
In some cases, for example, the validity of
self-reports may depend on respondents’ verbal abilities.
Self-report data from children or those who have
cognitive deficits may be inaccurate because of an
inability to understand the questions or express
responses. Even when ability to accurately report is
not in question, people may not be willing to express
their true feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. For example,
when asked about socially undesirable opinions
or behaviors, people may be inclined to respond in
ways that make them look good to themselves and
others (i.e., social desirability bias). Thus, when there
are concerns that research participants might lie on
self-reports (e.g., when addressing socially sensitive
issues such as stereotyping, prejudice, or aggression),
other forms of measurement may provide especially
useful information.
Behavioral Measures
Behavioral measurement consists of observing and
recording people’s actions. Social psychologists typically
measure a particular behavior(s) (e.g., smiling)
because the behavior directly relates to a variable of
interest (e.g., mood). Unlike self-reports, one advantage

of behavioral measures is that assessment can occur
without participants realizing that the measurement is
taking place. Thus, researchers might be able to assess
reactions that research participants would not willingly
share.
However, one limitation of behavioral measurement
is that researchers must infer the reasons for the
behavior. For example, imagine a study of opinions
toward consumer products where participants are
asked to choose one product (from several) that they
can take from the study. If a participant selects one
product rather than another, this could indicate that he
or she has a more positive opinion of the chosen product,
but this choice could have also been made for
other reasons unrelated to his or her opinion (e.g., taking
it to give to a friend). Another possible limitation
of behavioral measures (and of some self-reports) is
that behaviors are often situation-specific. That is, the
behavior may occur in one situation, but not in
another similar situation. In most social psychological
studies, people’s behaviors are assessed in only a
single situation. Therefore, the behavior-based assessment
of the variable might not reflect a general perception
that would work across circumstances; it may
reflect a more limited tendency to act a certain way in
a certain circumstance.
Response Latency
Researchers may often be able to make inferences
about psychological variables based on how quickly
or slowly people make responses. More often than
not, computers are used to present words or pictures
on screen, and the computer records how quickly
people respond to the word or picture (e.g., pronouncing
the word, naming the pictured object, or evaluating
the object). When speed of response is important,
responses often take the form of hitting one of two
computer keys as quickly but accurately as possible.
One common use of response time is to index whether
people have recently been thinking about a concept
related to the word or picture on the computer screen.
For example, imagine that a researcher believes
people are likely to spontaneously think about the
concept of race in a certain circumstance. If so, reaction
time to label a pictured person as belonging to
one racial category or another might be faster in that
condition than would the same reactions to the same
picture in a condition where previous consideration of
race is unlikely.
Like behavioral measures, reaction times may be
less susceptible than self-reports are to participant
control over socially undesirable responding. Because
response times often differ across conditions in very
small amounts (fractions of seconds), participants may
not even realize that they are responding more quickly
to some stimuli than to others, and they may be even
less likely to identify any such differences as reflecting
the conceptual relations between certain conditions
of the study and the critical responses to the specific
words or pictures. Like behavioral measures, however,
the researcher must infer the meaning of relatively fast
or slow responses. Research participants can take time
to engage in many different psychological processes. If
a number of different processes would make people
take longer to respond, then long response times alone
may not help the researcher to distinguish among those
potential thought processes. This may be especially
true when time measures are taken for engaging in
an activity such as reading information, rather than
responding to a question. People can take a long rather
than short time to read a passage for many different
reasons. Thus, measures of time taken to read (or, in
some cases, respond) may require additional measures
or manipulations to help characterize why the additional
time was taken.
Physiological Measures
Research Methods———749
Social psychologists (and perhaps especially social
neuroscientists) may use a variety of measures that
assess physiological responses to social stimuli. These
measures include those that assess brain or muscle
activity, activation of the autonomic nervous system,
and others. For example, even if observers cannot see
that a participant is smiling, electrical activity may be
greater in the smiling muscles when the person is listening
to information with which they agree rather
than disagree.
Physiological responses are often involuntary or
not under people’s conscious control. Therefore,
concerns about people’s inability or unwillingness to
respond in a certain way are minimal. Thus, like
behavioral and response latency measures, physiological
measures can be useful when measuring reactions
to socially sensitive material. Disadvantages include
the time and expense involved in taking physiological
measures. Even relatively minimal physiological
recording equipment is expensive, and more advanced
physiological measures (especially scanning techniques)

750———Research Methods
involve very expensive equipment. Most physiological
measures are also especially sensitive to participant
movements during the study and to the
environment in which the measurements are taken.
Thus, relatively long periods are taken to acquaint
participants with the recording equipment and to get
baseline measures (to control for individual differences
in baseline activation of the systems under
study). In addition, limitations in movement for many
physiological measures restrict the kinds of interactions
in which research participants can engage while
physiological recording occurs. Finally, much remains
to be learned about how various patterns of physiological
reaction relate to particular psychological
processes and variables. Many physiological systems
become active during more than one type of psychological
process. Therefore, in many circumstances,
there may not be a one-to-one mapping of activation
of a particular brain area or a particular system with
one particular psychological process or outcome. This
can make inferences based on physiological measures
quite complex when compared with other types of
measurement.
Experimental Design
Research Designs
Experiments are perhaps the most prominent
research approach used in social psychology. Experiments
offer many advantages over nonexperimental
approaches. In particular, because experiments control
extraneous variables through random assignment
to conditions, they allow researchers to confidently
determine cause-and-effect relations. Random assignment
is the procedure of assigning research participants
to different experimental groups such that each
participant has an equal chance of being assigned to
any experimental condition. This is important because
researchers can be assured that the background characteristics
of the participants in each group are equivalent
before a manipulation is applied. For example,
let’s return to our example of a study of mood and
helping. Some people may simply be more likely to
offer help to a stranger. Yet, if each person has an
equal chance of being assigned to a happy mood
group or a neutral mood group, then personal tendencies
to offer help should be equal across the groups
before any mood manipulation takes place. Later, if
there are differences in helping across mood groups,
this difference cannot be attributed to differences
across groups in the background tendencies of the
people in each group; the differences must have been
created by the manipulation.
Even though experimental designs offer many
advantages, they do have limitations. For instance,
experimentation cannot be performed when variables
such as gender, personality traits, or ethnicity are under
study because these variables cannot be manipulated.
Also, many possible manipulations of variables
such as ethnic prejudice, marital status, and physical
aggression would not be undertaken because of
ethical concerns. Therefore, research addressing influences
of variables such as these must be conducted
nonexperimentally.
Another potential issue with experimental designs
concerns to the extent to which findings can generalize
to real life. Increases in experimental control can
result in increased artificiality of the experimental setting.
This is less of an issue when the goal of the study
is to test psychological theory rather than to produce
results that are relevant to a particular applied setting.
For instance, a researcher may believe that ethnic categories
are activated when people encounter group
members as they walk down a hallway. Yet, it may be
much more straightforward to show such activation in
a laboratory showing pictures or video on a computer
screen. However, all else being equal, researchers
would often prefer that their research findings (or at
least the psychological processes that produced the
findings) would translate to real world settings.
Researchers can increase the likelihood of their results
translating to real world contexts by using experimental
activities that closely reflect similar activities in
everyday life, by showing that the research findings
are the same across different kinds of manipulations
and measures, or by conducting field research that
shows parallel effects without the same level of experimental
control over extraneous variables.
Nonexperimental Design
Although experimentation is the primary way to
determine causal relations among variables, a nonexperimental
design may be more appropriate for some
research questions. Some research questions do not
involve cause and effect. For example, when a
researcher is developing a multi-item measure of a

particular concept or idea, the researcher may only
be interested in identifying the presence of relations
among those items, not causal relations. Even when
researchers are interested in cause and effect, some
variables cannot be experimentally manipulated (e.g.,
gender, personality traits) or manipulation would not
be ethical (e.g., marital status, physical aggression).
When this is the case, nonexperimental research is the
best that researchers can do. In addressing cause and
effect relations, however, nonexperimental approaches
face a number of challenges.
Consider nonexperimental investigation of the
question of whether people are more likely to offer
help while in happy moods. For example, participants
could be asked to complete diaries in which they report
their moods and their major activities each day for a
month or more. It could be, in such a study, that people
who report being generally happy also more often
report helping others. One of the problems with nonexperimental
designs is that causes might often occur
in either direction (i.e., happy mood could increase
helping, or increased helping could create happy
mood). Even when this is not as likely (e.g., if mood
were measured before a specific opportunity to help,
so the helping opportunity itself cannot be the source
of the mood), a measurement of the independent variable
(mood) might identify people who are also disposed
to help for reasons other than their mood per se.
For example, the people who report being happy at a
particular point in time may be happy because of positive
events in their lives (e.g., getting a raise at work),
and those positive events themselves may make helping
more likely separate from mood (e.g., by making
people feel like they have an excess of resources, so
they can afford to share). At times, the researcher can
measure potential alternative reasons for the effects
or can include measurements over time that make a
stronger case for the preferred explanation. However,
these solutions are often less compelling than running
an experiment in which random assignment to conditions
equate the conditions on variables not influenced
by the manipulation of interest.
Duane T. Wegener
Jason K. Clark
See also Control Condition; Ecological Validity; Experimental
Condition; Experimentation; Nonexperimental Designs;
Quasi-Experimental Designs; Self-Reports; Social
Desirability Bias; Social Neuroscience
Further Readings
Pelham, B. W., & Blanton, H. (2003). Conducting research in
psychology: Measuring the weight of smoke (2nd ed.).
Toronto: Thompson/Wadsworth.
Reis, H. T., & Judd, C. M. (Eds.). (2000). Handbook of
research methods in social and personality psychology.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sansone, C., Morf, C. C., & Painter, A. T. (Eds.). (2004). The
Sage handbook of methods in social psychology.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
RESISTING PERSUASION
Resisting Persuasion———751
Resistance is central to persuasion. Without resistance,
persuasion is not necessary. Resistance to
persuasion can be desirable, for example, when nonsmokers
repeatedly resist advertisements and peer
pressure encouraging them to smoke. But resistance
can also be an undesirable characteristic, as when
smokers resist the many strong messages encouraging
them to stop smoking and prolong their lives.
Effective resistance can be used to ward off
unwanted persuasion, but inappropriate resistance can
close a person off to meaningful changes. Skepticism,
reactance, and inertia are three kinds of resistance that
work in different way to limit persuasion. People can
do many things to increase or to decrease their own or
other people’s resistance to persuasion.
Three Kinds of Resistance
Resistance to persuasion is not just one single thing.
One encounters three kinds of resistance: skepticism,
reactance, and inertia.
Skepticism is resistance to the content of the message.
Skepticism focuses on the logic and evidence of
the arguments in the message, and produces a desire
to critically evaluate and refute those arguments.
Reactance refers to the negative reaction people
have to someone else telling them what to think or do.
Reactance is resistance to the influence attempt itself.
The contrariness produced by reactance leads people
to counter the persuasion, no matter what it advocates,
and to reestablish their freedom to think by choosing
the opposite.
Inertia is an objection to change itself, no matter
which change is advocated. With inertia, people don’t

752———Resisting Persuasion
pay attention to the message. They aren’t interested
in the change. They just want to keep things the way
they are.
Increasing Resistance to Persuasion
Sometimes it is advisable to increase one’s own
resistance or someone else’s resistance to unwanted
persuasion. Skepticism can be strengthened by
(a) increasing a person’s motivation to examine the
message and (b) assembling information and tools to
effectively evaluate a message. Realizing that persuasion
is coming will energize both aspects of skepticism.
Also, considering the ways this topic is personally
important will increase the energy available to critically
and carefully think through a message or proposal.
Reactance can be increased by focusing on how
the persuasion is manipulative and aimed at limiting
freedom. Reactance is stronger when the unwanted
influence is directed toward more important values
and actions, and when the unwanted influence is more
intrusive and offensive. Thoughts that emphasize
these aspects of the influence increase the reactance
form of resistance.
Inertial resistance can be strengthened by focusing
on the current situation, particularly on what is liked
about the present situation, and how difficult it would
be to change. The nonsmoker who makes a mental list
of the top five things to like about being a nonsmoker
is bolstering inertia.
Decreasing Resistance to Persuasion
There are times when a person meets resistance, even
his or her own resistance to a proposal, and feels that
it is baseless and that it prevents a recommendation or
change from being realistically considered. In these
cases, it may be useful for the person to think of ways
to minimize or reduce resistance. Most people think
first to overwhelm resistance with debate, explaining
why resistance is unreasonable or unnecessary. This
tactic rarely works, and most often creates reactance.
But some more subtle and effective ways do allow
resistance to be minimized.
Skepticism is usually a good quality, but it can be
overused and get in the way of making good decisions.
A subtle way to diminish skepticism is to provide
a guarantee, which eliminates the need for skepticism
and scrutiny by assuring that a bad outcome will be
repaired. When a guarantee is not feasible, asking the
person (or yourself) to consider the proposal for the
future—for example, “What if next year at this time
you were a nonsmoker?”—can reduce skepticism.
Assessing a proposal for the future (next week, next
month, next year) diminishes the influence of the
costs and allows the benefits to be considered more
clearly.
Framing proposals differently can also greatly
affect how the request is considered. Listen to these
two ways of framing a request and their respective
result: Pat asked her father if she could watch TV
while she did homework, and he said “Certainly not!”
Pat’s sister asked her father if she could do homework
while she watched TV, and he said, “That would be
great!” Framing this case as a request about changing
TV watching was much more effective than framing it
as a request about how one does homework.
Reactance can be lessened by minimizing the
pushiness or offensiveness of the request. This can be
done by making a smaller request, which might be followed
later by a larger one. Reactance can also be
diminished by making the request politely. Saying, “I
know that you might not want to, but would you ...”
rather than simply saying “Would you ...”increases
persuasion dramatically. Another way to minimize
reactance is to put the message into a story about
someone who acted in a certain way and achieved a
certain result. A story sidesteps reactance because the
message is not, “you should ...,”but “Jesse did and
it worked for her.” With stories, people are interested
in what happened next, without analyzing or contesting
what happened they way they would with a direct
message.
The interesting problem with inertia is that this
form of resistance is unresponsive to persuasion. It is
the tuning out of persuasive messages. So, to reduce
inertia, one has to do something to make the person
tune in to the message. Many television ads are
designed on the principle that they first have to capture
the audience members’ attention before they can
hear the message. Bright lights, loud sounds, humor,
confusing beginnings, and unexpected events are all
ways that advertisements use to overcome inertia.
Eric S. Knowles
Jessica M. Nolan
Dan D Riner
See also Compliance; Influence; Persuasion; Reactance

Further Readings
Ahluwalia, R. (2000). Examination of psychological
processes underlying resistance to persuasion. Journal of
Consumer Research, 27(2), 217–232.
Hogan, K. (2004). The science of influence. New York: Wiley.
Knowles, E. S., & Linn, J. A. (2004). The future and promise
of resistance to persuasion. In E. S. Knowles & J. A. Linn
(Eds.), Resistance and persuasion (Chap. 15). Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Knowles, E. S., & Riner, D. (2007). Omega approaches to
persuasion: Overcoming resistance. In A. R. Pratkanis
(Ed.), The science of social influence (Chap. 2). New
York: Psychology Press.
RESPONSIBILITY ATTRIBUTION
A responsibility attribution relates to beliefs about
the cause of an event, or outcome, or state. The event
in question may be positive (success) or negative, but
responsibility is used more in association with aversive
outcomes. Hence, a responsibility attribution is
linked with terms such as fault and blame, with the
individual held accountable for an unwanted experience.
In addition, a responsibility attribution may apply
to the self or to others. This entry focuses on social
perception and judgments about others, rather than on
self-perception.
Responsibility attributions are of central importance
in studies of thinking, feeling, and behavior
(motivation). Social psychologists therefore have
devoted much attention to this topic, and that interest
remains central.
How Does One Know
If Another Is Responsible?
If an earthquake leveled a house, then it is unlikely
that a particular individual will be held responsible.
A responsibility attribution presumes that a person
brought about the outcome. But responsibility implies
more than an attribution to a person. It also embraces
a guilty mind and the belief that it could have been
otherwise. Hence, although effort and ability are person
characteristics, lack of effort resulting in failure
elicits judgments of responsibility, whereas this is not
the case given lack of aptitude as the cause, which is
presumed not to be subject to volitional control and
Responsibility Attribution———753
change. In a similar manner, obesity caused by love of
eating or HIV/AIDS caused by promiscuous sexual
behavior gives rise to responsibility ascriptions, whereas
obesity because of a thyroid disorder or HIV/AIDS
traced to a transfusion with contaminated blood
results in beliefs of nonresponsibility. The former are
“sinners,” the latter are “sick.”
These can be difficult judgments, prone to influence
by biases and affected by a variety of information. For
example, situational causes of behavior tend to be
underestimated in comparison with personal causes, so
that an individual may be blamed for a car accident on
a rainy day because the severity of the road conditions
is underestimated (what is called discounting).
Judgments of responsibility embrace complex
issues at the intersection of law, philosophy, and psychology,
and scholars with these interests often pose
odd dilemmas to tease apart the essence of responsibility.
Consider the following: Robber #1 is about to
rob a bank when Robber #2 enters that bank, holds a
gun to the head of Robber #1, and demands that he
help rob the bank or else he will be shot. Is Robber #1
responsible for the robbery? Similarly, when a
severely abused woman intentionally kills her abusive
spouse when he is asleep, is she fully responsible for
this action? Judgments of responsibility are lessened
given mitigating circumstances, such as mental state
at the time of the behavior. Hence, the abused spouse
is likely to receive a more lenient sentence than is one
who has not been victimized.
Consequences of
Responsibility Beliefs
Responsibility attributions affect emotions. Some psychologists
contend that feeling is directly determined
by thinking, that is, what is thought determines what
is felt. The task for this group of emotion theorists is
to specify the key thoughts linked with emotions and
identify the feelings they generate. Perceived responsibility
for an aversive event gives rise to anger and
related emotions such as annoyance. For example, you
are mad when a roommate fails to clean up the kitchen
or when a friend misses an appointment. Furthermore,
the greater the perceived responsibility is, the more
intense the anger is. Hence, an intentionally missed
appointment gives rise to greater anger than does one
forgotten (an unintentional cause revealing a less guilty
mind). On the other hand, nonresponsibility for a

754———Ringelmann Effect
negative event or state gives rise to sympathy and pity.
People feel sorry for the mentally handicapped person
who cannot complete an academic task and for the
physically handicapped individual who cannot compete
in an athletic event. Thus, responsibility judgments
provide one key to thinking–feeling linkages.
In addition, responsibility judgments and their linked
feelings give rise to important behavioral reactions.
For example, charity is more likely to be endorsed for
those considered not responsible for their plights.
Hence, it is easier to solicit financial assistance for the
blind than for drug abusers. This is one reason why so
many have contributed charity to those suffering from
hurricane damage in New Orleans and other southern
cities. Similarly, welfare payments are denounced by
individuals who see these recipients as lazy rather
than unemployed because of harsh economic conditions.
Political ideology affects these judgments and
how the political parties perceive one another and
themselves. Democrats (liberals) accuse Republicans
(conservatives) of holding others responsible when
this is not the case—for example, blaming those in
need of welfare for being lazy, when their poverty is
caused by the minimum wage being too low or by
some other uncontrollable factor. Conversely, Republicans
accuse Democrats of being bleeding hearts, giving
out public funds to those who are truly responsible
for their plights, and not differentiating between the
deserving and the undeserving needy. There are kernels
of truth in both positions, but of greater importance
here is that this debate illustrates the central role
responsibility beliefs play in political life.
Responsibility attributions and their consequences
are pervasive in other aspects of everyday life as well.
For example, teachers and parents are likely to punish
failure because of lack of studying but not if this
failure is attributed to lack of aptitude; spouses in
distressed marriages are more likely to fault their partners
for aversive events than are partners in successful
marriages; caregivers blame the mentally ill more for
passive symptoms (e.g., apathy) than for active symptoms
(e.g., hallucinations); and on and on. Thus,
responsibility judgments and their linked affects loom
large in people’s lives.
Altering Responsibility Beliefs
Inasmuch as being held responsible for a negative event
has great personal costs, individuals strive to reduce
such judgments. Impression management techniques
are available to meet this goal, including denial of the
event; providing an excuse (ex = from, cuse = cause)
that is external to the person or uncontrollable (“I am
late because the subway broke down”), giving a justification
so that the punishable behavior is regarded as
serving a higher goal (“I missed the appointment to
take my mother to the hospital”), or confessing, which
has the paradoxical effect of maintaining responsibility
yet reducing punishment. This is likely because the
act and the actor are separated—the confessor is perceived
as a good person who happened to perform a
bad act.
Bernard Weiner
See also Attributions; Excuse; Fundamental Attribution
Error; Person Perception; Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Malle, B. (2004). How the mind explains behavior.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Weiner, B. (1995). Judgments of responsibility. New York:
Guilford Press.
Weiner, B. (2006). Social motivation, justice, and the moral
emotions. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
RINGELMANN EFFECT
Definition
The Ringelmann effect refers to individuals expending
less individual effort on a task when working as
part of a group than when working alone.
Background and History
Max Ringelmann was a French agricultural engineer
who was interested in examining various aspects related
to agricultural efficiency. He was primarily interested
in conditions under which draft animals such as
horses and oxen—and men—are more or less efficient
in their work performance. Ringelmann’s research
represents some of the earliest systematic social psychological
research. Because he was also interested in
the process by which animals and men could be more
efficient, his research also represents some of the earliest
known human factors research. Actually, the human
factors aspect of his research represented the primary
focus of his research, whereas comparisons of

individual and group performance were only a secondary
interest at the time of his original research.
In some of his preliminary research, Ringelmann
had male participants pull horizontally on a rope for
approximately 5 seconds. Participants pulled on a rope
individually, in groups of 7, or in groups of 14. During
this time, their maximum pulling effort was recorded
via a dynamometer (a device that measures maximum
force exerted). Those participants who pulled alone
exerted a mean force of 85.3 kg per person. When participants
pulled in 7- and 14-person groups, the mean
force exerted per person was 65.0 kg and 61.4 kg,
respectively. Thus, as group size increased, the average
force exerted per individual decreased. Ringelmann
found similar results when participants were asked
to push a crossbar connected to a two-wheeled cart.
When participants pushed alone they exerted more
force (170.8 kg), on average, than when they pushed
together with another person (154.1 kg).
Some of Ringelmann’s most cited findings involve
examining relative group performance as a function of
group size in groups ranging in size from one to eight
participants. Similar to his research mentioned previously,
individual effort decreased as a function of group
size. For example, assuming that the total force exerted
for one worker was 1.00, the force exerted for two
through eight workers was 1.86, 2.55, 3.08, 3.50, 3.78,
3.92, and 3.92, respectively, indicating a curvilinear
relation among group size and group performance. That
is, as group size increased, the total force exerted for
the group decreased but the difference between twoand
three-person groups was greater than the difference
between four- and five-person groups and the difference
between seven- and eight-person groups was still
smaller. Interestingly, Ringelmann did not clearly specify
what types of tasks these data were based on. They
may or may not come from research specific to rope
pulling as is often assumed.
Ringelmann acknowledged two potential reasons
underlying this decrement of individual performance
when working in groups. The first was that the effect
was caused by coordination losses. For example, two
people pulling on a rope would be more coordinated
in their pulling (more likely to be in sync in their
pulling) than would a group of seven or eight people
putting together. For Ringelmann, this was the most
likely explanation. Nonetheless, he also acknowledged
the fact that such an effect might be the result of
decreased motivation. For example, with more people
pulling on a rope, individuals may feel that the work
of their coworkers will be enough to successfully
Ringelmann Effect———755
accomplish the task at hand, thus individual effort
decreases as the result. Others did not attempt to disentangle
the mystery of the Ringelmann effect until
nearly a century after Ringelmann’s original work.
Contemporary Research
Until the mid-1970s, researchers cited Ringelmann’s
work, but no one had attempted to replicate his findings.
Then in 1974, researchers sought to better understand
the Ringelmann effect. Is this effect real? Would
similar findings emerge if Ringelmann’s research had
been conducted in a controlled laboratory environment?
Are the effects Ringelmann obtained primarily
because of coordination losses involved with working
together on a task? Alternatively, can Ringelmann’s
data be explained primarily through other mechanisms
such as decreased individual motivation?
Similar to Ringelmann’s original research, more
contemporary findings indicate that individual effort
does decrease as a function of group size. These findings
have been replicated using a number of different
group sizes and a number of different tasks (clapping,
shouting, brainstorming, job evaluation, etc.), including
one of Ringelmann’s original tasks, rope pulling.
Moreover, both reduced motivation and coordination
losses contribute to decreased group performance on a
task, with coordination playing a bigger role as group
size increases. At least two possible causes have been
suggested to account for decreased motivation. The
first is that as group size increases so does an individual’s
belief that other group members will be able to
successfully accomplish the task at hand, thus leading
to decreased effort (i.e., motivation). This is referred to
as the free-rider effect. A second explanation for motivation
decrements concerns the perception that other
group members are not putting forth their best effort.
As a result, an individual will reduce his or her effort,
compared with when the individual is working alone,
so as not to appear as a sucker (i.e., the sucker effect).
This research also led to a change in terminology used
to describe this effect; the original Ringelmann effect
was replaced with a term that more aptly describes this
phenomenon, social loafing. When working on a task
as part of a group, many times people are apt to loaf or
work less hard than they would if working alone.
Since the reemergence of research in this area, several
variables have been found to moderate or mediate
the extent to which individuals will tend to loaf while
performing a group task. A few of these variables are
identifiability, personal relevance, group cohesiveness,

756———Risk Appraisal
and task interdependence. For example, individuals
are less likely to decrease their individual effort within
a group if they believe their individual effort is identifiable,
the group task has some personal relevance for
the individual (i.e., is important), the group is more
cohesive or tight-knit, and successful completion of a
task depends on the effort of all group members.
Robert Thomas Hitlan
See also Group Dynamics; Group Performance and
Productivity; Social Loafing
Further Readings
Ingham, A. G., Levinger, G., Graves, J., & Peckham, V.
(1974). Ringelmann effect: Studies of group size and
group performance. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 10, 371–384.
Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing: A
meta-analytic review and theoretical integration. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 681–706.
Kravitz, D. A., Martin, B. (1986). Ringelmann rediscovered:
The original article. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 50, 936–941.
RISK APPRAISAL
Definition
The term risk appraisal refers to an evaluation of the
chances that a future event may occur. Similar terms
include risk assessment, risk perception, perceived
likelihood, and perception of vulnerability. One might
appraise the risk of globally significant events (e.g.,
terrorism, natural disasters) as well as those that are
personally relevant (e.g., losing a child, developing
a disease). People’s beliefs about risk influence a
wide variety of decisions and behaviors in many life
domains including careers, relationships, and health.
As examples, college students are relatively less likely
to choose careers in which the chances of getting a job
are low, and women are unlikely to get mammographies
if they do not feel at risk for breast cancer. If risk
appraisals are incorrect, they may lead to faulty decision
making and counterproductive behavior, necessitating
the development of strategies to correct these
appraisals. Laypeople evaluate risk very differently
than experts do, and such differences can have public
policy implications.
Measurement
A common method of assessing perceptions of risk is
to ask individuals whether an event will or will not
happen, or have them estimate the chances it will happen
on a percentage (0%–100%) scale. One problem
with the latter approach is that people often have difficulty
thinking about risk in numerical terms and think
about probabilities differently than experts do. For example,
when people estimate that an event has a 50%
chance of happening, what they really mean is that it
might or might not happen and they are not sure.
Several other numerical measures attempt to minimize
this problem, such as a magnifier scale in which the
lower end of a percentage scale (between 0% and 1%)
is divided into smaller units to encourage respondents
to use this part of the scale for rare events. Another
approach is to have individuals make relative judgments,
such as how the risk of one event compares with that
of another (e.g., having cancer vs. having heart disease)
or how one person’s risk compares with that of
another person or persons. Still another is to use a verbal
scale (ranging, for example, from “very unlikely”
to “very likely”). Any of these measures can be designed
to be conditional on some behavior (e.g., “If you continue
to smoke, what are your chances of getting lung
cancer?”). Affective risk appraisals such as worry or
the feeling that something will happen can also be
assessed.
The choice of measures can greatly influence the
findings of a given study. For example, people’s verbal
risk appraisals are more sensitive to new information
than are their numerical risk appraisals, and people
may be pessimistically biased regarding their absolute
risk of an event yet optimistically biased about their
risk relative to that of their peers. Affective perceptions
of vulnerability (e.g., “feeling at risk”) are sometimes
more predictive of behaviors such as vaccination than
are cognitive perceptions of vulnerability.
Errors in Risk Appraisal
People often make errors when appraising their risk.
They tend to overestimate small risks and underestimate
large risks, and perceive positive events as more
likely to occur than negative events. A disproportionate

number of individuals consider their level of personal
risk to be lower than that of their peers, a bias called
unrealistic optimism. People also tend to overestimate
the risk of outcomes that have a low probability of
occurring and yet result in major consequences (e.g.,
nuclear reactor explosions, airplane accidents). These
events are often marked by a feeling of dread, lack of
control, and the potential for extremely negative outcomes.
Indeed, people often believe that high risk
initiatives have low benefit, whereas experts believe
exactly the reverse (as in the case of nuclear energy).
People may be able to estimate the likelihood of a
single event occurring (e.g., getting a job), but they
often have trouble estimating the probability of a compound
event (e.g., getting a job and being promoted).
They also have trouble understanding how quickly risk
accumulates; for example, smokers do not realize that
their risk of lung cancer relative to that of nonsmokers
gets substantially higher the more years they continue
to smoke. People have trouble making decisions where
the risk of one outcome increases and the risk of
another decreases (as is the case for many health therapies),
and they have trouble considering all possible
outcomes when assessing likelihood. For example,
when a sample of smokers was asked how many smokers
out of 100 would die of lung cancer, the average
response was 42, but when asked the same question
with a longer list of possible diseases, the average
response for lung cancer was much lower. People’s
risk perceptions are often constructed on the spot
based on the way these risk perceptions are measured
and the information available to the respondent at that
moment. This may explain why risk appraisals are
often not as predictive of behavior as one might expect.
Influences on Risk Appraisal
Many of the errors contaminating people’s risk
appraisals can be explained by a set of basic psychological
phenomena. Amos Tversky and Daniel
Kahneman found that people rely on a variety of
heuristics, or rules of thumb, when assessing the likelihood
of events. An example of such a heuristic is the
availability heuristic, whereby people estimate the
probability of an event occurring based on how easy it
is to think of an instance of that event. People tend
to remember (and thus overestimate) events that happened
relative to events that did not happen and are
likely to remember vivid events more than mundane
Risk Appraisal———757
events. For instance, people may overestimate the
number of times that disclosing personal information
on a date backfired, yet suppress memory of many
times that it did not. Highly publicized events such as
airplane crashes raise risk appraisals for air travel,
despite the fact that thousands more die in less publicized
car accidents. People also engage in egocentrism,
which means that thoughts about the self are
more prominent than are thoughts about other people.
As a result, when comparing their risk with that of
others, people rely on the abundance of information
they have about themselves, leading to errors like unrealistic
optimism.
People think differently about frequencies than they
do about proportions. For example, upon hearing that
10 individuals (of 100) were infected with a communicable
disease, people worry more than if they hear that
10% of this group was infected, despite the statistics
being equivalent. People seem to focus exclusively on
the 10 people who might have been infected. People
also fail to acknowledge the actual chances of an event
when assessing their own (or another person’s) risk.
For example, when determining whether a young
woman is anorexic, people might compare her build
and symptoms with that of other anorexic women and
pay little attention to the actual prevalence of anorexia
(which is lower than that of other health problems with
similar symptoms). Such a bias results from a heuristic
called the representativeness heuristic, which is
used to make judgments of similarity.
People tend to judge risks higher when sad, and
lower when angry or happy. Their motivation to believe
that good things will happen to them and bad things
will not often color their risk perceptions in a selfenhancing
direction. As a result, they may be resistant
to information designed to increase their risk perceptions,
which explains why many health promotion
campaigns are unsuccessful. People high in selfesteem,
extraversion, dispositional optimism, or sensation-seeking
tend to estimate their personal risks as
relatively lower, whereas those who are depressed tend
to be more pessimistic (though some evidence suggests
that depressed people are more realistic about their risk
than are nondepressed people). Contrary to popular
belief, adults and adolescents do not vary greatly in
their appraisals of the risk of various activities, and
even older adults have been found to be unrealistically
optimistic about their chances of experiencing negative
events relative to peers.

758———Risk Taking
Improving Risk Appraisal
Given the many errors in the way people appraise risk,
and given the association of risk appraisals with
important decisions and behaviors, it is important
to devise ways to improve the accuracy of risk
appraisals. The increasing use of computer aids and
the Internet will be helpful in this regard. Several Web
sites provide personalized risk information to individuals
about their chances of getting a disease, and decision
aids are now available to patients who need to
appraise the risk of competing options (e.g., watchful
waiting vs. surgery) when making important medical
decisions. These decision aids collect information
about patients’ values (such as whether years of life
matter more than quality of life) to help them understand
their risk and to make informed decisions.
Evidence also indicates that training in the social
sciences, and psychology in particular, improves the
ability to reason and make probabilistic judgments,
which is necessary to appraise risk accurately. If made
available to a wider audience, similar training may
reduce errors in risk appraisal on a wider scale.
William M. P. Klein
Jennifer L. Cerully
See also Availability Heuristic; Decision Making; Egocentric
Bias; Heuristic Processing; Representativeness Heuristic;
Risk Taking
Further Readings
Slovic, P. (1987). Perception of risk. Science, 236, 280–285.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under
uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
Weinstein, N. D. (2003). Exploring the links between risk
perceptions and preventive health behavior. In J. Suls &
K. A. Wallston (Eds.), Social psychological foundations of
health and illness (pp. 22–53). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
RISK TAKING
Definition
When people take risks, they engage in behaviors that
could lead to negative consequences such as physical
injury, social rejection, legal troubles, or financial
losses. Behaviors that are more likely to lead to such
outcomes are considered riskier than behaviors that are
less likely to lead to such outcomes. Regardless of the
degree of risk involved, however, behaviors of any type
can lead to both positive and negative consequences.
People who take risks think about consequences in one
of two ways. The first way involves an awareness that
a behavior such as gambling could lead to both positive
and negative consequences (e.g., their winnings
could increase further or they could lose all of their
money), but people engage in the behavior anyway
because they assume that the positive consequences
are more likely than the negative consequences. In
contrast, people who think about consequences in the
second way do not seem to consider both positive and
negative consequences at the time when they are thinking
about engaging in the behavior. Instead, they only
seem to consider the possible positive consequences.
If they had considered the negative consequences as
well, they might not have taken the risk.
Major Issues in
Risk-Taking Research
Researchers from a wide range of disciplines have
been interested in risk taking for a variety of reasons.
Economists and other financial experts, for example,
have considered the implications of philosophical,
mathematical, and psychological analyses of risk taking
for making wise investment decisions. Given that
nearly all financial decisions carry some degree of
risk, the focus is not on how one can avoid taking
risks. Rather, the focus is on how one can maximize
financial gains while minimizing financial losses.
Cognitive psychologists, in contrast, have been less
interested in financial decisions and more interested in
the ways in which the human mind copes with all the
information and possibilities that may be present in a
risk-taking situation. People cannot consider all the
possible positive and negative consequences of their
choices because doing so would require much more
memory ability and processing capacity than the human
mind possesses. Instead, they simplify the task for
themselves by only considering certain kinds of information,
narrowing down their options to one or two,
and relying on rules of thumb that are usually (but
not always) useful guides to selection. Whereas many
scholars (especially evolutionary psychologists) now
argue that such strategies are highly adaptive and usually
inconsequential, others have shown in experiments
how simplifying tendencies can lead to systematic

decision errors and inconsistent choices across similar
situations.
For example, when presented with hypothetical
health policy choices, people make different choices
depending on how the information is “framed.” In one
study, one group of participants was willing to implement
a risky health policy involving a vaccination
plan when they were told only that the vaccination
would likely “save the lives of 600 people” in a particular
town (population = 1,000). A second group, in
contrast, was unwilling to implement the policy when
they were only told that “400 people might die” if the
plan were implemented. Thus, people made different
choices even though the choices were formally identical.
People presented with the first frame failed to
realize that although 600 would be saved, 400 would
not be. People presented with the second frame failed
to draw the opposite inference.
Although studies of framing and other effects have
been of interest to social psychologists as well, other
issues currently predominate in the social psychological
literature on risk taking. The goal of most studies
is to identify the psychological factors that seem to
predict who is likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors
such as unprotected sex, reckless driving, or cigarette
smoking. Some researchers argue that people engage
in these unhealthy behaviors because the long-term,
negative consequences of these behaviors are outweighed
in their minds by the short-term, positive
consequences that they produce.
Risk taking is particularly likely when the shortterm
positive consequences include reductions in both
negative emotion and high self-awareness, combined
with increases in physical pleasure or arousal. That is,
people are drawn to risks that promise a quick positive
outcome that will feel good, be exciting, help them
forget themselves, and get rid of unpleasant emotions.
Experimental procedures that increase negative emotion
or self-awareness (e.g., leading people to believe
they will never form close relationships; reminding
them that they will die someday) increase tendencies
toward risk taking. Further work has shown that risktaking
is more likely when (a) factors such as stress or
alcohol decrease the number of consequences considered,
(b) the risky behaviors serve a variety of goals
and needs (e.g., need for intimacy; self-esteem), and
(c) people have favorable stereotypes about the kind
of person who engages in the behavior, believe that
most people engage in the behavior, and their friends
would approve of their engaging in the behavior.
Risk Taking———759
Developmental (child) psychology often builds
on scholarship in the fields of cognitive and social
psychology. Developmental psychologists have given
many of the same tasks and measures used by cognitive
and social psychologists to children in an effort to
document developmental increases or decreases in
risk-taking tendencies. Although adolescents are more
likely to engage in certain kinds of risky behaviors than
are preadolescents and children (e.g., smoking, binge
drinking, unprotected sex), age differences have not
been found on a variety of other risk-taking measures.
Hence, there does not appear to be a global increase
in risk taking with age because age differences vary by
topic. Similarly, there does not appear to be a general
tendency for males to take more risks than females do.
Although some studies have found that males engage in
certain risky behaviors more than females (e.g., reckless
driving), other studies have either found no gender
differences or found that females engaged in certain
risky behaviors more than males (e.g., females in their
20s smoke more than males in their 20s).
Hence, financial scholars and scholars in various
subfields of psychology have had somewhat divergent
interests. Nevertheless, several findings and
issues have been of interest to scholars in all these disciplines.
One issue pertains to the question of whether
a person who engages in one kind of risky behavior
(e.g., smoking) is also likely to engage in other kinds
as well (e.g., binge drinking, reckless driving). Again,
the findings seem to show that the degree of consistency
depends on which behaviors are presented to
participants in studies. Certain kinds of risky behaviors
do tend to cluster together (e.g., smoking and
binge drinking in teens), but other kinds do not (e.g.,
trying out for a sport and smoking). Whenever larger
lists of risky behaviors are presented to participants,
less consistency in the tendency to take risks emerges.
The second issue of interest to scholars in multiple
disciplines pertains to the relation between risk taking
and rationality. In classical terms, rational people are
people who behave in ways that are consistent with
their beliefs and values. To illustrate, people who drive
recklessly with their children in their cars can be said
to behave irrationally if they (a) believe that driving
recklessly could lead to the injury or death of any passengers
in their cars and (b) consider it very important
to protect their children. Similarly, the act of smoking
cigarettes is irrational for any person who believes that
smoking causes premature death and considers it important
to live a long and healthy life.

760———Risky Shift
Several studies of risk taking have shown that adolescents
and adults can deviate from the classical norms
of rationality. Scholars have reacted to such deviations
in one of two ways. Some have argued that the classical
criteria for rational behavior need to be discarded
in favor of other criteria. In other words, there is nothing
wrong with the human mind; there is something
wrong with the definition of rationality. These scholars
suggest that millions of years of evolution could not
have produced a mind that is designed for selfdestruction.
Other scholars, in contrast, have accepted
the classical criteria and sought to determine the psychological
and contextual factors that cause people to
sometimes behave irrationally. As noted previously,
for example, social psychologists have appealed to
constructs such as negative emotion, self-awareness,
social exclusion, lack of self-regulation, and positive
views of risk-takers to explain irrational risky behavior.
Developmental psychologists have also appealed
to lack of self-regulation, but have added an emphasis
on other factors such as impulsivity and sensationseeking
as well. In contrast, cognitive psychologists
have focused on various cognitive processes that keep
people from attending to, or recalling, the right kinds
of information.
The issue of rationality also arises in legal settings.
When adults or adolescents engage in criminal
behaviors, the question arises whether they should be
held accountable for their behavior. Are their beliefs
in accord with reality? Do they value their own lives
or the lives of others? Did psychological factors such
as extreme emotion or uncontrollable impulsivity
cause them to behave irrationally? If so, should they
be held accountable for not controlling their emotions
or impulses?
See also Decision Making; Emotion; Self-Defeating
Behavior; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
James P. Byrnes
Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Esteem threat, self-regulatory
breakdown, and emotional distress as factors in
self-defeating behavior. Review of General Psychology,
1, 145–174.
Byrnes, J. P., Miller, D. C., & Schafer, W. D. (1999). Gender
differences in risk-taking: A meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 125, 367–383.
Jacobs, J. E., & Klaczynski, P. A. (2005). The development of
judgment and decision-making in children and
adolescents. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Romer, D. (2004). Reducing adolescent risk. Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
RISKY SHIFT
Risky shift occurs when people change their decisions
or opinions to become more extreme and risky when
acting as part of a group, compared with acting individually;
this is one form of the phenomenon known
as group polarization. The result is that group decisions
are bolder and more adventurous than those
made by individuals alone and even riskier than the
average of the individuals’ opinions and decisions
before group discussion. However, sometimes people
in groups shift such that the group decision is actually
more conservative, which is known as cautious (or
conservative) shift. The group’s initial tendency
toward risk is important in predicting if risky shift will
occur. The direction of the shift (to be more risky or
more conservative) tends to be in line with the general
direction of group initial viewpoints.
The term risky shift was coined by James Stoner in
1961. To examine group decision making, he asked
participants to make decisions about real-life scenarios
that involved some amount of risk. Participants first
gave their own individual ratings. Then they got
together in groups and arrived at a decision together.
Following this, participants made their own individual
ratings again. Contrary to what was expected, he found
that group decisions were more risky. In addition, the
postdiscussion individual decisions also showed a shift
toward increased risk. Subsequent research has shown
that people in groups may make more risky decisions
in a variety of situations including, but not limited to,
gambling and consumer behavior, and people in groups
can become more prejudiced in their opinions of
minorities or more liberal on issues such as feminism.
This risky shift in group decision making may
occur for a variety of reasons. First, the individuals
with more extreme views may be more confident,
committed, and persuasive, compared with the more
conservative members of the group. In addition, as
people present their arguments to the group members,
they may come to hold a stronger belief in their own
opinions and, in turn, be willing to make more extreme

decisions. These stronger opinions may carry more
weight in determining the final decision.
Another reason for the occurrence of risky shift is
that the group may fail to consider all available opinions
and possibilities. There may be biased filtering and
communicating of views, facts, and findings because of
motivation by an individual to promote his or her own
opinion. This insufficient exploration by the group of
costs and benefits of each choice may lead to assumptions
in which negative outcomes are overlooked.
Although the goal and desire of committee and group
decision making is ultimately to result in more educated,
well-rounded, and better decisions, risky shift
may be a deterrent to this. In groups such as juries or
panels of judges, committees of generals, or boards of
directors, as a result of group discussion, the group
may choose a more risky option than a single juror or
judge, general, or CEO alone would. Unfortunately, in
some cases, this may result in poor, even disastrous,
decisions and outcomes.
Carrie L. Wyland
See also Group Polarization; Groups, Characteristics of
Further Readings
Isenberg, D. J. (1986). Group polarization: A critical review
and meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 50, 1141–1151.
Johnson, N. R., Stemler, J. G., & Hunter, D. (1977). Crowd
behavior as risky shift: A laboratory experiment. Social
Psychology Quarterly, 40, 183–187.
Stoner, J. A. F. (1961). A comparison of individual and group
decisions involving risk. Unpublished master’s thesis,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.
Stoner, J. A. F. (1968). Risky and cautious shifts in group
decisions: The influence of widely held values. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 4, 442, 459.
Wallach, M. A., Kogan, N., & Burt, R. B. (1962). Group
influence on individual risk taking. Journal of Abnormal
Social Psychology, 65, 75–86.
ROBBERS CAVE EXPERIMENT
Definition
The Robbers Cave experiment demonstrated that an
attempt to simply bring hostile groups together is not
Robbers Cave Experiment———761
enough to reduce intergroup prejudice. Rather, this
experiment confirmed that groups must cooperate and
have common goals to truly build peace. Thus, although
contact is vital to reducing tensions between groups,
interdependence is essential for establishing lasting
intergroup harmony. This experiment is a classic in
social psychology and is important because it has
implications for reducing conflict between real social
groups. In addition, this study has implications for a
number of prominent social psychological theories,
including realistic conflict theory and social identity
theory.
Background
The purpose of this study was to create conflict and
hostility between groups, and then employ interventions
designed to reduce it. Researchers accomplished
this goal by sending two groups of adolescent boys to a
remote location where both the creation and resolution
of intergroup conflict could be manipulated. Twentytwo
11-year-old boys were transported to a summer
camp located in Oklahoma’s Robbers Cave State Park
(hence the name by which this experiment has come
to be known). All the boys were similar on important
demographic features, with each exhibiting satisfactory
academic performance and coming from stable, middle-class
families. In addition, the boys did not know
one another and had no idea that they were about to
participate in a psychology experiment. Researchers
divided the boys into two equal-sized groups that were
taken to opposite sides of the camp. These groups were
initially unaware of each other’s existence, but this soon
changed.
The study took place in three separate stages that
were approximately 1 week apart: (1) group formation,
(2) intergroup competition, and (3) intergroup cooperation.
The purpose of the first stage was to encourage
the development of unique ingroup identities among
the groups. This occurred as a result of the boys
engaging in shared activities (e.g., swimming, hiking)
with their own groups, which indeed led to the spontaneous
emergence of norms, leaders, and identities.
In fact, the groups even chose distinct names for
themselves, with one referring to itself as the Rattlers
and the other as the Eagles.
In the second stage, the groups were introduced and
placed in direct competition with one another. Thus, the
boys competed in a series of contests involving activities
such as baseball and tug-of-war. The group that

762———Roles and Role Theory
won overall was to be awarded a trophy and other
prizes, and the losing group was to receive nothing. The
result was a vicious rivalry between the groups, with
both verbal and physical attacks being commonplace.
For instance, the boys engaged in name-calling and
taunting, as well as more physical acts of aggression
such as stealing the winning group’s prizes and burning
each other’s team flags. Clearly, the researchers’ goal
of creating intergroup conflict was easily achieved.
However, resolving this conflict turned out to be a more
difficult task.
In the final stage of the experiment, researchers
arranged specific situations designed to reduce the severe
hostility between groups. First, the groups were provided
with noncompetitive opportunities for increased
contact, such as watching movies and sharing meals
together. However, these getting-to-know-you opportunities
did little to defuse intergroup hostility. In fact,
many of these situations resulted in an exchange of
verbal insults and, occasionally, food fights.
As an alternative strategy, the groups were placed
in situations that required them to cooperate with
one another (i.e., the situations involved superordinate
goals). For instance, one situation involved a brokendown
truck carrying supplies to the camp. Another
involved a problem with the camp’s water supply. In
both cases, the groups needed to work together because
the resources at stake were important to everyone
involved. This cooperation resulted in more harmonious
relations between groups, as friendships began
to develop across group lines. As a telling sign of their
newfound harmony, both groups expressed a desire to
return home on the same bus.
Implications and Importance
The Robbers Cave experiment has had an enormous
impact on the field of social psychology. First, this
study has implications for the contact hypothesis of
prejudice reduction, which, in its simplest form, posits
that contact between members of different groups
improves how well groups get along. This experiment
illustrates how contact alone is not enough to restore
intergroup harmony. Even after the competition
between the boys ended, the hostility did not disappear
during future contact. Competition seemingly became
incorporated into the groups’ identities. The hostility
did not finally calm down until the context changed
and cooperation between groups was required. Thus,
beyond mere contact, groups also need to be interdependent
and have common goals.
Second, this study validated the claims of realistic
conflict theory, which specifies that prejudice and
discrimination result when groups are placed in
competition for valuable resources. The boys in this
experiment clearly demonstrated that competition
breeds intergroup hostility. More importantly, however,
this study highlights the significance of the
social context in the development of prejudice and
discrimination. The boys selected to participate in this
study were well-adjusted and came from stable, middleclass
families. Thus, it is unlikely that individual characteristics
such as socioeconomic status and family
life were responsible for the observed effects because
these factors were held constant. Rather, the context
of intergroup relations (i.e., competition) led to the
observed conflict and hostility. This suggests that
prejudice is largely a product of social situations and
that individual pathology is not necessary to produce
outgroup hatred. Therefore, the results of this experiment
speak to a number of social psychological theories
that emphasize the importance of the social context
in understanding group prejudice, such as social identity
theory and self-categorization theory.
Justin J. Lehmiller
See also Contact Hypothesis; Prejudice; Racism; Realistic
Group Conflict Theory; Self-Categorization Theory;
Social Identity Theory
Further Readings
LeVine, R. A., & Campbell, D. T. (1972). Ethnocentrism:
Theories of conflict, ethnic attitudes and group behavior.
New York: Wiley.
Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., &
Sherif, C. W. (1988). The Robbers Cave experiment.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
ROLES AND ROLE THEORY
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women
merely players”: With these lines from As You Like It,
William Shakespeare succinctly captured the essence
of role theory. In short, people’s behavior stems from
the parts they play in life. In social psychology, a role

is defined as the collection of expectations that
accompany a particular social position. Indeed, the
word originates from the French rôle, which denoted
the parchment from which an actor read his lines.
Each individual typically plays multiple roles in his or
her life; in different contexts or with different people,
a particular person might be a student, a friend, or an
employee. Each of these roles carries its own expectations
about appropriate behavior, speech, attire, and so
on. What might be rewarded for a person in one role
would be unacceptable for a person occupying a different
role (e.g., competitive behavior is rewarded for
an athlete but not a preschool teacher). Roles range
from specific, in that they only apply to a certain setting,
to diffuse, in that they apply across a range of
situations. For example, gender roles influence behavior
across many different contexts; although someone
may be a cashier when she is on the clock, she is a
woman across all settings. Role theory examines how
these roles influence a wide array of psychological
outcomes, including behavior, attitudes, cognitions,
and social interaction.
Background
Within social psychology, role theory has generally
focused on roles as causes of (a) behaviors enacted by
individuals or groups and (b) inferences about individuals
or groups. One of the fundamental precepts of
social psychology is that the social and physical environment
exerts a profound influence on individuals’
thoughts and behavior. Role theory posits that the
roles that people occupy provide contexts that shape
behavior. For example, the Stanford Prison Experiment
demonstrated that normal college students displayed
strikingly different behaviors depending on whether
they were assigned to be guards or prisoners in a simulated
prison environment. Within a short time, prisoners
began to show meek, submissive behaviors, whereas
prison guards began to show dominant, abusive behaviors.
In general, people are motivated to behave in ways
that fit valued social roles. Rewards stem from alignment
to valued social roles, and punishments stem
from misalignment to such roles.
Role theory also examines how observers form
inferences about others’ personality and abilities based
on their roles. Indeed, one of the first questions asked
to get to know someone is, “What do you do?” A classic
illustration of the power of roles to influence beliefs
about others is a study in which individuals participated
in a quiz show with a partner. Their roles as
questioner or contestant were randomly assigned by a
flip of a coin, in plain sight of both participants. The
questioner was instructed to write a series of general
knowledge questions based on anything that he or she
knew, and then the questioner posed these questions to
the contestant. After this trivia game, participants rated
the general knowledge ability of themselves and their
partners. Both the contestants and observers rated the
questioners as more knowledgeable than the contestant.
In fact, according to objective tests, the questioners
and the contestants did not differ in knowledge.
This study clearly showed that observing someone in a
particular role leads to the inference of related traits,
even when his or her behaviors are required by a particular
role, that role is arbitrarily assigned, and role
assignment is obvious to all involved.
These trait judgments form partly because observers
infer that individuals possess the personality traits that
equip them to perform their roles. For example, seeing
someone care for a puppy would likely lead to the
inference that this individual is sensitive and kind. In
contrast, seeing someone play a game of basketball
would lead to the inference that the individual is aggressive
and competitive. Observers typically assume that
people have the personal qualities or motivation to
behave a certain way, and thus observers underestimate
how much roles elicit behaviors.
Mechanisms: How Do Roles
Lead to Behavior?
External Mechanisms
Roles and Role Theory———763
One basic way in which roles influence behavior
is via role affordances, or opportunities for different
actions. For example, competitive roles typically promote
self-assertion but inhibit kindness. In the quizshow
study described earlier, the role of questioner
afforded the display of knowledge. This display led
to the inference that the questioner was extremely
knowledgeable, even though both partners tested
similarly in general knowledge and the questioner
was allowed to pick questions that he or she knew.
The expectations of others based on one’s role also
powerfully influence behavior. Many experiments have
documented the effects of the self-fulfilling prophecy,
in which an individual’s beliefs about a target are

764———Roles and Role Theory
confirmed because the individual elicits such behavior
from the target. For example, Robert Rosenthal and
colleagues demonstrated the power of expectancies on
others by providing teachers with lists of students who
had been identified as likely to develop special abilities
throughout the school year. In truth, these students
did not initially differ from other students. However,
the teachers assessed these children as more curious,
interesting, and likely to succeed, and by the end of
the school year, the “late bloomer” students actually
performed better than other students. Studies of the
self-fulfilling prophecy have effectively demonstrated
how expectancies about different role occupants
(e.g., that CEOs will be aggressive or women are
emotional) can become reality.
Internal Mechanisms
With repeated experience in a role, aspects of that
role can become internalized in the self-concept—for
example, repeated experience of competing against
others might lead one to identify as “competitive.”
These internalized constructs become an important
part of identity and are carried across the boundaries
of different roles. Indeed, identity transformations frequently
happen when individuals enter or leave roles.
Major life transitions, such as going to college, starting
a new job, or getting married, represent some of
these role-identity shifts.
When someone occupies a certain role, he or she is
socialized to perform certain behaviors. In addition,
more experience in role-related tasks fosters comfort
and expertise in specific domains. Individuals may thus
begin to feel greater self-efficacy in roles they have previously
occupied. Moreover, socialization into diffuse
roles (e.g., gender roles) can lead to greater comfort in
activities that are compatible with those roles, with the
result that individuals choose specific roles that fit with
their diffuse role socialization. For example, the tendency
to socialize girls more than boys to attend to
others’ needs can contribute to women’s greater selection
of communal or caring-oriented careers.
Implications
Role theory has provided an important framework for
understanding perceived and actual group differences.
Just as perceivers fail to correct for the influence of
roles on individuals’ behavior, they fail to correct for
the influence of roles on group members’ behaviors.
The role perspective on stereotype content has been
applied to understand stereotypes based on gender,
age, ethnicity, and culture. According to the social role
theory of sex differences and similarities, the traditional
division of labor (in which women are concentrated
in caretaking roles and men in breadwinner
roles) leads to the inference that men and women possess
the traits that equip them to perform their roles.
Moreover, group members may differ in their behaviors
because of current or historical distributions into
certain social roles. As detailed previously, role occupancy
can lead to constraints on the performance of
behaviors, as well as to the development of skills and
abilities associated with those roles.
Role theory also provides an explanation of the
sources of prejudice against certain groups. Role congruity
theory posits that negativity stems from the lack
of fit between the requirements of valued social roles
and the perceived characteristics of an individual or
group. For example, negativity occurs when a group’s
stereotype (e.g., women are kind) does not align with
the characteristics required by the role (e.g., leaders are
aggressive). As a way of understanding how behavior
derives from the surrounding context, role theory thus
provides a useful framework to understand the behaviors,
thoughts, and attitudes of oneself and others.
Amanda B. Diekman
See also Fundamental Attribution Error; Looking-Glass Self;
Self-Categorization Theory; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy; Sex
Roles; Stanford Prison Experiment
Further Readings
Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of
prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review,
109, 573–598.
Eagly, A. H., Wood, W., & Diekman, A. B. (2000). Social
role theory of sex differences and similarities: A current
appraisal. In T. Eckes & H. M. Trautner (Eds.), The
developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 123–174).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Moskowitz, D. S., Suh, E. J., & Desaulniers, J. (1994).
Situational influences on gender differences in agency and
communion. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 66, 753–761.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the
classroom. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Ross, L. D., Amabile, T. M., & Steinmetz, J. L. (1977). Social
roles, social control, and biases in social-perception
processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
35, 485–494.

ROMANTIC LOVE
Romantic love has been found in every historical era
and in every culture for which data are available. To
those familiar with the research literature, romantic
love today is no longer the mystery it has been considered
to be throughout the ages. Nevertheless, there
is much more to learn, and romantic love remains a
thriving topic of research for social psychologists.
Aspects of romantic love are found in many animal
species, and love may have played a central role in
shaping human evolution. In humans, romantic love
is a source of some of the deepest joys and greatest
problems, including depression, abandonment rage,
stalking, suicide, and homicide. Therefore, social psychologists
and other scientists have devoted a great
deal of research to understanding romantic love.
Definition
People generally understand love by its resemblance
to a prototype, which means a standard model or idea
(as one would recognize a bird by its resemblance to
a robin). The protoypical features of love encompass,
in order of centrality, intimacy, commitment, and
passion. Scientists, by contrast, define love in a more
formal way—for example, as the constellation of
behaviors, cognitions, and emotions associated with a
desire to enter or maintain a close relationship with a
specific other person.
Much research on love has focused on types of love,
including distinguishing romantic love from more general
kinds of love, such as familial love or compassionate
love for strangers. Romantic love, which is
associated with dependence, caring, and exclusiveness,
is also distinguished from liking, which emphasizes
similarity, respect, and positive evaluation. Moreover,
passionate love (the fervent desire for connection with
a particular other person) is also distinguished from
companionate love (the warm feelings one has for
people with whom one’s life is interconnected). Items
on the standard research measure of passionate love
focus on such things as wanting to be with this person
more than with anyone else, and melting when looking
into this person’s eyes. A similar distinction is between
those whom one “loves” and the subset of these with
whom one is “in love.”
Another well-researched approach identifies six
love styles: eros (romantic, passionate love), ludus
(game playing love), storge (friendship love), pragma
(logical, “shopping-list” love), mania (possessive,
dependent love), and agape (selfless love). Yet another
influential approach, the triangular theory, conceptualizes
love in terms of intimacy, commitment/decision,
and passion, the various combinations of which define
diverse types of romantic love.
Biological Basis
Romantic Love———765
Biological research suggests that birds and mammals
evolved several distinct brain systems for courtship,
mating, and parenting, including (a) the sex drive,
characterized by a craving for sexual gratification;
(b) attraction, characterized by focused attention on a
preferred mating partner; and (c) attachment, characterized
by the maintenance of proximity, affiliative gestures
and expressions of calm when in social contact
with a mating partner, and separation anxiety when
apart. Each neural system is associated with a different
constellation of brain circuits, different behavior patterns,
and different emotional and motivational states.
With regard to human love, one can equate “attraction”
with passionate love and “attachment” with companionate
love. Recent studies using functional magnetic
resonance imaging of the brain indicate that these three
neural systems are distinct yet interrelated.
Predicting Falling in Love
Numerous experiments have identified factors that
lead to liking, in general, and to many forms of loving.
These factors include discovering that the other person
likes one’s self; attraction to the other’s characteristics,
including kindness, intelligence, humor, good looks,
social status; similarities with one’s self, especially in
attitudes and background characteristics; proximity and
exposure to the other; and confirmation and encouragement
from one’s peers and family that this is suitable
partner. In the context of falling in love, discovering
that the other likes one’s self and that he or she has
desirable and appropriate characteristics is especially
important. In addition, a well-researched predictor specific
to falling in love is the arousal-attraction effect—
being physiologically stirred up at the time of meeting
a potential partner (e.g., one study found that men who
met an attractive woman when on a scary suspension
bridge were more romantically attracted to her than
were men who met the same woman on a safe bridge;
another study found that individuals felt greater romantic
attraction to an individual whom they met just after
running in place for a few minutes!).

766———Romantic Love
Effects of Falling in Love
Those experiencing intense passionate love report a
constellation of feelings including focused attention on
the beloved, heightened energy, sleeplessness, loss of
appetite, euphoria and mood swings, bodily reactions
such as a pounding heart, emotional dependence on
and obsessive thinking about the beloved, emotional
and physical possessiveness, craving for emotional
union with the beloved, and intense motivation to win
this particular partner. Studies have also found that
when someone is intensely in love, and that person’s
romantic passion is reciprocated, the lovers experience
an increase in self-esteem and an expanded, more diverse
sense of one’s self.
Unreciprocated Love
Autobiographical accounts of being rejected and of
being the undesired object of someone’s attraction have
reported that rejection can lead to strong organization
as well as strong disorganization of thoughts, behaviors,
and emotions. Both the rejector and rejectee largely
express passive behaviors, both are unhappy with the
situation, and both usually end up disappointed. A large
survey study found that the intensity of a person’s feelings
of unrequited love can be predicted by how much
the individual wants the relationship, how much he or
she likes the state of being in love (whether reciprocated
or not), and whether the rejectee initially believed
his or her love would be reciprocated.
Maintaining Love Over Time
Longitudinal studies report that passionate love regularly
declines after an initial relationship period of 1 to
3 years. Evolutionary anthropologists suggest that this
decline is because the basic function of love (to promote
the breeding process with a specific individual)
was designed to dissipate and change into feelings of
attachment so partners could rear their child together
in a calmer state. One psychological explanation for
this emphasizes habituation. Another psychological
explanation argues that passionate love arises from the
rapid increase in intimacy or interpersonal connection,
which inevitably slows down as one gets to
know the partner. Whatever the reason for the typical
decline, love does not inevitably weaken. In one study
following newlyweds for 4 years, about 10% maintained
or increased their relationship satisfaction.
Furthermore, some studies have found a small percentage
of long-term married people have very high
levels of passionate love. How might this happen?
One clue is from experiments and surveys showing an
increase in passionate love in long-term relationships
in which partners do challenging and novel activities
together.
How Does Love Work?
Love as Emotion and Motivation
Love, especially “moments of love,” are very emotional
(indeed, “love” is the first example most people
give when asked to name an emotion). However,
love, especially passionate love, may not be a specific
emotion in its own right. Rather, passionate love may
be better described as a goal-oriented state (the desire
for a relationship with a particular partner) that can
lead to a variety of emotions depending on the partner’s
response. Also, unlike basic emotions, passionate
love is not associated with any specific facial
expression, it is more focused on a highly specific
goal, and it is particularly hard to control (it is almost
impossible to make yourself feel passionate love for
someone). Similarly, brain scan studies show that
passionate love engages a common reward-area brain
system across individuals, a system similar to that
which becomes active when one takes cocaine, but
the emotional parts of the brain show different
patterns for different individuals.
Love and Sex
People typically feel sexual desire for a person they
passionately love, but they may not feel passionate
love for all of the people whom they sexually desire.
This distinction between these systems is also seen
in studies of neural systems active in brain functioning
and in varying behavioral responses in laboratory
experiments.
Love and Attachment
Attachment theory posits that a key factor in adult
love is whether during infancy one’s primary caregiver
(usually one’s mother) provided a secure base for
exploration. Research shows that those who had inconsistent
caregiving are much more likely to experience
intense passionate love as adults; those who had

consistent lack of attention in infancy are especially
unlikely to experience passionate love. Some evidence
also indicates that the brain systems engaged by passionate
love may differ according to one’s attachment
history.
Self-Expansion
The self-expansion model posits, with research support,
that the exhilaration and intense focused attention
of passionate love arise from the rapid rate of coming
to feel as if the other is part of oneself that is often
associated with forming a new romantic relationship,
but that companionate love arises from the ongoing
greater opportunities offered by the partner and the
potential for loss to the self of losing the partner.
Love as a Story
An influential (though little researched) idea is
that loving relationships can be described accurately
by the people involved through narrative autobiographies,
often suggesting culturally prototypical “stories.”
For example, the story of a couple locked in
constant struggle is common, as is the story of couples
growing to love each other over time.
Evolutionary Approaches
One evolutionary view (noted earlier), based on
animal studies and some recent brain scanning studies,
proposes that passionate romantic love evolved to
motivate individuals to select among potential mating
partners and focus their courtship attention on these
favored individuals, thereby conserving precious
courtship and mating time and energy. Another influential
line of evolutionary thinking is based on the idea
that when choosing a mate, a woman is making a bigger
investment than is a man. This approach has emphasized
gender differences, for example, in what features
are desirable in a mate (across cultures, women give
more weight to a man’s social status; men, to a woman’s
good looks). Finally, some recent theorists interpret
various studies as suggesting that romantic love is
an elaboration of the basic bonding system between
infants and parents.
Arthur Aron
Helen E. Fisher
Greg Strong
See also Attachment Theory; Close Relationships; Love;
Self-Expansion Theory; Sexual Desire; Triangular
Theory of Love; Unrequited Love
Further Readings
Aron, A., Fisher, H., & Strong, G. (2006). Romantic love. In
D. Perlman & A. Vangelisti (Eds.), Cambridge handbook
of personal relationships (pp. 595–614). Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Baumeister, R. F., & Wotman, S. R. (1992). Breaking hearts:
The two sides of unrequited love. New York: Guilford
Press.
Fisher, H. (2004). Why we love: The nature and chemistry
of romantic love. New York: Henry Holt.
Pines, A. M. (1999). Falling in love: Why we choose the
lovers we choose. London: Routledge.
Tennov, D. (1999). Love and limerence: The experience
of being in love. Lanham, MD: Scarborough House.
ROMANTIC SECRECY
Romantic Secrecy———767
Definition
Romantic secrecy is the process by which an individual
deliberately conceals his or her ongoing romantic
relationship from a person or persons outside of the
relationship. Romantic secrecy is typically associated
with deception about the nature of a romantic relationship.
Romantic secrecy occurs most clearly when
an individual conceals all aspects of his or her romantic
relationship from others. An individual can maintain
such pretenses by meeting privately with only his
or her romantic partner or by concealing the romantic
nature of the relationship when in public. Romantic
secrecy occurs similarly when an individual acknowledges
an ongoing romantic relationship, but conceals
the romantic partner. Finally, romantic secrecy occurs
to a lesser degree when an individual acknowledges a
romantic relationship, but goes to lengths to hide the
emotional depth of the relationship.
Romantic secrecy occurs for two general reasons.
First, individuals commonly engage in romantic secrecy
during early relationship development. That is, individuals
frequently maintain the privacy of a new relationship
until they consider it the right time to reveal
the relationship to others. For example, an individual
might wait until a new relationship becomes more

768———Romantic Secrecy
serious before disclosing the relationship to friends.
This form of romantic secrecy is probably benign
insofar as it involves low levels of deliberate deception
and any relationship concealment can be regulated
easily by romantic relationship partners. Second,
and more important, individuals might maintain romantic
secrecy because of identifiable external constraints
that make relationship disclosure appear harmful. The
notion of romantic secrecy generally refers to these
kinds of relationships. In these cases, romantic secrecy
goes beyond the relatively brief romantic relationship
concealment that partners might invoke in developing
relationships. Instead, relationship partners experience
heightened anxiety about possible romantic relationship
disclosure and maintain romantic secrecy for
extended periods. For example, romantic partners in
an interreligious relationship might keep their relationship
secret because they anticipate strong disapproval
from friends and family.
Relationships that contain high levels of romantic
secrecy are often thought of as “secret relationships.”
However, even relationships that appear to be nonsecret
can contain milder levels of romantic secrecy. To
illustrate, partners who conceal their romantic relationship
from one person might not identify their
own relationship as secret but still engage in some
elements of romantic secrecy.
Prevalence of Romantic Secrecy
Individuals usually maintain romantic secrecy to avoid
negative outcomes that they believe would result from
relationship disclosure. Individuals might engage in
romantic secrecy to avoid personal harm (e.g., an individual
might hide a homosexual relationship to avoid
social disapproval). Similarly, individuals might engage
in romantic secrecy to protect their romantic partners
from harm (e.g., an individual might conceal a romantic
relationship to avoid creating a rift between the
partner and the partner’s parents). Lastly, individuals
might maintain romantic secrecy to protect others outside
of the relationship (e.g., single parents might keep
newer, unstable romances secret from children to avoid
causing them distress).
Individuals might underestimate the prevalence of
romantic secrecy because it does not seem a part of
the prototypical adult romantic relationship. However,
some common forms of romantic secrecy demonstrate
the ubiquitous nature of this phenomenon. To begin,
workplace romances are common, and romantically
involved coworkers frequently conceal their relationships
to avoid gossip and potential administrative
repercussions. Members of homosexual, interracial,
and interreligious relationships might maintain romantic
secrecy because others are more likely to disapprove
of these relationships. Members of these
so-called stigmatized relationships, particularly members
of homosexual relationships, might also worry
about more serious issues such as employment termination
and even violence.
Romantic affairs are another common source of
romantic secrecy. Romantic affairs are noteworthy
because they can create two simultaneous forms of
romantic secrecy. Romantic affairs might be kept secret
from long-term relationship partners, and long-term
relationships (e.g., marriages) might be kept secret
from extra-relationship partners. For obvious reasons,
romantic affairs often require inordinately high levels
of romantic secrecy. On a related note, individuals
who do not have full-scale affairs might still employ
romantic secrecy to leave open the option to “trade
up.” Put differently, individuals might avoid revealing
their existing romances when in the presence of
romantically intriguing and newly met others, particularly
when their current relationships are less satisfactory
than they used to be.
Romantic Secrecy and
Relationship Quality
Many individuals believe that romantic secrecy
increases romantic attraction. According to one theory,
romantic secrecy causes individuals to think more frequently
about their romantic partners, which, in turn,
heightens romantic attraction. Although some evidence
supports this theory, research indicates generally that
romantic secrecy decreases relationship quality. Individuals
in ongoing romantic relationships who report
greater levels of romantic secrecy also tend to report
reduced relationship quality (e.g., love). Similarly, members
of interracial and homosexual relationships appear
to find the requirements of romantic secrecy aversive
rather than alluring. Romantic secrecy might inhibit
relationship quality because relationships with greater
levels of romantic secrecy are more difficult to manage
and receive less social support. Individuals should be
aware of these potential challenges when entering or
maintaining relationships that require romantic secrecy.
Craig Foster

See also Close Relationships; Deception (Lying); Self-
Presentation; Social Support
Further Readings
Baxter, L. A., & Widenmann, S. (1993). Revealing and not
revealing the status of romantic relationships to social
networks. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships,
10, 321–337.
Foster, C. A., & Campbell, W. K. (2005). The adversity of
secret relationships. Personal Relationships, 12, 125–143.
Wegner, D. M., Lane, J. D., & Dimitri, S. (1994). The allure
of secret relationships. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 66, 287–300.
ROSENTHAL EFFECT
See EXPERIMENTER EFFECTS
RUBICON MODEL OF ACTION PHASES
To differentiate and integrate both the selection and
realization of goals, the Rubicon model of action
phases was developed. The model describes successful
goal pursuit as solving four consecutive tasks:
choosing between potential goals, planning the implementation
of a chosen goal, acting on the chosen goal,
and assessing what has been achieved by acting on the
goal and what still needs to be achieved by further acting
on the goal. Thus, the Rubicon model of action
phases posits four distinct phases of goal pursuit:
(1) the predecisional phase, in which the pros and
cons of one’s wishes and desires are deliberated by
assessing the desirability of expected outcomes and the
question of feasibility (i.e., Can I obtain the desired
outcomes if I wanted to?); (2) the postdecisional phase,
in which the implementation of the chosen goal is
planned by deciding on when, where, and how one
wants to act toward the goal; (3) the actional phase, in
which one progresses toward the goal by initiating
goal-directed behaviors and bringing them to a successful
ending; (4) finally, the postactional phase in
which the achieved outcomes of the goal-directed
behavior are evaluated by looking backward (i.e., How
successfully did I perform the goal-directed behavior?)
Rubicon Model of Action Phases———769
and forward (i.e., What needs to be done still to
achieve the desired outcomes implied by my goal?).
These four phases are separated by three clear transition
points: (1) deciding to strive for the realization
of certain wishes and desires, thus transforming them
into goals (at the end of the predecisional phase);
(2) the initiation of actions suited to attain these goals
(at the end of the preactional phase); and (3) the evaluation
of the achieved outcomes of these goal-directed
actions (at the end of the actional phase). The transition
point at the end of the first phase is called the
transition of the Rubicon. This metaphor comes from
Julius Caesar’s crossing of the northern Italian
Rubicon River with his army after some hesitations in
49 B.C.E., thereby initiating a civil war. By crossing the
Rubicon, Caesar committed himself to conquer or to
perish. Thus, the metaphor “crossing the Rubicon”
symbolizes that as soon as one has decided to pursue a
select wish or desire, the pro versus con deliberation is
terminated, and one is strongly committed to act. Thus,
at the end of the predecisional phase, the deliberation
is replaced by a sense of determination to actually realize
the former wish or desire that is now experienced
as a firm goal.
Different modes of thought are associated with each
of the four action phases—the so-called action mindsets.
By getting involved with the distinct tasks posed
in each of the four phases, certain ways of thinking
become more prominent (i.e., unique cognitive procedures
are activated). The deliberative mind-set is associated
with the predecisional phase. It emerges when
people start to think about an unresolved personal
problem that is still a wish or desire, thinking of the
short-term and long-term pros and cons of both making
and not making the decision to realize it. The
implemental mind-set is associated with the postdecisional
phase. It originates when people start to plan the
steps they want to take to actually realize a chosen
goal. These plans specify when, where, and how one
intends to execute each of these steps.
To investigate the cognitive, self-evaluative, and
behavioral consequences of the deliberative and implemental
mind-sets, the following experimental paradigm
was invented. Research participants are made to
believe that they have to perform two different, subsequent
experiments (usually performed by two different
experimenters). The first experimenter then induces
the deliberative and the implemental mind-sets. The
deliberative mind-set is induced by having participants
deliberate a still unresolved personal problem (e.g.,

770———Rubicon Model of Action Phases
Should I move to a different apartment?). The implemental
mind-set is induced by having participants plan
the implementation of a chosen project to be resolved
in the near future (e.g., moving into a different apartment).
The second experimenter, being blind to this
manipulation of mind-sets, then asks participants to
perform certain tasks or answer questionnaires that
tap into the hypothesized cognitive features of the two
mind-sets. Numerous studies in social and motivation
psychology have used this paradigm showing that
the deliberative and the implemental mind-sets thus
created have distinct consequences.
People in a deliberative mind-set usually show
the following attributes: (a) They evaluate their selves
accurately (i.e., rate themselves realistically with regard to
intelligence, attractiveness, etc.), (b) they show reduced
positive illusions of control over frequent outcomes
that are uncontrollable, (c) they make less positive
illusionary judgments of their invulnerability to controllable
(e.g., divorce, having a drinking problem)
and uncontrollable risks (e.g., death of a loved one),
(d) they are impartial in the sense that they appraise
desirability-related information even-handedly,
(e) they are particularly effective in processing
desirability-related information, and (f) they are openminded
as their processing of incidental information
is generally very effective.
In contrast, people in an implemental mind-set
show quite different attributes: (a) They evaluate
themselves in a very positive illusionary manner (e.g.,
they rate themselves as much more intelligent and
attractive than the average person in their peer group),
(b) they show strong illusions of control over frequent,
but uncontrollable outcomes, (c) they make very positive
illusionary judgments of their vulnerability to
controllable and uncontrollable outcomes, (d) they
are partial in the sense that they focus on positive
desirability-related information more than on negative
desirability-related information, (e) they are particularly
effective in processing information related to the
realization of goals, and (f) they are closed-minded in
the sense that they are rather sluggish in processing
incidental information.
Recently, these effects of implemental mind-sets
(enhanced self-efficacy, optimistic outcome expectations,
perceptions of the task at hand as easy, etc.) were
shown help people to succeed in their ongoing goal
pursuits. Furthermore, people in an implemental mindset
are more optimistic in their forecasts of the survival
of their romantic relationships than deliberative mind-set
individuals. When choosing test materials of different
difficulty, people in implemental mind-sets preferred
more difficult tasks than did people in deliberative
mind-sets. Moreover, those in implemental mind-sets
overestimated their probability of success as compared
with people in deliberative mind-sets.
Finally, there are individual differences in the ability
of activating deliberative and implemental mind-sets
and their effects on cognition and behavior. Deliberative
and implemental mind-set effects are moderated
by a person’s level of achievement motivation, social
anxiety, and goal commitment. For instance, people
whose achievement motive is strongly determined by
hope for success (in contrast to fear of failure) show
a strong illusionary optimism when they are in an
implemental mind-set compared with a deliberative
mind-set. Conversely, fear of failure people when in
a deliberative mind-set boost their self-perception of
competence (i.e., show illusionary optimism), but not
when they are in an implemental mind-set.
The Rubicon model of action phases with its associated
mind-set theory has stimulated a re-conceptualization
of the classic concept of motivation. In the
past, the term motivation referred to both the readiness
to choose a certain course of action and the intensity
and effectiveness with which the chosen course of
action was implemented. Nowadays, one discusses
only issues of choosing a course of action in motivational
terms by pointing to the motivational variables
of desirability and feasibility. However, the issue of
successful implementation of a chosen course of action
is considered to be volitional in nature. That is, it
depends on people’s willpower and their possession of
relevant self-regulation skills whether a chosen course
of action is ultimately implemented. The mind-set
theory associated with the Rubicon model turned out
to be conceptually very influential too. Theories of
action control that distinguish between types of goals
(e.g., abstract vs. concrete, promotion vs. prevention,
learning vs. performance) have tried to test their hypotheses
by creating respective mind-sets—for instance,
creating why versus how mind-sets to assess differences
between the pursuit of goals construed at a high
versus low level of abstraction.
Anja Achtziger
Peter M. Gollwitzer
See also Goals; Implementation Intentions; Positive Illusions;
Reasoned Action Theory

Further Readings
Achtziger, A., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2006). Motivation and
volition in the course of action. In J. Heckhausen &
H. Heckhausen (Eds.), Motivation and action. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
Bayer, U. C., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2005). Mindset effects on
information search in self-evaluation. European Journal
of Social Psychology, 35, 313–327.
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1990). Action phases and mindsets. In
E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of
motivation and cognition: Foundation of social behavior
(Vol. 2, pp. 53–92). New York: Guilford Press.
RUMOR TRANSMISSION
Definition
Rumors are unverified information statements that
people circulate to make sense of an unclear situation
or to deal with a possible threat. Rumors are about
issues or situations of topical interest. Rumors are like
news except that news is accompanied by solid evidence;
rumor is not. A classic example: “I heard that
our department is being downsized; what have you
heard?” Rumor discussions are thus collective sensemaking
and threat-management efforts. The threat
could be physical or psychological. In either case, the
rumor helps people actively or emotionally prepare
for negative events, or to defend against threats to
their self-esteem.
Although most people use gossip and rumor
interchangeably, they are different. Gossip is evaluative
social talk about individuals outside of their hearing.
Gossip may or may not be verified. It is
entertaining tittle-tattle of the sort: “Did you hear what
Kyle did at the Christmas party?!” Urban legends—
sometimes called contemporary or modern legends—
also differ from rumor. Urban legends are funny,
horrible, or tall tales that amuse us or teach us a moral
lesson. They are longer narratives than rumor, with a
setting, plot, climax, and denouement. Many people
have heard the story of the man who lost his kidney.
Away from home on a business trip, he is enticed by a
woman at a bar and they return to his room; after a
drink, his next memory is waking up the next morning
in a bathtub packed with ice, his kidney removed—
sold on the black market. Moral of the story:
Indiscretions can be costly!
Rumor Transmission———771
Types, Frequency, and Effects
Social psychologists have been interested in rumors
since the 1930s. They often categorize them as one of
three types: Dread rumors convey fear about a potential
negative event: “The ‘good-times’ virus will erase
your hard drive!” Wish rumors relate a desired outcome:
“Have you heard? We’re getting a big bonus this
year!” Wedge-driving rumors divide people groups,
such as this false one from World War II: “The
Catholics are evading the draft.” Unfortunately, wedgedriving
rumors may be the most numerous of the three.
Rumors have been categorized in other ways that indicate
what people are collectively concerned about:
Stock market rumors suggest ever-present stockholder
worries over portfolio value, job-security rumors convey
anxiety over possible job losses, personnel-change
rumors evidence concern about how one’s job duties
might change with a new boss.
Rumors appear to be a regular feature of social and
organizational landscapes. For example, in corporations,
rumors reach the ears of management about
once per week on average. Rumor activity waxes and
wanes, but seems especially prevalent when important
changes occur that are not well understood and may be
potentially threatening. Rumors cause or contribute to
a variety of attitudes and behaviors. Negative rumors
can lower morale, reduce trust, and sully reputations.
Wedge-driving rumors help form or strengthen prejudicial
attitudes. Rumors have long been implicated in
sparking riots during times of ethnic/racial tension,
altering stock market trading, and changing behaviors
that affect health or disease detection. Interestingly,
rumors may not have to be believed to have such
effects: Burger sales at McDonald’s once dropped
because of a false rumor that McDonald’s used wormmeat—this
even though people disbelieved the rumor!
Transmission and Belief
People spread rumors for three broad reasons. First, to
find the facts so they can act effectively in a given situation:
“I heard that I might get laid off—is this true?
I’ll put out my resume.” Second, to enhance their
relationship with the rumor recipient: Being in the
know with the latest information, for example, increases
one’s social standing. Third, to boost one’s self-esteem,
often by derogating rival groups: By putting other
groups down, people sometimes build up their own
group—and by extension themselves—by comparison.

772———Rumor Transmission
People are more likely to spread rumors when they
are anxious (worried about a dreaded event or simply
anxiety-prone), uncertain (filled with questions about
what events mean or what will happen), or feel that
they have lost control in a situation that is important to
them. These conditions are more likely to occur when
people distrust either formal news sources (“That TV
news channel is biased!”) or the group the rumor
targets (“Management are aliens!”). Finally, rumors
that are believed are more likely to be spread than
are those in which we have less confidence.
People believe rumors—even fantastic ones—
when the rumor accords with their previously held
attitudes, it comes from a credible source, is heard
repeatedly, and is not rebutted. Rumors that the leader
of political party x tried to cover up illegal activity, for
example, are believed more strongly by members of
rival party y, who hear these rumors repeatedly from
trusted party y officials and do not hear a rebuttal of
any sort. For these reasons, the plausible rumors circulated
in one community are considered fantastic
in another. For example, false rumors that the
AIDS virus was concocted in a Western laboratory,
tested on 100,000 Africans, and led to the current
African pandemic are believed by some in the U.S.
African American community.
Content Change and Accuracy
In the course of rumor transmission and discussion,
rumors change. Four types of change have been identified:
leveling is the reduction of the number of
details in the rumor message, adding is when the
rumor becomes more elaborate, sharpening is when
certain details are accentuated, and assimilation is the
overall shaping of the rumor to fit preconceived ideas.
Sharpening and assimilation occur in all forms of
rumor transmission. For example, rumors about an
intoxicated football player’s auto accident tend to
retain those elements of the story that match athlete
stereotypes. Leveling tends to happen especially when
rumor are transmitted serially—as in the “telephone
game” or “whisper-down-the-lane.” For example, 20
details may be leveled to 5 after several transmissions.
In contrast, adding tends to occur in very active highinvolvement
rumor discussions: A rumor about a sensational
murder in one’s local high school is likely to
be extensively elaborated.
Rumors have a reputation as being inaccurate
and false, but this reputation may not be deserved.
Some situations—such as established organizational
grapevines—tend to produce highly accurate rumors,
whereas others—such as natural disasters—give rise to
grossly inaccurate ones. Several factors affect accuracy.
Accuracy is generally reduced by limits to attention
and memory, relationship- and self-enhancement
motives, high anxiety, the inability to check rumor
veracity, and transmitting the rumor without discussion.
Accuracy is enhanced when transmitted by persons
who are motivated by fact-finding and situated in
an established communication channel. Organizational
rumors—often transmitted in communication channels
that have existed for some time, checked against one
another, transmitted with lots of discussion to ensure
precision, and discussed by people who want to ferret
out the facts—are often extremely accurate. In one
organization that underwent radical downsizing, a
rumor listing the names of all the people to be cut
was circulated one week before the official layoff
announcement—the rumor was 100% accurate.
Managing Rumors
People often desire to prevent or neutralize harmful
rumors. Prevention is best accomplished by reducing
the uncertainty that gives rise to rumor and by
developing trust in formal sources of information.
Uncertainty can be reduced even when the rumor cannot
be confirmed or disconfirmed by setting a timeline
for when more information will be forthcoming, stating
the values and procedures by which changes and
policies will be made, and stating precisely what is
known. Rumors cannot always be prevented however.
In such cases, rebuttals—of false rumors—offered by
a source perceived to be appropriate and honest, conveying
anxiety-reducing information, and relating the
context for why the rebuttal is being offered, are most
effective in reducing harmful rumor effects. Credible
third parties are often effective in refuting rumors.
False tales that the Procter & Gamble Corporation
contributed to the Church of Satan, for example, were
quickly squelched when transmitters were given
“truth kits” containing letters from religious leaders
stating that these malicious rumors were false.
Nicholas DiFonzo
Prashant Bordia
See also Attitude Change; Gossip; Prejudice; Self-Esteem
Stability

Further Readings
Allport, G. W., & Postman, L. J. (1947). The psychology of
rumor. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Bordia, P., & DiFonzo, N. (2002). When social psychology
became less social: Prasad and the history of rumor
research. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 49–61.
Rumor Transmission———773
DiFonzo, N., & Bordia, P. (2007). Rumor psychology: Social
& organizational approaches. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Rosnow, R. L. (1991). Inside rumor: A personal journey.
American Psychologist, 46, 484–496.
Shibutani, T. (1966). Improvised news: A sociological study
of rumor. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill.

SALIENCE
Definition
The term salient refers to anything (person, behavior,
trait, etc.) that is prominent, conspicuous, or otherwise
noticeable compared with its surroundings. Salience
is usually produced by novelty or unexpectedness, but
can also be brought about by shifting one’s attention
to that feature. Salience usually depends on context. A
child would not be particularly salient at his or her
school, but would be at a nursing home. The act of
crying would not be salient at a funeral, but would be
at a job interview. A salient feature can be thought of
as the “figure” that stands out against the “ground” of
all other nonsalient features.
Importance
Humans have a limited ability to process information;
they cannot attend to every aspect of a situation.
Salience determines which information will most
likely grab one’s attention and have the greatest influence
on one’s perception of the world. Unfortunately,
the most salient information is not always the most
accurate or important. Salient media coverage might
cause people to overestimate the frequency of relatively
unusual dangers (e.g., airplane crashes) and
underestimate much more common threats (e.g.,
colon cancer) that do not receive salient coverage.
People are not usually consciously aware of the extent
to which salience affects them.
S
775
Effects
Salience has been shown to influence people’s perception
of the causes of events, particularly other people’s
behaviors. Behaviors have two possible causes: the
traits of the person who performs the behavior, or
aspects of the situation in which the behavior took
place. Researchers have repeatedly shown that the situation
in which behaviors takes place is usually not
very salient to observers. Instead observers almost
always focus on the behavior itself, which leads them
to infer the traits of the person. If someone snaps at
you, you are more likely to think that this is a mean
person than that he or she is simply having a bad day.
Although behaviors are quite salient for observers, the
situational context is often more salient to the actors
themselves, for example, “I’m smiling because one
has to smile at job interviews.” Interesting, some
studies have increased the salience of actors’ behavior
to themselves, for example, by having them perform a
task in front of a mirror, or watch a videotape of themselves
performing the behavior. In this case, actors
attributed their behavior to their own disposition
rather than to the situation, just as an observer would,
for example, “I’m smiling because I’m a happy
person.”
How Do Researchers
Manipulate Salience?
Researchers can increase the salience of a person in
a number of ways. First, they can simply direct
observers’ attention to that person. Second, they can
change the visual characteristics of the person relative

776———Satisficing
to others in the situation. For example, one person may
wear a brightly colored shirt instead of a dull one, or
rock in a rocking chair instead of sitting motionless.
Third, researchers can arrange a situation so that the
feature is more noticeable to observers. In a classic
experiment by Shelley Taylor and Susan Fiske, for
example, two actors were seated facing each other
having a get-acquainted conversation, while other
observers sat in a circle around them. If an observer
could see the face of one actor better than the other,
that salient actor was believed to have set the tone of
the conversation, and have greater influence over the
behavior of the other nonsalient actor. Similar results
have been shown by having observers watch a videotaped
conversation shown from different camera
angles. Whichever actor is most visually salient (e.g.,
has their face shown by the camera) will be judged by
most people to control the conversation. In an interesting
twist on this experiment, the conversation being
observed is between a police officer and someone confessing
to a crime. People who viewed the police officer’s
face were more likely to perceive the confession
as coerced, that is, caused by the police officer. Other
research has shown that simply sitting at the head of a
table will increase one’s salience and cause observers to
judge that person as having more leadership qualities.
Salience, Sex, and Race
Salience can affect perceptions of people who are members
of minority or stereotyped groups. Researchers
have manipulated the uniqueness of an actor’s sex or
race by changing the composition of a group the actor
is in. In one study, participants listened to a taperecorded
conversation between six men. A photograph
of each man appeared on a screen as he spoke, allowing
researchers to manipulate the proportion of Black
to White men in the group. Compared with a situation
with equal representation of both races, a person who
occupied solo status (the only Black person in the
room) was perceived to have spoken more, and to
have been more influential in the conversation.
Similar studies have shown that the only woman in a
room full of men is more likely to be stereotyped than
is a woman in a more balanced environment. In general,
salient persons and objects are evaluated more
extremely than are other targets.
Salience also affects perceptions of entire groups.
Smaller minority groups tend to be more salient than
larger, majority groups. Observers often perceive
members of smaller groups to be more similar to each
other than are members of larger groups. Interesting,
members of salient groups are also more likely to overestimate
how much they agree with each other, and to
show a stronger bias in favor of their own group.
In addition, research has shown that because
salient pairings (e.g., violent crime and minority race)
are more available in memory, they are likely to be
overestimated when people later recall their frequency.
This may contribute to the perpetuation of
certain stereotypes.
Mark V. Pezzo
See also Availability Heuristic; Mortality Salience; Priming
Further Readings
Taylor, S. E., & Fiske, S. T. (1978). Salience, attention, and
attribution: Top of the head phenomena. In L. Berkowitz
(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 11, pp. 249–288). New York: Academic Press.
SATISFICING
Definition
Satisficing refers to making a decision with the goal
of satisfying or fulfilling some acceptable minimum
requirement (instead of choosing the best option).
Decision makers who adopt a satisficing strategy
do not evaluate all the available alternatives. Instead,
they accept the first “good enough” option that they
encounter. Satisficing is thought to be a useful
decision-making strategy given that people live with
limited information-processing capacity in a world of
complicated and difficult choices. The cost of expending
the resources required to evaluate every available
option is thought to be greater than the additional
value that will be gained by selecting the best option
instead of the good enough option. Satisficing is
typically discussed as an alternative to maximizing
(maximizing the value of a decision by comparing the
value of all options and selecting the best one).
Background and History
Historically, rational choice theory has strongly influenced
how people study and think about decision
making. When John von Neumann and Oskar

Morgenstern published Theory of Games and Economic
Behavior in 1944, they introduced several different
elements of rational decision making to the field of
economics. Expected utility theory specifies that decision
makers can assign an expected value to every
alternative course of action. After an expected utility
is assigned to every option, the alternative with the
highest expected value will be selected.
However, although von Neumann and Morganstern’s
work played a key role in the field of economics,
psychologists began to demonstrate key ways in
which actual decision makers systematically deviate
from rational choice models. In the 1950s, Nobel Prize
winner Herbert Simon (economist and psychologist)
published a series of papers in which he suggested that
it is more useful to approach the study of decision
making by acknowledging that actual decision makers
have to approach complicated choices with limited
information and limited cognitive resources available
to them. Rational choice theory requires that all
options can be thoroughly evaluated, which is not the
case in the real world. Simon was the first to coin the
term satisficing when he suggested that decision
makers conserve resources by choosing to fulfill some
minimum requirement instead of maximizing expected
value. In more recent years, psychologist Barry
Schwartz borrowed Simon’s term and discovered that
individual people differ in the degree to which they
tend to approach decisions with the goal of satisficing.
Individual Differences
Schwartz divided the world into “satisficers” versus
“maximizers” when he identified existing individual
differences in people’s tendencies to approach decisions
with the goal of satisficing versus maximizing.
He measured these differences through a maximization
scale that he developed and administered to
several thousand participants. Following are some
examples of items found on the maximization scale:
“Renting videos is really difficult. I’m always struggling
to pick the best one.”
“When I am in the car listening to the radio, I often check
other stations to see if something better is playing, even
if I am relatively satisfied with what I’m listening to.”
“Whenever I’m faced with a choice, I try to imagine
what all the other possibilities are, even ones that aren’t
present at the moment.”
Satisficing———777
Participants rated each statement on a 1 to 7 scale
(ranging from completely disagree to completely
agree). Schwartz did not define a strict cutoff that
identifies maximizers versus satisficers, but he generally
calls people maximizers if their average score is
higher than 4 for all the items. Satisficers generally
have an average score of less than 4. The distribution
of scores for his participants was relatively symmetrical
about the midpoint of the scale. About one third
received an average score of more than 4.75 and one
third scored under 3.25. The final third scored closer
to the middle, somewhere between 3.25 and 4.75. In
addition, approximately 1 of every 10 participants had
an average score of more than 5.5 (extreme maximizers),
and similarly, about 1 of every 10 had an average
score of less than 2.5 (extreme satisficers).
Importance and Implications
Schwartz also investigated implications of satisficing
versus maximizing for decision makers’ experiences
both during and after making a choice. People who are
more apt to satisfice complete a less thorough search
of all available options, make decisions faster, and
are less likely to engage in social comparison while
choosing. After the decision, satisficers are also more
likely to evaluate decision outcomes more positively,
despite apparently expending less effort in the process
of making the choice. For example, after making a
consumer choice, satisficers are less likely to reflect
on the products that they didn’t choose and engage in
“what if” thinking. Satisficers are happier with their
choices and don’t feel as regretful as maximizers.
They are less likely to ruminate and think counterfactually.
In addition, satisficers are less aversely affected
by an increase in the number of available alternatives.
For the maximizer, more options can create anxiety
because they make the goal of identifying the best one
more difficult to achieve.
Satisficing has also been linked to many positive
psychological outcomes. Schwartz administered general
well-being scales to subjects and found that satisficers
are less likely to be perfectionists and less likely
to suffer from depression. They are happier, more
optimistic, more satisfied with life, and have higher
self-esteem. People who are least likely to employ
satisficing strategies (extreme maximizers) tend
to demonstrate depressive symptoms that are in the
borderline clinical range.
Ironically, striving for the best and adopting an
approach that most closely mirrors rational choice

778———Scapegoat Theory
strategies can have negative consequences. People
seem to need some choice to maintain happiness, and
an initial increase in choice can increase happiness.
However, evidence suggests that having too much
choice can decrease happiness, particularly if a person
does not adopt a satisficing approach. In a complicated
world with limitless options, satisficing might
be the most rational approach to making decisions.
See also Decision Making; Individual Differences
Further Readings
Erin Sparks
Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is
less. New York: HarperCollins.
Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky,
S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing
versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice.
Journal of personality and social psychology, 83(5),
1178–1197.
von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of
games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
SCAPEGOAT THEORY
Definition
Scapegoat theory refers to the tendency to blame someone
else for one’s own problems, a process that often
results in feelings of prejudice toward the person or
group that one is blaming. Scapegoating serves as an
opportunity to explain failure or misdeeds, while maintaining
one’s positive self-image. If a person who is
poor or doesn’t get a job that he or she applies for can
blame an unfair system or the people who did get the
job that he or she wanted, the person may be using the
others as a scapegoat and may end up hating them as a
result. However, if the system really is unfair and keeps
the person from succeeding financially, or the other
people got the job because of nepotism or illegitimate
preferential treatment, then blaming those factors
would not be scapegoating. Essentially, scapegoating
generally employs a stand-in for one’s own failures so
that one doesn’t have to face one’s own weaknesses.
Origins
The term itself comes from the Bible’s reference to
a goat upon which Aaron cast all the sins of Israel
and then banished to the wilderness. Hence, the goat,
though presumably blameless, was essentially punished
for the sins of the people of Israel. Psychologists
have expanded the concept to include not only someone
else to pay the price for one’s own immorality but
also a target of blame and explanation when outcomes
are not what one hoped for.
Historical and Research Applications
History contains a number of examples of political
leaders using scapegoats to rally their people at the
expense of a despised group. In perhaps the most
blatant and tragic example, Adolf Hitler notoriously
scapegoated Jews for the fact that other Germans were
suffering after World War I. By depicting Jews as more
commercially successful than the average German
citizen—and unfairly so, by favoring other Jews—he
rallied his citizens to extreme levels of nationalism at
the expense of Jews and other groups. He thus conjured
resentment and hatred toward the group, simultaneously
unifying other Germans to a singular cause:
the perceived improvement of Germany.
The concept of scapegoating is also somewhat
consistent with Sigmund Freud’s notions of displacement
or projection as defense mechanisms. According
to Freud, people displace hostility that they hold
toward unacceptable targets (e.g., parents, the boss)
onto less powerful ones. Similarly, projection refers to
one’s tendency to attribute one’s own unacceptable
feelings or anxieties onto others, thus denying them
within oneself. Both mechanisms protect people from
their illicit desires or fears by helping them reject the
notion that they are the holders of such feelings. As
such, the target of their displacement or projection
may serve as a scapegoat.
More recently, social psychologists have explained
the tendency to scapegoat in similar terms, but with
some qualifications and clarifications. For example,
the notion of displaced aggression has received a good
deal of attention in the field. If a woman has a fight
with her boyfriend, she may come home and kick her
dog for a minor misbehavior. The dog, then, is her
scapegoat and is paying the price for the fight with the
boyfriend. The aggression that the fight produced is

not being directed toward its true cause, but instead is
directed at the dog, which is a more acceptable target
because it cannot retaliate or argue back, as the
boyfriend is likely to do. In addition, the theory of
relative deprivation is relevant as an explanation for
people’s tendency to scapegoat. This theory suggests
that people experience negative emotions when they
feel as though they are treated relatively poorly for
illegitimate reasons. For example, a person may be
satisfied with his or her salary until the person learns
that a colleague whose work is not great but who is
friends with the boss gets a raise. Now the person is
relatively deprived and may resent the colleague for
the person’s lower salary.
Other researchers have specified some conditions
in which scapegoating against a particular group is
most likely to occur. For example, the scapegoated
group tends to be one of relatively low power.
Otherwise, the group would be able to stamp out the
opposition brought from the masses. The scapegoated
group also tends to be a group that is somehow recognizable
as distinct from the ingroup (the group to
which one belongs), so that group members can be
easily identified and associated with the undesired
situation. Finally, the scapegoat tends to pose a real
threat to the ingroup, intentionally or unintentionally.
For example, lynchings against Blacks rose dramatically
when the economic prospects for Whites began
to drop off. African Americans were perceived as a
greater threat to the increasingly scarce jobs and
opportunities and so were punished in brutally tragic
ways. In a land of plenty or when a group is kept completely
under wraps, that group poses no threat and
therefore does not present the opportunity to serve as
a scapegoat.
Elliott D. Hammer
See also Displaced Aggression; Intergroup Relations;
Projection; Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Glick, P. (2002). Sacrificial lambs dressed in wolves’
clothing: Envious prejudice, ideology, and the
scapegoating of Jews. In L. S. Newman & R. Erber
(Eds.), Understanding genocide: The social psychology of
the Holocaust (pp. 113–142). New York: Oxford
University Press.
SCARCITY PRINCIPLE
Scarcity Principle———779
Definition
According to the scarcity principle, objects become
more attractive when there are not very many of them.
This scarcity may be either real or imagined. People
assume that because others appear to want something,
and it is in short supply, it must be valuable. In a classic
demonstration of the scarcity principle, students
were divided into two groups. One group was asked to
choose a cookie from a jar with two cookies. The
other group was asked to choose a cookie from a jar
that contained ten cookies. Consistent with the
scarcity principle, students who chose from the jar
with two cookies (scarce condition) rated the cookies
as more desirable than students who chose from the
jar with ten cookies (plentiful condition).
Importance of Topic
Imagine the following scenario, which illustrates several
strategic compliance techniques, most notably the
scarcity principle. A family’s dinner is interrupted by
a knock on the door. The father, Fred, answered the
door to find an older gentleman, Al, who was holding
a bundle of sketches. Al greeted Fred and told him of
a great opportunity. For the low, low price of $249, Al
would sketch a portrait of Fred’s house. By this time,
Fred’s wife, Mary, had come outside with their two
young sons. The man quickly commented on how cute
the boys were and proceeded with his pitch. “This
type of sketch normally costs $700,” he informed the
couple. Knowing the perils of making quick, emotional
decisions, Fred asked Al for his phone number
to call him back after discussing his offer. Al quickly
replied, “I can’t really come back because of time
constraints. I do all the sketches and all the doorto-door
contacting, so it’s simply not efficient for me
to return. I really need to know tonight.” Mary
remarked that she really wanted to have a portrait of
their house in the living room and Fred reluctantly
agreed. They discussed it briefly and told Al they’d
give him $200. Al countered with $225 and no sales
tax, and they agreed on a deal. Fred and Mary thought,
“Wow, did we ever get a bargain: from $700 to $249
to $225 without sales tax! We had saved nearly $500!”
It was only after Fred and Mary sat down later that
evening that they realized Al was indeed an artist: both

780———Schemas
a sketch artist and a master in the art of persuasion!
Maybe, instead of saving money, they unexpectedly
spent $225 more than they planned to at the outset of
the evening. Al had skillfully employed a number of
compliance techniques, particularly in his use of the
scarcity principle. By telling the couple they had to
decide immediately, Al created the illusion that this
opportunity would not be available again. Notice how
Al did not even respond to their question of whether
they could call him. If he had, the sketch would no
longer be scarce. By creating the false impression that
they had to decide now, Al invoked the scarcity principle,
a powerful weapon of social influence.
Of course, Al is not alone in his recognition of the
power of a scarce resource. Walk through any mall to
find any number of messages alerting people to unbelievable
opportunities to purchase items they have
always (or never) wanted. But, to take advantage of
these fabulous offers, one must act now. Consider the
following signs:
“Hurry, while supplies last!” (Presumably supplies will
be around as long as people keep buying.)
“Don’t miss out!” (Who wants to miss out, on anything?)
“Don’t be left out in the cold!” (People in cold climates
are particularly sensitive to this one.)
“Buy today—save thousands!” (Who in their right mind
doesn’t want to save thousands?)
Employed effectively, the scarcity principle is a
subtle way to take advantage of the fact that most
people assume that if something is in short supply,
others must like it, it must be good, and a purchase
ought to be made quickly. The scarcity principle has
the potential to make something good seem great, and
something undesirable seem desirable. The belief that
one may miss out on a fabulous opportunity creates a
sense of urgency, leading individuals to make emotional,
rather than rational, decisions. Thus, one may
end up purchasing unwanted items, simply because of
what psychologist Robert Cialdini has termed a feeding
frenzy, not unlike that witnessed among fish when
food is sprinkled in a lake. This explains why every
holiday season, parents and children line up and fight
for the hottest new toys. By creating the perception of
scarcity, corporations recognize their products will be
more appealing. Hence, the race to purchase Cabbage
Patch Kids in the 1980s, Beanie Babies in the 1990s,
and sadly, gasoline in the 21st century.
Implications
Fortunately, there are ways to avoid falling prey to
the scarcity principle. First, when people start feeling
emotional during a decision, they can stop, and
promise to return to the decision when they feel more
rational. Although a salesperson may claim that one
must act now, odds are the same offer will still be
around tomorrow. Actually, many stores seem to have
a once-a-year sale on a nearly weekly basis! Second,
individuals can limit their purchases to items they had
already planned to buy. Anytime people are caught off
guard by an offer, they should consciously choose to
wait some time before deciding whether or not to purchase
the item. Legendary economist John Galbraith
theorized that business manufactures the needs it
seeks to satisfy. Consumers will be far better off if
they decide what they need and make their purchases
accordingly, rather than letting others create and
decide these needs for them.
See also Consumer Behavior; Decision Making
Further Readings
John M. Tauer
Cialdini, R. B. (2001). Influence: Science and practice.
Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Levine, R. (2003). The power of persuasion. Hoboken,
NJ: Wiley.
SCHEMAS
Definition
A schema is a cognitive representation of a concept, its
associated characteristics, and how those characteristics
are interrelated. Social schemas are representations
of social concepts and may include notions of physical
appearance, traits, behavioral information, and functions.
Social schemas may be relatively concrete (e.g.,
one’s fifth-grade teacher) or abstract (e.g., likable person).
When a schema is activated, the characteristics of
the concept are evoked spontaneously. For example, the
concept “librarian” may bring to mind a drably attired
unmarried woman, who is quiet, reads books, and helps
one conduct a literature search. Those characterizations
may be entirely false in general, and certainly many
specific librarians will differ from that stereotype, but

they are the characteristics that the observer associates
with the concept. Although social schemas for the
same concept vary somewhat from person to person,
observers who share a common culture or upbringing
often hold strikingly similar schemas. In short, social
schemas comprise the expectations that observers have
for the characteristics and behavior of themselves, other
people, and social situations.
Types of Social Schemas
Observers develop schemas for individual social roles
(e.g., librarians) and social groups (e.g., ethnic and
cultural outgroups). Schemas for social groups fall
under the rubric of stereotypes, and the basic principles
discussed later apply to them as well as to other
types of schemas.
An event schema, sometimes termed a script, prescribes
a chronological order to the relation among the
characteristics. Going out to dinner at a four-star restaurant,
one expects first to be greeted, then guided to a
table, then order drinks, and so forth. Violation of the
event schema (e.g., a pronounced delay in ordering
drinks) may elicit surprise and possible substitution of
another script. Scripts that additionally require causal
coherence among the characteristics are termed narratives.
In a murder trial, for instance, a prosecuting attorney
may outline a plausible sequence of events that
explains the body of evidence. In a related vein, people
form excuses by purporting a narrative of unforeseeable
and unavoidable events, thereby reducing their apparent
responsibility for negative outcomes. Schemas thus can
play an important role in how people understand the
causes of behavior and events.
A self-schema is an integrated collection of knowledge,
beliefs, attitudes, and memories about the self.
Self-schemas may develop around personality traits,
roles in relationships, occupations, activities, opinions,
and other characteristics that are part of an individual’s
definition of self. Typically, individuals form
self-schemas for characteristics that they believe to be
important or central to who they are. In other words,
individuals are schematic on central characteristics,
but may be aschematic on less central characteristics.
For example, individuals who believe that their friendliness
is a particularly defining characteristic of their
self-concepts probably have a self-schema for friendliness.
If such individuals do not consider politics
interesting or important, they likely are aschematic on
a dimension such as political activism.
Self-schemas, and schemas in general, may vary in
their degree of complexity. For example, some people
might off-handedly acknowledge their own intelligence,
but may view friendliness as more self-defining
and important. Their mental representation of friendliness
would be more complex, including detailed memories
of their own friendly behaviors, stable beliefs
about the causes and consequences of friendliness, and
certainty about their own friendliness. They also might
categorize other people’s behaviors in terms of friendliness,
thereby using the self-schema as a filter for
interpreting their social world.
Uses of Social Schemas
Schemas———781
Schemas can affect whether observers notice information
as well as the inferences that they draw about
that information. Specifically, schemas can affect how
observers categorize a situation or group, process
information about it, and then remember that information.
Schemas encourage information processing
through the schematic lens, often overlooking the
unique qualities of the social situation or person. For
example, a library patron hurrying to find assistance
may notice and approach a drably attired person perusing
a heavy reference volume, only to suffer embarrassment
when the person denies being the librarian.
Relying primarily on the librarian schema led to a categorization
error. Later, when the actual librarian is
identified, the hurried patron notices sensible shoes
and eyeglasses, but misses schema-irrelevant qualities
such as the tarnished school ring and brown eyes.
Generally speaking, schema-consistent information is
noticed and remembered better than schema-irrelevant
information, sometimes yielding judgment errors.
The previous example also illustrates that schema
use is influenced by observer goals. The patron has a
pressing goal to find immediate assistance. Thus, the
patron relies on the librarian schema and schemaconsistent
information to accelerate the process. If
the patron had a different goal or fewer time constraints,
the impression formation process likely would
change. For instance, if the patron hopes to contest a
large library fee, a more careful search process might
be desired. An accuracy goal generally discourages
reliance on schemas and encourages attention to
unique behaviors and qualities in forming impressions.
When seeking accuracy, even schema-inconsistent
information may be remembered better than it typically
would be because observers feel compelled to

782———Scripts
expend extra effort to reconcile such information in
light of the schema.
Implications
In general, schemas help to organize social information
and facilitate navigation through social environments.
This organization allows people to use fewer
cognitive resources in the detection and interpretation
of schema-relevant information, thus increasing efficiency
and sparing important resources that could be
used for interacting with novel and complex stimuli.
However, overreliance upon schemas may lead
observers to miss important information. For instance,
mistaking a patron for the librarian both interferes
with the search for the real librarian and yields an
embarrassing interaction with the nonlibrarian. When
relying on schemas to guide social experiences, the
cost of missing important information must be
weighed against the benefit of efficiency.
Janet B. Ruscher
Alecia M. Santuzzi
See also Impression Management; Roles and Role Theory;
Scripts; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition
(2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kunda, Z. (2001). Social cognition: Making sense of people.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
SCRIPTS
Let me tell you a simple story: John went to a restaurant.
He ordered lobster. He paid the check and left.
Now let me ask you some questions about your
understanding of this story: What did John eat? Did he
sit down? Whom did he give money to? Why?
These questions are easy to answer. Unfortunately,
your answers to them have no basis in actual fact.
John may have put the lobster in his pocket. He might
have been standing on one foot while eating (if he was
eating). Who really knows whom he paid?
You feel we know the answer to these questions
because you are relying on knowledge you have about
common situations that you have encountered in your
own life. What kind of knowledge is this? Where does
it reside? How is it that your understanding depends
on guessing?
People have scripts. A script can be best understood
as a package of knowledge that a person has
about particular kinds of situations that he or she has
encountered frequently. Some scripts are culturally
common, everyone you know shares them, and some
scripts are idiosyncratic, which means that only you
know about them. When you refer to something that
takes place in a restaurant you can leave out most of
the details because you know that your listener can fill
them in. You know what your listener knows. But, if
you were telling a story about a situation that only you
were familiar with, you would have to explain what
was happening in great detail. Knowing that your listener
has the baseball script, you can describe a game
to him or her quite quickly. But, if you were speaking
to someone who had never seen a baseball game you
would either have to make reference to a script the listener
already had (cricket perhaps) or else you would
be in for a long explanation.
Scripts help people understand what others are
telling them and also help people comprehend what
they are seeing and experiencing. When a person
wants to order in a restaurant and starts to talk to the
waiter and he hands the person a piece of paper and a
pencil, the person is surprised. He or she may not
know what to do. But, the person may have had experience
with private clubs that want orders written
down. If not, the person will ask. When expectations
are violated, when a script fails and things don’t happen
the way a person expected, he or she must adjust.
Adjustments in daily life to script violations are the
basis of learning. Next time the person will know to
expect the waiter to hand him or her a paper and pencil.
Or the person might generalize and decide that
next time doesn’t only mean in this restaurant but in
any restaurant of this type. Making generalizations
about type is a major aspect of learning. Every time a
script is violated in some way, every time a person’s
expectations fail, he or she must rewrite the script, so
as not to be fooled next time.
Scripts are really just packages of expectations
about what people will do in given situations, so one
is constantly surprised since other people don’t
always do what one expects. This means in effect, that
although scripts serve the obvious role of telling people
what will happen next, they also have a less obvious
role as organizers of the memories of experiences
people have had.

Remember that time in the airplane when the flight
attendant threw the food packages at the passengers?
You would remember such an experience, and might
tell people a story about it: “You know what happened
on my flight?” Stories are descriptions of script violations
of an interesting sort. But, suppose that this happened
twice, or five times; suppose it happened every
time you flew a particular airline. Then, you would
match one script violation with another, to realize that
it wasn’t a script violation at all, just a different script
you hadn’t known about. Learning depends on being
able to remember when and how a script failed, marking
that failure with a memory or story about the failure
event, and then being able to recognize a similar
incident and make a new script.
Scripts fail all the time. This is why people have
trouble understanding each other. Their scripts are
not identical. What one person assumes about a
situation—the script he or she has built because of
the experiences he or she has had—may not match
another’s because that person has had different experiences.
Children get upset when their scripts fail.
They cry because what they assumed would happen
didn’t happen. Their world model is naive and faulty.
But they recover day by day, growing scripts that are
just like the ones that adults have. They do this by
expecting, failing, explaining their failure (maybe
they ask someone for help), and making a new expectation,
which will probably fail too someday. This
cycle of understanding is a means by which people
can learn every day from every experience.
Some people stop learning. They expect all scripts
to be followed the way they always were. They get
angry when a fork is on the wrong side of a plate
because that’s the way it has always been and has to
be. All people have such rigidity in their scripts.
They have scripts that others wouldn’t consider violating
because they want to live in an orderly world.
People confuse other people when they fail to follow
culturally agreed upon scripts. People depend on
other people to follow the rules. And, their understanding
of the behavior of others depends on everyone
agreeing to behave in restaurants the way people
behave in restaurants. It is so much easier to communicate
that way.
Scripts dominate people’s thinking lives. They
organize people’s memories, they drive people’s
comprehension, and they cause learning to happen
when they fail.
Roger C. Schank
See also Expectations; Memory; Schemas
Further Readings
Search for Meaning in Life———783
Schank, R. C. (with Abelson, R.). (1977). Scripts, plans,
goals and understanding: An inquiry into human
knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic memory: A theory of
learning in computers and people. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schank, R. C. (1986). Explanation patterns: Understanding
mechanically and creatively. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schank, R. C. (1995). Tell me a story: Narrative and
intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
SEARCH FOR MEANING IN LIFE
Definition
The search for meaning in life refers to the idea that
individuals are strongly motivated to find meaning in
their lives, that is, to be able to understand the nature
of their personal existence, and feel it is significant
and purposeful. Life feels meaningful to people when
they can satisfactorily answer the big questions about
their lives, such as who am I, why am I here, what is
truly important to me, what am I supposed to do with
my life. That finding meaning in life is considered a
fundamental motivation by some means that human
beings must perceive a sufficient amount of meaning
in their lives. In other words, feeling that one’s life
is significant, comprehensible, or purposeful may be
necessary for human psychological functioning.
Background and History
For millennia, attempting to understand what makes
life meaningful had been the task of artists, theologians,
and philosophers. Following World War I, some
influential philosophers asserted that life is inherently
meaningless. They believed that there was no higher
purpose to the universe, and therefore people were all
alone in trying to figure out what their individual lives
were all about. However, people will go to great
lengths to defend their ideas of what life is really all
about. In other words, they firmly hold onto their life
meanings. For example, many people strive to defend
specific religious, moral, or scientific beliefs in the
face of contradictory opinions or beliefs. From this

784———Search for Meaning in Life
observation, several psychologists proposed that people
must be motivated to find meaning in their lives.
Alfred Adler said that people innately strive to accomplish
the purpose of their lives, particularly through participation
in social activities. Erik Erikson proposed the
need for self-integration in later life. In this approach,
searching for meaning focuses on struggling to understand
one’s life experiences and what it all has meant in
the Big Picture. Eric Fromm stressed the importance of
meaning in human life and suggested that feeling alienated
from others and mindlessly feeling, thinking, and
acting during daily and work activities reduces our ability
to find life meaningful. Abraham Maslow thought
meaning would arise from self-actualization, or achieving
one’s full potential.
Fromm’s ideas about alienation and automatization
in modern life echo work by Viktor Frankl, the person
who is most closely associated with psychological
work on meaning in life. Frankl’s experiences as a survivor
of Germany’s World War II concentration camps
convinced him of the importance of finding a purpose
for living. He felt that the biggest difference between
those who did and did not survive the horrific camps
was not how much they were forced to work, how little
they had to eat, or how exposed to the elements they
were (everyone had to work to exhaustion, no one had
enough to eat, and all were greatly exposed to adverse
weather). Instead, Frankl believed that Friedrich
Nietzsche’s maxim— by having “our own why of life
we shall get along with almost any how”—made the
critical difference. Frankl believed that all people must
find their own, unique why—in other words, their purpose
in life. He wrote that those who found some
meaning or purpose were more likely to survive the
concentration camps, and those who had lost their
purpose were almost certainly doomed. Following
Frankl’s writings, and his founding of logotherapy
(literally, meaning-healing), psychological work on the
importance of searching for meaning accelerated dramatically.
Roy Baumeister’s argument that meaning in
life is rooted largely in people’s strivings for feelings
of purpose, value in what they do, control and capability,
and self-worth ushered in the modern era of social
psychological research into the search for meaning.
Two important distinctions must be made between
the search for meaning in life and related psychological
processes. First, although Frankl wrote that the
will to meaning drove each person to find the unique
meaning of his or her own life, others distinguished
between searching for meaning and having meaning.
A common assumption is that only people without
meaning in life would search for it. Essentially, the
assumption was that searching for and feeling the
presence of meaning in life were opposite ends of
the same continuum.
Several lines of research, however, demonstrate that
searching for meaning is different from having meaning.
Psychological measures of how much people are
searching for meaning and how much meaning people
feel in their lives have very little overlap. Also, the
assumption that searching for and having meaning are
opposite versions of the same thing may be culturally
bound. That is to say, among European Americans (who
often think in terms of individuality and dichotomies),
there is a small, inverse relation between the two (the
less you have, the more you search, and vice versa),
whereas some evidence suggests that among people
from cultures that are more traditionally collectivistic or
holistic (who often think in terms of relationships or harmony,
e.g., Japan), the two variables may be positively
related (the more you search, the more you feel you
have, and vice versa). Those whose cultural influences
are somewhere in between (e.g., Spaniards) appear to
report no relation between them. Finally, some evidence
also indicates that searching for meaning and having
meaning fluctuate in their relation to each other depending
on age and stages in life. For example, the relation
may be less strong in youth and stronger in older adulthood.
A younger person might be searching for more
meaning and also feel life is meaningful, whereas an
older adult is more likely to search for meaning in life if
he or she feels that life is somewhat meaningless.
The second important distinction to make is
between searching for meaning in life and searching
for some sort of meaning in a traumatic or aversive
event. Those who have experienced traumatic events,
such as being assaulted, losing a loved one, or having
a miscarriage, often struggle with the question,
why did this happen. Frequently, attempts to answer
such questions are referred to as a search for meaning.
It is probably more accurate to refer to them as
efforts to find situational meaning or attributions.
The search for meaning in life refers to attempts to
understand what one’s life as a whole means, rather
than more circumscribed efforts to understand a particular
event.
Importance
If the search for meaning in life is an important
psychological motivation, it should be important to
human welfare. We know with certainty that the

presence of meaning in life is related to more wellbeing
in relationships, work, and life in general, as
well as to less psychological distress. However, we
cannot assume that people who are searching for
meaning in life are simply less happy and more distressed.
The search for meaning in life might motivate
people to immerse themselves in religion, volunteering,
wilderness adventures, or philosophy just as
much as it might drive them to despair. Even people
who already feel that their lives are full of meaning
might be searching for a deeper understanding of that
meaning, or be trying to adjust to a big life change
such as having children, or they might be looking for
new sources of meaning. For example, a successful
athlete might derive meaning from athletic competition.
A career-ending injury might take away that
source of meaning, and the athlete might look to
family, friends, religion, or social service as potential
new sources of meaning.
Those highest in the search for meaning appear
somewhat less happy, more anxious, and more
depressed, but they also appear more open-minded
and thoughtful in some ways, reflecting on their past
experiences and asking questions about the nature of
their religious beliefs. How much people are searching
for meaning also varies from day to day. On days
when people are searching for meaning in life, they
are actually happier. So, even though people who are
usually searching for meaning are less happy, people
who momentarily search for meaning enjoy the
process in the short term. In some ways this supports
the theory that the search for meaning is an important
psychological motivation: Those who are able to meet
temporarily strong needs for meaning over a day or
two are happy with their success, whereas those who
must search for longer periods, or who are almost
always trying to meet this need, are unhappy.
Individual Differences
People differ in the strength and intensity of their
search for meaning in life. Psychologists have developed
questionnaires in recent years to measure these
differences. Recent efforts to develop psychometrically
sound measures of the search for meaning in life
appear promising, although more research and theory
development are needed. People who score high on
search for meaning measures are usually looking for
more meaning and purpose in their lives. People who
score low are rarely looking for meaning and purpose.
Scores on this scale are stable, even over 1 year,
meaning that people who are usually searching for
meaning in life now will probably still be searching
next year.
Michael F. Steger
Todd B. Kashdan
See also Happiness; Phenomenal Self; Self-Awareness
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of life. New York:
Guilford Press.
Frankl, V. E. (1963). Man’s search for meaning: An
introduction to logotherapy. New York: Washington
Square Press.
Steger, M. F., Frazier, P., Oishi, S., & Kaler, M (2006). The
Meaning in Life Questionnaire: Assessing the presence of
and search for meaning in life. Journal of Counseling
Psychology, 53, 80–93.
SELF
Definition
In psychology, the notion of the self refers to a
person’s experience as a single, unitary, autonomous
being that is separate from others, experienced with
continuity through time and place. The experience of
the self includes consciousness of one’s physicality as
well as one’s inner character and emotional life.
People experience their selves in two senses. The
first is as an active agent who acts on the world as well
as being influenced by that world. This type of self is
usually referred to as the I, and focuses on how people
experience themselves as doers. The second is as an
object of reflection and evaluation. In this type of self,
people turn their attention to their physical and psychological
attributes to contemplate the constellation
of skills, traits, attitudes, opinions, and feelings that
they may have. This type of self is referred to as the
me, and focuses on how people observe themselves
from the outside looking in, much like people monitor
and contemplate the competence and character of
other people.
History and Development
Self———785
Everyone has an experience of self. That self, however,
can be quite different from the one experienced

786———Self
by another person. For example, historians suggest
that people in medieval times experienced themselves
quite differently from the way people do today.
Literature from that time suggests that people did not
possess the rich interior lives that people experience
today but, rather, equated a person’s self with his or
her public actions. Not until the 16th century, according
to the literature of the time, did people conceive of
an inner self whose thoughts and feelings might differ
from the way he or she acted. Over time, that inner
self would become to be considered as the individual’s
real self, which reflected who the person really
is. Today, people feel their selves are more accurately
revealed by their interior thoughts and feelings rather
than by the actions they take (although people often
reverse this stance in their opinions of others, thinking
others are revealed more by their actions than by their
feelings and beliefs they express about those actions).
People also differ in their experience of self as they
age and develop. Indeed, evidence indicates that
people are not born with a sense of self, but that the
notion that one is a separate and autonomous being is
one that the child must develop. For example, suppose
you placed a large orange mark on the forehead of a
toddler, and then put the toddler in front of a mirror, a
procedure known as a mark test. Children don’t begin
to show any recognition that it is their self that they
are seeing in the mirror, reaching for their own foreheads
to touch the mark, until they are between 18 and
24 months old.
The senses of self that children develop may also
differ from the mature one they will attain when
they are older. In 1967, Morris Rosenberg asked 10year-olds
to describe themselves in 10 sentences. The
children tended to describe themselves in physical
terms. Not until a few years later did children, at the
edge of adolescence, began to describe themselves in
terms of their personality and character. However,
some psychologists believe that a psychological rather
than a physical sense of self develops much earlier
than 10 years old. For example, ask young children if
someone would be a different person if that person’s
body were replaced by someone else’s, and children
generally say no. However, if that person’s personality
were replaced by another individual’s personality,
children argue that that person’s self has now been
changed.
People in different cultures may also differ in
the elements that make up their sense of self. North
Americans and Western Europeans tend to view themselves
as independent beings. Ask them to describe
themselves, and they tend to dwell on their individual
skills and personality traits (e.g., as an intelligent,
moral, and hardworking individual). Individuals from
the Far East (e.g., Japan), however, tend to ascribe to
a more interdependent view of self, defining who they
are in terms of their social relations and place in the
world. Ask them to describe themselves, and they tend
to focus more than do Americans on social roles that
they fill in their everyday life (e.g., as mother, or
daughter, or as a manager in a local firm).
Some mental illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s or bipolar
affective disorder, alter or disrupt people’s experience
of the self. For example, people suffering from
autism appear to possess rather concrete, physical
experiences of self. They do not experience the self at
a more abstract level. If they answer a questionnaire
about their personality traits, they later do not remember
the traits that they said they possessed. This is in
sharp contrast to people not suffering from autism,
who show a strong memory bias toward recalling the
traits they said were self-descriptive. This difference
can be explained if one assumes that nonsufferers have
a self-schema about themselves, that is, a cognitive
representation of their inner personality that aids their
later memory. Those with autism, it appears, do not
have a self-schema that is as richly developed.
In addition, schizophrenia can damage a person’s
experience of self. The disordered thought associated
with schizophrenia can lead people to lose the experience
of themselves as an individual with an unbroken
history from the past to the present. Schizophrenia can
also lead a person to confuse where his or her self
ends and the outside world begins. This can be an
important aspect of hallucinations and delusions.
People suffering from schizophrenia may lose track of
how much they themselves author their hallucinations,
instead thinking that the hallucinations come
from the outside world.
Implications
The self that people possess has profound implications
for their thoughts, emotional reactions, and behavior.
For example, the thoughts people have often are
crafted to maintain the sense of self that they possess.
This is especially true for thoughts about other people.
The impressions that people tend to have about themselves
(their “me’s”), at least in North America and
Western Europe, tend to be rather positive ones with
many strengths and proficiencies. People tend to see
other people who share some similarity as also imbued

with these same strengths and weaknesses, whereas
people who are different are more likely to be seen as
having shortcomings and weaknesses. In this way,
people can bolster their self-impressions as lovable
and capable people.
A sense of self also influences the emotions people
feel. People do not feel merely bad or good, but experience
an entire panoply of emotions. Some emotions
arise because people view that they authored the
actions that produced them. When students study hard
and do well on tests, they feel happy and proud. If
they wrong a friend, they do not feel unhappy; they
feel guilty. If they are worried about how their action
looks to others, they feel shame, or perhaps embarrassment.
Many emotions involve self-consciousness,
and the experience of all these emotions requires a
sense of self.
Finally, people’s views of themselves can significantly
affect their behavior. People often act in ways
to maintain the view of self they possess. For example,
if you ask people whether they would give to
charity, they will likely say yes. If someone else
approaches them a few days later and asks them to
donate, people are then more likely to donate (relative
to a group not asked), even though they do not connect
the second request to the original question. In a similar
way, if you ask a person whether people should
save water during a drought, he or she typically
responds that they should and do. If you then point out
what a long shower the person just had (such as is
done in studies of hypocrisy), the person is much
more likely to take shorter showers in the future. In
short, the actions people take are constrained by the
views they have of themselves, especially if those
views are made salient to them.
David Dunning
See also Independent Self-Construals; Interdependent Self-
Construals; Looking-Glass Self; Phenomenal Self;
Schemas; Self-Enhancement
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1997). How the self became a problem:
A psychological review of historical research. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 163–176.
Baumeister, R. F. (1998). The self. In D. T. Gilbert,
S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social
psychology (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 680–740). Boston:
McGraw-Hill, 1998.
Self-Affirmation Theory———787
Brown, J. D. (1998). The self. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Leary, M., & Tangney, J. (Eds.). (2002). Handbook of self
and identity. New York: Guilford Press.
SELF-AFFIRMATION THEORY
Definition
The self-affirmation theory posits that people have
a fundamental motivation to maintain self-integrity,
a perception of themselves as good, virtuous, and
able to predict and control important outcomes. In
virtually all cultures and historical periods, there are
socially shared conceptions of what it means to be a
person of self-integrity. Having self-integrity means
that one perceives oneself as living up to a culturally
specified conception of goodness, virtue, and agency.
Self-affirmation theory examines how people maintain
self-integrity when this perception of the self is
threatened.
Background and History
From humanist psychologists like Abraham Maslow
and Carl Rogers to contemporary investigators examining
the psychology of self-esteem, there has been a
historical emphasis in psychology on the importance
of people’s sense of personal regard. Some have
suggested that a sense of personal regard emerges
early in the life of an infant and remains relatively stable
through the lifetime.
Contemporary researchers have documented the
various adaptations people deploy to maintain selfregard.
The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his
colleagues have suggested that people have a psychological
immune system that initiates psychological
adaptations to threats to self-regard. Indeed, these protective
adaptations may lead to rationalizations and
even distortions of reality. The social psychologist
Tony Greenwald described the self as totalitarian in its
ambition to interpret the world in a way congenial to
its desires and needs. People view themselves as able
to control outcomes that they objectively cannot. They
take excessive credit for success while denying responsibility
for failure. They are overoptimistic in their predictions
of future success and are blind to their own
incompetence. People resist updating their beliefs and
behavior in light of new experience and information,
preferring to maintain the illusion that they were right

788———Self-Affirmation Theory
all along. Although people are certainly capable of
realism and self-criticism, ego-defensiveness nevertheless
seems to be a pervasive human penchant.
The social psychologist Claude Steele first proposed
the theory of self-affirmation. A major insight of
this theory involves the notion that although people try
to maintain specific self-images (such as “being a good
student” or “being a good family member”), that is not
their primary motivation. Rather, individuals are motivated
to maintain global self-integrity, a general perception
of their goodness, virtue, and efficacy. There is
thus some fungibility in the sources of self-integrity. If
individuals feel relatively positive about themselves in
one domain, they are willing and able to tolerate a
threat to their self-integrity in another domain.
Self-affirmation theory led to a reinterpretation of
classic research findings in cognitive dissonance. In a
classic cognitive dissonance study, people are shown
to change their attitudes to bring them in line with
their past behavior. People led to commit an action
espousing a position with which they disagree (for
example, students who write in favor of tuition
increases) subsequently come to agree with the position
when they believe that their actions were freely
chosen. Doing so is a form of rationalization and selfjustification;
it convinces the individual that his or her
action was the right one. Previously, such effects had
been viewed as evidence of a basic motivation for psychological
consistency; people want to see their attitudes
as consistent with their actions. However, Steele
and colleagues demonstrated that these effects arise,
in part, from the motivation to maintain self-integrity.
Thus, when people are given an opportunity to affirm
their self-integrity in an alternative domain, the
rationalization effect disappears. For example, when
people were given the opportunity to express the
importance of a cherished personal value (for example,
when science students were allowed to don a
white lab coat, or when people who valued aesthetics
were allowed to assert their love of art), these individuals
did not defensively change their attitudes to make
them concordant with their behavior.
Contributions of
Self-Affirmation Theory
When self-integrity is threatened, according to selfaffirmation
theory, people need not defensively rationalize
or distort reality. Instead, they can reestablish
self-integrity through affirmations of alternative
domains of self-worth unrelated to the provoking
threat. Such self-affirmations, by fulfilling the need to
protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable
people to deal with threatening events and information
without resorting to defensive bias. Self-affirmations
can take the form of reflections on important, overarching
values (such as relationships with friends and
family) or on a prized skill.
Numerous studies demonstrate that individuals are
less likely to rationalize, deny, or resist threatening
information in one domain if their sense of selfintegrity
is affirmed in another domain. People have
been shown to be more open to persuasive information,
and less biased in their evaluations of political
information and health risk warnings if they are first
permitted to self-affirm in an unrelated domain, for
instance, by reflecting on an important personal
value. Self-affirmed individuals are also more likely
to acknowledge their own personal responsibility (and
their group’s collective responsibility) for defeat. In
addition, people are more open to threatening courses
of action—for example, compromising with an adversary
in a divisive social-political dispute—when selfaffirmed.
Self-affirmation theory also illuminates the
way in which prejudice and stereotyping are forms of
self-integrity maintenance. The social psychologists
Steven Fein and Steven Spencer showed that respondents
were less likely to discriminate against a Jewish
job candidate if they had previously been provided with
a self-affirmation. People, it seems, can use a negative
stereotype as a cognitively justifiable way of putting
other people down, to make themselves feel good.
However, if their needs for self-integrity are met in
another domain, they have less need to resort to negative
stereotypes.
Self-affirmations can also help to reduce physiological
and psychological stress responses. David
Creswell and colleagues had participants complete a
self-affirmation procedure before engaging in the
stressful experience of public speaking and mental
arithmetic in front of a hostile audience. Unlike those
in a control condition, those in the self-affirmation
condition did not show any changes from baseline in
their levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Because
chronic stress is linked to physical illness, this finding
also suggests that affirming the self could have positive
effects on health outcomes.
One of the most important implications of contemporary
research on self-affirmation theory involves its
demonstration that seemingly small interventions can

have large effects, if they are attuned to psychological
processes of self-integrity maintenance. Self-affirmation
was used successfully to mitigate the psychological
threat associated with being the target of a negative
stereotype in school. Previous research had demonstrated
that African Americans experience threat and
its concomitant stress, in situations in which they
know that they or fellow group members could be judged
in light of a negative racial stereotype. This stress, in
turn, can undermine performance. A series of field
experiments demonstrated that a self-affirmation,
administered for 15 minutes in the context of students’
classroom activities, improved African American
students’ end-of-term course grades and thus reduced
the racial achievement gap by 40%. Although the
affirmed state stemming from a self-affirmation may
appear relatively brief, the changes in attributions and
information processing it prompts can become selfreinforcing
or self-sustaining over time.
Research and theorizing inspired by self-affirmation
theory has led to theoretical advances in social psychology,
with wide-ranging implications for many
instances of human functioning and frailty. Selfaffirmation
theory research suggests that defensive
resistance, self-serving illusions, intransigence in
social dispute, prejudice and stereotyping, stress, illness,
and intellectual underperformance can be understood
as arising, in part, from threats to self-integrity
and the motivation to protect it. Self-affirmation theory
provides a framework for understanding the origins of
these problems and an optimistic perspective for their
resolution.
Geoffrey L. Cohen
David K. Sherman
See also Cognitive Dissonance Theory; Ego Shock; Goals;
Stress and Coping; Values
Further Readings
Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., & Master, A. (2006).
Reducing the racial achievement gap: A socialpsychological
intervention. Science, 313, 1251–1252.
Creswell, J. D., Welch, W., Taylor, S. E., Sherman,
D. K., Gruenewald, T., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of
personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological
stress responses. Psychological Science, 16, 846–851.
Sherman, D. K., & Cohen, G. L. (2006). The psychology of
self-defense: Self-affirmation theory. In M. P. Zanna
Self-Attribution Process———789
(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 38, pp. 183–242). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation:
Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21,
pp. 261–302). New York: Academic Press.
SELF-ATTRIBUTION PROCESS
Definition
Self-attribution refers to the process through which
people determine the antecedents and consequences
of their behaviors. Because people do not have access
to their internal states—attitudes, beliefs, emotions,
motives, traits—they must infer these from observations
of their own behaviors and the situational contexts
in which they occurred.
Historical Background
Theoretical and empirical accounts of the selfattribution
process developed from attribution theory,
which addressed how individuals infer the internal
states of others from observable behaviors. The theory
was derived from the work of Fritz Heider, who
suggested that behavioral perceptions are a function
of how observers make attributions for the causes of
behavior. According to Heider, behavioral causes can
be attributed either to the person who performed the
behavior (i.e., internal cause) or to the environment in
which the behavior occurred (i.e., external cause). If
an attribution is made to an internal cause, intentionality
can be assigned to the person, and thus both
stable and temporary characteristics of the actor can
be inferred. More recently, Daryl Bem developed selfperception
theory as an account of how people determine
their own internal states. Bem suggested that
people determine their own internal states by inferring
them from observations of their own behavior and the
situational context in which the behavior occurred.
The Process of Self-Attribution
Theoretically, self-attribution occurs in a manner
that is similar to the process of person perception.
Specifically, individuals observe their overt behavior,
assign intentionality through an attribution to either
internal or external causes, and infer their own internal

790———Self-Awareness
states from their behavioral observations. For example,
some students often read about social psychology,
enjoy the topic, and even read when not studying for
an exam; from this, they can make internal attributions
of causality. Thus, they can infer that they hold favorable
attitudes toward social psychology.
Errors in Self-Attribution
The process of self-attribution is far from perfect.
One exemplary error is known as the self-serving bias,
which suggests that people tend to attribute positive
outcomes to internal causes but negative outcomes to
external causes. For example, if students receive an A,
they are likely to attribute the good grade to their own
abilities; in contrast, if they receive a D, they are likely
to attribute the poor grade to the difficulty of the
assignment or to the harshness of the professor.
Implications
Errors in self-attribution may be responsible for
poor psychological health. For example, depression is
widely viewed as a function of a maladaptive style of
self-attribution that is opposite to the self-serving bias.
Specifically, depressed people often attribute positive
outcomes to external causes but negative outcomes
to internal causes. As a result, depressed people view
positive outcomes as the result of chance or fate and
view themselves as personally responsible for negative
outcomes.
Christopher P. Niemiec
See also Attribution Theory, Self-Perception Theory;
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations.
New York: Wiley.
Miller, D. T., & Ross, M. (1975). Self-serving biases in the
attribution of causality: Fact or fiction? Psychological
Bulletin, 82, 213–225.
SELF-AWARENESS
Self-awareness is often defined in terms of an ability
to engage in reflective awareness. According to most
theorists, this requires certain types of cognitive
abilities. Even in its most primitive form (visual selfrecognition
and the ability to recognize oneself in a
mirror), self-awareness appears to be restricted to a
small subset of animals including humans, chimpanzees,
orangutans, and dolphins. In humans, this
ability is not present at birth and only begins to appear
around 12 to 18 months of age. Furthermore, there
appears to be some support for George Herbert
Mead’s claim that development of this ability requires
a social rearing history in which the individual comes
to recognize that he or she is distinct from others.
Beyond an ability to be reflectively aware of oneself,
self-awareness is often associated with executive
processes essential to self-regulation. Thus, the selfaware
individual is often viewed as more controlled
and intentional in his or her actions. Within social psychology,
self-awareness is often associated with a theory
of objective self-awareness by Shelley Duval and
Robert Wicklund. According to this theory, situational
cues that remind individuals of themselves (e.g., mirrors
and video cameras) lead to attention focused on
the self and away from the environment. The result is
a self-aware state in which individuals are proposed to
compare their current selves with ideal self-standards.
Because the current or actual self is usually found
to be lacking when compared with these standards,
Duval and Wicklund proposed that self-awareness
creates a negative emotional reaction. This negative
affect then motivates the individual either (a) to regulate
his or her behavior with respect to the standard in
an effort to reduce the discrepancy, or (b) to avoid the
self-aware state.
Although this theory has yielded a great deal
of research in support of its basic tenets, several
researchers noted that self-awareness inducing stimuli
often motivate self-regulation without inducing
self-criticism and negative affect. Charles Carver
and Michael Scheier proposed an alternative theory
of self-awareness that retained some features of the
Duval and Wicklund model (e.g., self-focused attention),
but argued that the comparison of the current
self with an ideal standard is itself sufficient to motivate
behavior without creating negative affect. Their
model of self-awareness was inspired by other cybernetic
models of behavior. Jay G. Hull and Alan Levy
proposed a more drastic departure from the original
Duval and Wicklund model. According to Hull and
Levy, self-awareness inducing stimuli essentially act
as self-symbolic primes that activate self-knowledge

and cause the individual to process situations as
personally relevant. Behavior follows as a consequence
of focusing on the self-relevant aspects of the
environment (as opposed to focusing inward and evaluating
self).
Although social psychologists are typically interested
in situationally manipulated self-awareness,
personality researchers are interested in individual differences
in tendency to become self-aware. To measure
such differences, Alan Fenigstein, Michael Scheier, and
Arnold Buss created the Self- Consciousness Scale.
This personality inventory has three subscales: private
self-consciousness, public self-consciousness, and
social anxiety. Private self-consciousness focuses on
the internal experience of self-awareness. It is measured
with items such as “I’m always trying to figure
myself out,” “I reflect about myself a lot,” and “I’m
alert to changes in my mood.” Public self-consciousness
focuses on the self-presentational motives sometimes
associated with self-awareness and is measured with
items such as “I’m concerned about the way I present
myself,” “I’m concerned about what other people think
of me,” and “I’m usually aware of my appearance.”
Social anxiety focuses on negative emotions sometimes
associated with being the focus of attention of others
and is measured with items such as “I get embarrassed
very easily,” “I feel anxious when I speak in front of a
group,” and “Large groups make me nervous.” Although
the social anxiety subscale captures the colloquial
understanding of what it means to be self-conscious,
the private and public self-consciousness scales assess
individual differences in the psychological processes
most often theorized to be associated with the selfaware
state.
Given that both public and private self-consciousness
measures focus on self, it is not surprising that
they tend to be modestly correlated. Similarly, both
public self-consciousness and social anxiety tend to
be modestly correlated. Private self-consciousness
tends not to be correlated with social anxiety.
Recently, some researchers have argued that private
self-consciousness is itself associated with two subcomponents:
internal state awareness characterized by
items such as “I am alert to changes in my mood,” and
reflectiveness characterized by items such as “I reflect
about myself a lot.” This issue has yet to be resolved.
With respect to individual differences in selfregulation,
the components of the Self-Consciousness
Scale are often compared with those of the Self-
Monitoring Scale introduced by Mark Snyder.
Self-Awareness———791
Individuals high in self-monitoring are motivated by
self-presentational concerns, whereas individuals low
in self-monitoring are motivated by personal concerns.
Perhaps the best way to think about the relation of these
individual differences is that high self-monitors are
both high in public self-consciousness and low in private
self-consciousness. Conversely, low self-monitors
are both low in public self-consciousness and high in
private self-consciousness.
The effects of individual differences in private selfconsciousness
have often been found to parallel the
effects of situational manipulations of self-awareness
(e.g., the presence or absence of a mirror). Similarly,
the effects of individual differences in public selfconsciousness
have often been found to parallel the
effects of situational manipulations that remind the
individual of their appearance to others (e.g., video
cameras). As a consequence, researchers often distinguish
between situational manipulations of private
and public self-awareness along the same lines that
they distinguish individual differences of private and
public self-consciousness.
Research has regularly demonstrated that both situational
manipulations of self-awareness and individual
differences in self-consciousness are associated
with increased self-regulation. Manipulations of
private self-awareness and individual differences in
private self-consciousness have been associated with
increased attitude–behavior consistency, increased
emotional reactivity to success and failure feedback,
and increased self-regulation with respect to standards
of appropriate conduct (e.g., increased helping when
helping is defined as situationally appropriate, and
decreased aggression when aggression is defined as
situationally inappropriate). Private self-awareness
has also been associated with an increased motivation
to avoid self-awareness when it is personally painful
(e.g., following failure). Indeed, evidence shows that
the latter motivation to avoid self-awareness can lead
individuals to consume drugs such as alcohol that can
lower self-awareness.
Manipulations of public self-awareness and individual
differences in public self-consciousness have
been associated with increased self-presentation and
impression management. For example, individuals
high in public self-consciousness demonstrate a
greater emphasis on social rather than personal identities,
a concern over body image (body weight, clothing,
makeup use), and an increased concern with
the perspective of others. Although this focus on

792———Self-Categorization Theory
self-presentational concerns can be useful in gaining
the approval of others, it can also lead to somewhat
self-destructive impression management strategies
(e.g., increased self-handicapping) and even paranoia
regarding others’ intentions.
Whereas most research on this topic has investigated
the effects of manipulations that heighten
self-awareness, some research has examined manipulations
that lower self-awareness. In addition to
alcohol use mentioned previously, these include deindividuation
manipulations that render the individual
indistinguishable from others (e.g., through anonymity,
being in a crowd, darkness, or wearing masks). Such
manipulations typically increase disinhibited behavior
that does not conform to social and personal norms.
One popular account of how this occurs is that deindividuation
manipulations lower self-awareness.
Paralleling the previous arguments, researchers have
distinguished both public and private components of
the deindividuated experience. Situations that foster
anonymity are thought to reduce aspects of public
self-awareness whereas situations that reduce the
individual’s ability to distinguish themselves from
others are thought to reduce aspects of private selfawareness.
In summary, at its most basic, self-awareness is
associated with a reflective awareness of self. Within
social psychology, self-awareness is typically viewed
as involving cognitive and affective processes essential
to self-regulation. A variety of theories have been
offered that describe these processes. Both social psychologists
and personality psychologists have actively
pursued research on this topic. As a consequence,
research has investigated the effects of both situational
manipulations (of self-awareness) and individual
differences (in self-consciousness). Within
each of these approaches, researchers usually distinguish
between more personal, private aspects of
self-awareness and more public, self-presentational
aspects of self-awareness. This has been true both for
variables associated with increased self-awareness as
well as variables related to deindividuation and
decreased self-awareness. Because of its relevance to
self-regulation of a variety of different types of behavior,
research and theory on self-awareness has integrated
topics as disparate as helping, aggression, and
self-presentation and bridged traditional divisions
between social and personality psychology.
Jay Hull
See also Deindividuation; Impression Management;
Self-Monitoring; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1981). Attention and
self-regulation: A control theory approach to human
behavior. New York: Springer.
Duval, S., & Wicklund, R. A. (1972). A theory of objective
self-awareness. New York: Academic Press.
Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public
and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory.
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43,
522–527.
Hull, J. G., & Levy, A. S. (1979). The organizational
functions of the self: An alternative to the Duval and
Wicklund model of self-awareness. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 37, 756–768.
SELF-CATEGORIZATION THEORY
Self-categorization theory addresses the problem of
the psychological group. Are there such things as
psychological groups? How do they form? How is a
collection of individuals able to act, think, and feel as
a group, collectively, as if, in the extreme, the group
members shared a common mind? It is taken for
granted that human beings are individual persons, that
they have unique personalities and differ from other
individuals, but it is also known that they belong to
social groups and that these social groups can have a
psychological reality for their members. People do not
just describe others as belonging to groups, they
describe themselves as groups (not as if they were
groups, but as groups). They talk about “we” and “us”
as well as “I” and “me”; they act under the right circumstances
in a highly uniform, consensual, unified
way as a crowd, a nation, an army, a mob, an audience,
and so on; they experience collective emotions
and feelings and share similar attitudes, beliefs, and
values. Can people be or become a group, psychologically,
subjectively, in terms of their identities, perceptions,
feelings, beliefs, motives, and so on? Or is it just
an illusion because people are really, fundamentally,
nothing but individuals?
Self-categorization theory, in contrast to a popular
point of view in North American social psychology,
asserts that human beings are and are able to act as
both individual persons and social groups. The theory

assumes that a person might act as a unique personality
in one context, but display collective similarities as
a group member in another. Human beings are very
good at varying the degree to which they act in terms
of either individual differences or collective similarities,
and the theory tries to explain how such flexibility
is possible.
Self-categorization theory explains individuality
and group behavior (and the relationship between
them) in terms of the way that people define and perceive
themselves. Like many other theories, it focuses
on what is called the self-concept, the collection of
identities, definitions, descriptions, categories, concepts,
and so on, that people use to define and experience
themselves, the self-categories that people use to
answer the question, who am I? or who are we? Like
other theories, the theory assumes that people define
themselves differently in different situations and that
the way they categorize themselves will influence
how they will react to that situation. For example, you
may react very differently to a news story about the
criminal behavior of a young child if you think of
yourself as a police officer rather than as a parent.
Self-categorizing is simply the process whereby a person
defines the self in terms of varying kinds of “I,”
“me,” “we,” or “us” categories such as “the real me,”
or “me as opposed to you,” or “we Australians compared
with you Americans” or “us Earth people as
opposed to you alien Martians.” Nearly all theories
before self-categorization theory tended to assume
that the self-concept was basically, primarily, or predominantly
about defining the person as a unique
individual being, that it revolved around ways of
defining I or me. Self-categorization theory holds that
people see themselves at different levels, of which the
individual level is only one. In particular, it makes a
distinction between personal and social identity.
Think of a “chair.” This is a category we might use
to describe four-legged objects we sit on in contrast to
a “table.” The same object could also be considered
“furniture,” a category we might use to refer to both
chairs and tables in contrast to, say, “objects not
designed for human use.” It could also be called an
“old chair” to distinguish it from a “new chair.” In
these three cases the object is put into categories at a
lower (more specific), intermediate or higher (more
inclusive) level as we move from old chair to chair to
furniture. With each step, it becomes similar to more
objects, which were different from it at more specific
levels. The process is just the same with the self the
Self-Categorization Theory———793
theory states. People can define themselves as “the me
as I was in my youth” in contrast to “the me as I am
today,” or “I the writer” in contrast to “you the reader,”
or “we English people” as opposed to “you continental
Europeans,” or “we Europeans” in contrast to “you
Americans,” right up to “we human beings” as
opposed to other animals, and beyond. In principle, an
endless number of levels of self-categorizing are possible,
limited only by reality and one’s imagination,
and higher levels include more people (are more
collective) than lower levels.
The theory describes the individual level (e.g.,
“I John Smith” as opposed to “you Jane Brown”) as
one’s personal identity and the various possible group
levels (e.g., “we Europeans” versus “you Americans”)
as social identity. Every person has many different
actual and possible personal and social identities. The
theory holds that the way that people define and see
themselves in any particular situation moves up and
down between these levels and between the different
identities at each level and that this is completely normal.
It also holds that as self-definition shifts from
personal to social identity and people see themselves
differently, then psychologically and behaviorally
people change from being individuals to being group
members, from making responses based on individual
personality to making responses based on shared
social identity and collective similarities.
In sum, people define themselves in terms of social
identities as well as personal identities; under certain
circumstances, social identities become more important
or influential than personal identities in the
perception of oneself, and behavior changes from
individual to group as people act more in terms of
social than personal identity. Much research has
looked at how and when people define themselves in
terms of personal or social identity, how and why this
makes people’s behavior and psychology more collective
and less personal, and how these basic ideas can
be used to explain the whole variety of phenomena
related to group psychology.
Particular social identities become salient as a
result of both psychological factors having to do with
the perceiver such as his or her experience, habits,
motives, beliefs and knowledge, and the nature of the
social relationships perceived in a given social situation.
One important finding is that people are much
more likely to see themselves as individuals in settings
where only people from their own group are present
than where members of other groups are present.

794———Self-Categorization Theory
Social identity comes to the fore more in the presence
of outgroup than ingroup members. For example,
research shows that a woman who is asked to judge
herself against other women will define herself in
terms of her personal identity, how she differs from
other women as an individual, but one asked to judge
herself against other men is likely to emphasize her
social identity and see herself as much more like other
women and different from men. In the former situation,
she may see herself and be faster to rate herself as
more masculine (different from the typical woman),
but in the latter she may see herself and be faster to rate
herself as more feminine (similar to the typical woman
and different from men). She can see herself as having
completely opposite traits depending on whether her
personal or social identity is salient. Another strongly
supported finding consistent with this idea is that
social identity tends to be especially strong and powerful
in situations of social conflict between groups.
Americans may see themselves as very individualistic,
but if attacked as a group by an enemy, they may pull
together behind their leaders and conform strongly to
group attitudes in their reactions.
Why do people become more group-oriented when
social identity is salient? One reason is that social
identities tend to have the same meaning for people
because they arise in the same culture and are used
in the same situation. Australians asked to say what
Australians are like, for example, will agree about a lot
of things. Because social categories have similar
meanings for the people who use them, people will see
themselves as more similar and actually become more
similar when they define themselves in terms of the
same group. If one asks a group of Australians to discuss
their individual views about what Americans are
like, one will find that they happily disagree on many
points, but if one asks them to think about their views
“as Australians,” one will now find a very high degree
of uniformity in their views of Americans, just as
one will in their views of Australians. Thus, a social
identity that is shared by people makes people more
similar in their self-described traits, goals, attitudes,
beliefs, definition of the situation and behavior when it
is made salient in a specific situation. This leads their
behavior to become more consensual and unitary; they
act alike. It also leads them to expect to be similar and
encourages them to influence each other to produce
agreement even when it was not originally present.
Also, people who define each other in terms of the
same social category share an inclusive self that shapes
their self-interest and emotions. If the self becomes
a “we” instead of an “I,” then people can cooperate
and be altruistic because helping an ingroup member is
helping oneself. Similarly, people can feel the experiences
of others because what happens to others is
also happening to themselves if they see themselves
as members of the same inclusive self-category. If a
police officer beats Rodney King, then any African
American or any American who identifies with King
can react as if he or she were the victim. He or she can
feel empathy and sympathy. A person can have collective
emotions that go beyond the experience of the
individual person.
Research backs up the idea that people’s selfperception,
behavior, and psychology change qualitatively
as psychological or situational factors make
social identity more salient and personal identity less
salient. Under these conditions, people see themselves
as more similar to ingroup members (and different from
outgroup members); they feel closer and more attracted
to ingroup members; they are more influenced by
ingroup members and agree with them more; they are
more likely to cooperate and pursue joint interests, to
obey and comply with ingroup members’ authority;
they feel ingroup members’ emotions and are motivated
by their needs and goals. Self-categorization theory
explains how and why people are much more than
merely unique persons, and why they are capable of a
collective as well as an individual psychology, without
any unscientific assumptions about a group mind.
See also Collective Self; Intergroup Relations; Self;
Self-Concept
Further Readings
John C. Turner
Onorato, R. S., & Turner, J. C. (2004). Fluidity in the
self-concept: The shift from personal to social identity.
European Journal of Social Psychology, 34, 257–278.
Turner, J. C. (1985). Social categorization and the selfconcept:
A social cognitive theory of group behaviour.
In E. J. Lawler (Ed.), Advances in Group Processes
(Vol. 2, pp. 77–122) Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.
Turner, J. C. (2005). Explaining the nature of power: A threeprocess
theory. European Journal of Social Psychology,
35, 1–22.
Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., Haslam, S. A., & McGarty,
C. A. (1994). Self and collective: Cognition and social
context. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin,
20, 454–463.

SELF-COMPLEXITY
Definition
People differ substantially in how extremely they
react to good and bad events in their lives. Some
people experience dramatic swings in mood and selfappraisal
in response to the ups and downs of life,
whereas others do not. Some experience adverse
mental and physical health consequences of stressful
events, but others do not. The self-complexity concept
helps us understand these differences.
According to Patricia Linville’s original formulation
of the self-complexity model, people differ in
the degree to which they maintain a complex, differentiated
view of the self. This model assumes that the
representation of the self in memory consists of
multiple self-aspects, which may be organized in
terms of contexts (home, school, with friends), roles
(student, athlete), traits (creative, nurturing), behaviors
(studying, playing tennis), and time frames (past,
present, and future selves). Intuitively, greater selfcomplexity
involves having a more differentiated
view of the self. The greater the extent to which a person
makes distinctions among the attributes or features
associated with various self-aspects, the greater the person’s
self-complexity is. Furthermore, a person who is
higher in self-complexity is likely to associate different
emotions and self-appraisals with different self-aspects.
For example, a person may feel good about himself or
herself as an athlete but not as a student.
History and Background
The concept of self-complexity provides a perspective
on several enduring issues and paradoxes in the
psychology of the self. First, it is directly related to a
classic debate about whether people have a unified,
single self (a view espoused by many early self theorists)
or multiple selves (espoused by William James
and most contemporary researchers). The current
self-complexity concept assumes that self-knowledge
is represented and processed in terms of multiple
self-aspects related to various contexts of experience.
Second, the self-complexity concept helps people
understand the classic paradox—How can a person
maintain seemingly discrepant beliefs about the self?
A person may associate different self-attributes or
behaviors with different aspects of the self, allowing
Self-Complexity———795
inconsistent self-knowledge to coexist. For example, a
woman may perceive herself as outgoing in small
social gatherings yet shy at large parties. Third, the
self-complexity concept helps explain the enduring
paradox—How can the self be both stable yet malleable?
Different self-aspects may be cognitively
activated or accessible at different points in time or in
different contexts, thus creating a flexible working
self. Furthermore, certain core self-aspects (e.g., self
as a moral person) may be stable over long periods,
whereas others may adapt rapidly in the face of changing
experience (e.g., self as a competitive athlete).
Also, one may develop entirely new self-aspects as one
enters new realms of experience (e.g., self as a parent).
Importance and Consequences
People differ substantially in their degree of selfcomplexity.
Do these differences have any important
consequences for their lives? People also differ substantially
in how they react to good and bad events in
their lives. The self-complexity concept is important
largely because it helps to explain these differences in
reactions to life events.
Self-Complexity and Affective Extremity
According to the self-complexity model, those
lower in self-complexity will experience greater
swings in affect and self-appraisal in response to life
events such as success or failure. They will evaluate
themselves more positively (and experience more positive
emotion) when good things happen, but they will
also evaluate themselves more negatively (and experience
more negative emotion) when bad things happen.
Why? People who are lower in self-complexity tend
to maintain stronger ties among the traits or behaviors
describing various self-aspects. Thus, a positive or
negative event that has a direct impact on one selfaspect
is likely to have a relatively broad overall
impact on the self because strong ties among the traits
and behaviors describing various self-aspects will
lead to greater spillover (generalization) from one trait
to another or one self-aspect to another. In contrast,
with greater self-complexity, there will be less generalization
across traits or self-aspects, so a smaller
proportion of the self will be affected by any given
positive or negative event.
Several types of evidence support this general
hypothesis. First, studies of reactions to performance

796———Self-Complexity
feedback show that those lower in self-complexity
experience both a greater increase in affect and selfappraisal
following success feedback and a greater
decrease in affect and self-appraisal following failure
feedback. Second, assuming that people experience
both positive and negative events over time, the selfcomplexity
model predicts that those lower in selfcomplexity
will experience greater mood variability
over time. This prediction was supported in a mood
diary study in which participants filled out a set of
mood scales each day over a 2-week period. In short,
higher self-complexity buffers a person against the
bad times but also keeps his or her feet on the ground
in good times.
Self-Complexity as a Stress Buffer
Stressful events can lead to mental and physical
health problems. Furthermore, people higher in
self-complexity experience less negative emotional
reactions following negative events. If these negative
emotional reactions contribute to stress-related
depression and illness, then greater self-complexity
may also reduce the adverse health and mental health
effects of negative stressful events. As this line of
reasoning suggests, several studies have found that
greater self-complexity moderates the adverse mental
and physical health effects of stressful life events; that
is, those higher in self-complexity are less adversely
affected by stressful events. They seem less prone to
both physical illnesses (e.g., upper respiratory infections)
and depressive symptoms 2 weeks after experiencing
high levels of stressful life events.
Related Findings and Research
In an interesting extension of self-complexity to
present and future goals, Paula Niedenthal and her
colleagues showed that the complexity of the present
self moderates reactions to feedback about current
goals, whereas complexity of possible selves moderates
reactions to feedback about future goals. Roy
Baumeister and others have extended self-complexity
to the realm of self-regulation. One interesting finding
is that those lower in self-complexity are more threatened
by failure and consequently are more motivated
to escape from self-awareness following failure.
Consistent with this prediction, those lowest in selfcomplexity
were the quickest to finish an essay on self
goals in front of a mirror following failure. Another
interesting finding is that those who are higher in
self-complexity regarding activities have higher
optimal activity levels. Greater activity complexity
appears to reduce the rate at which performing additional
tasks leads to ego depletion and fatigue.
Another important issue concerns the source of
differences in self-complexity. Peter Salovey has
shown that both positive and negative mood lead to
greater self-complexity because both lead to greater
self-focused attention than a neutral mood state.
Similarly, individuals with greater attentional
resources (e.g., working memory capacity) also display
higher levels of self-complexity.
Yet another set of interesting issues concerns the
mechanisms underlying the link between selfcomplexity
and emotional extremity. Recent research
supports the assumption that the emotional consequences
of positive and negative experiences spill
over from the most directly affected self-aspects to
others. As predicted, the degree of spillover is greater
for those lower in self-complexity.
Measuring Self-Complexity
The self-complexity concept is quite intuitive, but
applications of self-complexity require a precise measure.
Linville’s original formulation of self-complexity
theory relies on a card-sorting procedure in which
people sort a set of features (e.g., smart, shy) into piles
describing different self-aspects. Using the results of
this sorting task, one can compute a complexity measure
known as the H-statistic, which reflects the number
of independent dimensions implicitly present in
the self-aspects created. The self-complexity model
and findings rely heavily on the properties of this
measure of differentiation. Recently, there have been
several attempts to reformulate the self-complexity
concept in terms of separate measures of number of
self-aspects and degree of feature overlap between
self-aspects. At present, it appears that a reformulation
of self-complexity in terms of feature overlap often
fails to confirm the theoretical predictions of the
self-complexity model. Consequently, almost all of
the findings reported here were obtained in studies
in which the H-statistic was computed from feature
sorting tasks. The self-complexity hypotheses described
here are closely tied to the properties of the H-statistic.
These hypotheses may not hold for other conceptual
definitions or measures of self-complexity. In this
context, the specific measure used matters.

Related Concepts and Research
The term self-complexity has close links to other
concepts such as self-schemas and self-differentiation.
Self-complexity also has links to other cognitive complexity
concepts. In general, experts about a domain
perceive objects in the domain in a more differentiated
or complex way. For example, ingroup members tend
to have a more differentiated view of their group than
do outgroup members and political experts have a
more complex view of political candidates than do
nonexperts. Finally, the self-complexity model has
close ties to the complexity-extremity model of social
judgment, developed by Linville and Edward Jones.
Patricia Linville
See also Phenomenal Self; Self; Self-Esteem; Stress and
Coping
Further Readings
Dixon, T. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Escaping the self:
The moderating effect of self-complexity. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 363–368.
Linville, P. W. (1985). Self-complexity and affective
extremity: Don’t put all of your eggs in one cognitive
basket. Social Cognition, 3, 94–120.
Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer
against stress-related depression and illness. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 663–676.
Linville, P. W., & Carlston, D. E. (1994). Social cognition of
the self. In P. G. Devine, D. L. Hamilton, & T. M. Ostrom
(Eds.), Social cognition: Its impact on social psychology
(pp. 143–193). New York: Academic Press.
Niedenthal, P. M., Setterlund, M. B., & Wherry,
M. B. (1992). Possible self-complexity and affective
reactions to goal-relevant evaluation. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 575–584.
SELF-CONCEPT
Definition
Self-concept refers to people’s characteristic ideas
about who they are and what they are like. Although
psychologists often talk about the self-concept, a person’s
self-concept typically consists of a loose collection
of ideas rather than a single unified conception of
the self. The self-concept is grounded in subjective
experience. This means that a person’s self-concept
may be different from what he or she is actually like.
History
Self-Concept———797
One of the first psychologists who wrote about the
self-concept was William James, a psychologist in the
late 19th century. James distinguished between the I and
the ME. The I is the part of the self that is actively perceiving
and thinking. The ME is the part of the self that
becomes an object of the person’s thoughts and perceptions.
The self-concept relates primarily to the ME.
Adaptive Functions of the Self-Concept
Having a self-concept is a uniquely human trait. The
capacity to form a self-concept presumably evolved
because it promoted survival and reproduction among
early humans. Because people have a self-concept,
they can consider themselves in alternative times and
circumstances. Thus, one adaptive function of the
self-concept lies in helping people plan for the future.
Goals, particularly ideals and obligations, are indeed
central to people’s self-concepts. When a person’s
current self differs from his or her desired self, this
motivates the person to take action to move closer to
the desired self. Another adaptive function of the selfconcept
is to facilitate social behavior. When people
view themselves similarly as their interaction partners,
this helps people predict how others will behave
toward them. A shared cultural background may lead
people to construe their self-concepts in a similar
manner. For instance, people living in Western cultures
like the United States or France tend to regard
themselves as more independent from others. By contrast,
people living in Eastern cultures such as Japan
or India tend to think of themselves as more mutually
dependent. When people have similar self-concepts,
they may understand each other better.
Structure of the Self-Concept
Self-concepts have a certain structure. One important
aspect of the structure of the self-concept is selfcomplexity.
Individuals with a complex self-concept
distinguish between many distinct aspects or dimensions
of themselves. Individuals with a simple selfconcept
view themselves in terms of only a few broad

798———Self-Concept
aspects or dimensions. Individuals with a simple
self-concept are more vulnerable to stress than are individuals
with a complex self-concept. This is because
individuals with a complex self-concept can overcome
negative feedback in one self-domain (e.g., getting fired
from one’s job) by turning their attention to other selfdomains
(e.g., one’s family life, religion). Individuals
with a simple self-concept cannot follow this strategy.
Another important aspect of the structure of the
self-concept is whether self-views are implicit or
explicit. Explicit self-views are ideas about the self
of which people are consciously aware. Implicit selfviews
are ideas about the self that are unconsciously
held. Self-views may become unconscious when
people use them over and over again, so that these
ideas become like automatic mental habits. Explicit
self-views are easier to observe than implicit selfviews
are. This is mainly because people themselves
do not know about their implicit self-views. Nevertheless,
implicit self-views can be observed indirectly
because they influence how people respond to selfrelevant
objects or situations. Implicit self-views are
especially likely to guide people’s behavior when
people rely on their immediate intuitions, for instance,
when people are responding very quickly or when
they are distracted.
Self-Concept Motives
When people learn about themselves, certain kinds
of information are especially valuable to them. It
seems intuitively plausible that people should be
interested in obtaining accurate information about
themselves. The desire for accurate information about
the self has been called the self-assessment motive. As
it turns out, self-assessment is not the only motive surrounding
the self-concept. Three additional motives
have been found to influence how people construct
their self-concepts. First, people want to receive positive,
self-enhancing feedback, which is known as the
self-enhancement motive. Second, people want to
confirm what they already believe about themselves,
which has been called the self-verification motive.
Third, people want to learn things that help them
to improve themselves, which is known as the selfimprovement
motive.
Self-assessment, self-enhancement, self-verification,
and self-improvement jointly determine which information
people use to construct their self-concepts.
However, the motives sometimes conflict. For
instance, self-enhancement leads people to prefer
positive feedback, even when their self-concepts are
negative. However, self-verification leads people with
negative self-concepts to prefer negative feedback. The
conflict between self-enhancement and self-verification
motives has been extensively studied by psychologist
Bill Swann and associates. These researchers found
that self-enhancement drives people’s immediate emotional
reactions to self-relevant information. However,
self-verification may still prevail in people’s cognitive
beliefs about themselves. People with a negative
self-concept may thus internalize negative feedback,
even when this feedback is emotionally painful to
them. People with a positive self-concept don’t experience
this conflict because for them, both selfenhancement
and self-verification foster a preference
for positive feedback.
The different self-concept motives become dominant
under different circumstances. Self-enhancement
is the most automatic motive, at least among people living
in the West. Self-enhancement therefore becomes
stronger when people are distracted or emotionally
aroused. Self-assessment becomes stronger when
people are deliberating about the pros and cons of a
course of action. Self-verification becomes stronger
when people possess great confidence in their beliefs
about themselves. Finally, self-improvement becomes
stronger when people believe that they can change their
self-attributes. Moreover, self-improvement is particularly
strong among people in Eastern cultures.
Sander Koole
See also Independent Self-Construals; Interdependent Self-
Construals; Self; Self-Complexity; Self-Enhancement;
Self-Verification Theory
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1998). The self. In D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske,
& G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology
(4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 680–740). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kihlstrom, J. F., & Klein, S. B. (1994). The self as a
knowledge structure. In R. S. Wyer, Jr., & T. K. Srull
(Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (Vol. 1,
pp. 153–208). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sedikides, C., & Skowronski, J. J. (1997). The symbolic self
in evolutionary context. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 1, 80–102.

SELF-CONCEPT CLARITY
Definition
Some individuals possess a clear sense of who they
are and where they are going in life. They are aware of
their strengths and weaknesses, the nature of their personalities,
and where they stand on important attitudes
and values. Other individuals have less clear selfconcepts.
These individuals may not be confident in
who they are, may not really know where they stand on
important issues, and may not be certain about their
abilities. Self-concept clarity refers to the extent to
which people with a clear self-concept know who they
are, do not have beliefs that conflict with each other,
and have viewpoints that are consistent over time.
Whereas self-esteem is seen as an overall evaluation of
the self as good or bad, self-concept clarity is seen as
the way in which people’s knowledge about themselves
is cognitively organized. One would hypothesize
that self-concept clarity is a good thing, providing
individuals with a greater sense of understanding and
meaning and allowing them to make life decisions that
result in greater well-being.
Measurement
The initial measurement of self-concept clarity was
somewhat indirect. For example, the variable was first
measured by such factors as the confidence with
which individuals reported holding various selfbeliefs
(e.g., “I am confident,” “I am extraverted”), the
stability of self-ratings over time (e.g., the consistency
between the same self-reports taken 9 weeks apart),
and how fast individuals were able to respond to
questions about themselves (with a faster reaction
time seen as indicating higher self-concept clarity).
However, researchers later developed a self-report
measure to assess self-concept clarity, whereby individuals
are asked to rate the extent to which they have
clear self-beliefs that do not conflict with each other.
A 12-item scale was ultimately created that asks individuals
the extent to which they agree with such items
as “In general I know who I am and where I’m headed
in life,” and “I spend a lot of time wondering what
kind of person I really am” (reverse-scored). This
scale has been used in many different studies to assess
the relationships between self-concept clarity and a
Self-Concept Clarity———799
number of additional variables (e.g., self-esteem, psychological
adjustment, self-focus).
Outcomes
One of the earliest and consistent correlates of selfconcept
clarity was self-esteem. Individuals with high
levels of self-esteem are more likely to have positive,
well-articulated views of the self, whereas individuals
with low self-esteem report inconsistent, uncertain,
and unstable views of themselves. Research has also
shown that individuals with high levels of selfconcept
clarity also report lower levels of depression,
anxiety, neuroticism, and perceived stress and report
higher levels of perceived social support and psychological
adjustment than do individuals with low levels
of self-concept clarity.
In addition to examining the relationships between
self-concept clarity and psychological health, researchers
have also assessed whether people high versus low
in clarity use different types of coping strategies when
dealing with life’s challenges. Individuals with clearer
self-concepts are more likely to take action, plan, and
use positive reinterpretation (trying to view the situation
in a more positive, less stressful way) to deal with
stressful situations. However, those with a less clear
self-concept are more likely to use denial, mental disengagement
(e.g., try not to think about the stressful
situation), behavioral disengagement (e.g., physically
leave the stressful situation), and drugs or alcohol.
These relationships are seen even when controlling
for the effects of gender, perceived social support,
anxiety, depression, and self-esteem.
Relationships of self-concept clarity with motivational
factors have also been found. For example, selfconcept
clarity has been found to be related to the
degree of personal engagement an individual feels for
his or her occupation. Individuals higher in selfconcept
clarity are more likely to report a high level of
connection with their jobs than are individuals low in
self-concept clarity. This could be a result of individuals
high in self-concept clarity choosing occupations
that are more consistent with their self-views.
Finally, self-concept clarity has also been found
to influence how people respond to others. The concept
was first linked to a phenomenon known as the
foot-in-the-door-technique, whereby individuals who
agree to a small favor (e.g., to donate $1 to a charity)
are more likely to agree to a larger favor when asked

800———Self-Control Measures
later (e.g., to donate $50 to a charity) than if the
smaller favor had not been asked. Interestingly, individuals
higher in self-concept clarity were more likely
than those low in clarity to comply with a second,
larger request. This effect likely stems from those high
in clarity wanting to ensure consistency between their
behaviors so that agreeing to the small request creates
a greater need to agree to the second, larger request.
Although individuals high in self-concept clarity are
more likely to fall victim to the foot-in-the-door technique,
individuals low in self-concept clarity are more
likely to have difficulties in conflict resolution because
of a need to take ownership over arguments in a dispute.
This effect is most likely due to the need that
low-clarity individuals have for connecting reality to
their self-concept.
Future Research
Self-concept clarity is a useful variable in understanding
psychological health, coping, and reactions to
one’s interpersonal world. One of the biggest areas in
need of future research is how self-concept clarity
develops, and what contributes to low versus high
clarity. Can someone have high self-concept clarity
and then experience life events that lead to lower clarity?
Do certain parental behaviors contribute to high
versus low self-concept clarity? The answers to these
questions await future research.
Thomas W. Britt
Heather N. Odle-Dusseau
See also Foot-in-the-Door Technique; Self-Concept;
Self-Esteem; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Burger, J. M., & Guadagno, R. E. (2003). Self-concept clarity
and the foot-in-the-door procedure. Basic and Applied
Social Psychology, 25, 79–86.
Campbell, J. D. (1990). Self-esteem and clarity of the
self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 59, 538–549.
Campbell, J. D., Assanand, S., & Di Paula, A. (2003). The
structure of the self-concept and its relation to psychological
adjustment. Journal of Personality,71, 115–140.
Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M.,
Lavellee, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept
clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural
boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
70, 141–156.
SELF-CONTROL MEASURES
Self-control (also commonly referred to as selfregulation)
is the ability to control one’s thoughts,
emotions, urges, and behaviors. A person might exert
self-control, for example, by trying to stop thinking
about something unpleasant, escape a bad mood and
feel better, or refrain from cursing in front of his or her
parents. Self-control is conceptually similar to what
many people refer to as self-discipline, willpower, or
self-change. Although self-control can be regarded as
an act, the capability for it is a personality trait. Some
people are better at self-control than are others, not in
every single occasion, but overall. Self-control measures
are designed to identify which people are generally
good at self-control and which ones are not.
The ability to exert self-control is vital to maintaining
a successful and healthy lifestyle. People must frequently
exert self-control in many areas of their lives,
such as when trying to diet, quit smoking or drinking,
control their spending, or refrain from engaging in
undesirable sexual acts. Life requires constant selfchange
and adaptation, such as a new college student
who must motivate himself or herself to study in the
absence of parental supervision. Self-control is essential
in this regard.
Likewise, people who are more capable than others
at self-control experience numerous benefits as a
result. For instance, they receive better grades, are
more popular with peers, have better social relationships
and mental health, and cope better with stress.
They are also less likely to suffer from eating disorders
or have substance problems. High self-control even
helps people to follow the law and stay out of jail.
Researchers have developed several different ways
to measure self-control. One method is to directly
assess people’s self-control behaviors. For instance, a
researcher might give a person some delicious cookies
or ice cream and measure how much the person eats.
People typically try to limit how much of these foods
they eat, and so eating a larger amount indicates a lack
of self-control. One method commonly used with
children is to assess the ability to delay gratification.

For instance, a researcher might give a child a marshmallow
and tell the child that he or she can eat it
immediately or wait to eat it until the researcher
retrieves a second marshmallow. The researcher then
measures how long the child is willing to resist eating
the marshmallow and wait (up to about 20 or 30 minutes)
for the second marshmallow. Experiments using
this and other similar procedures have shown that
children more capable of delaying gratification are
more successful (e.g., more popular and healthier
mentally) than others many years later, even during
adulthood.
Questionnaires are also used frequently to assess
self-control. For instance, a research participant might
indicate how much he or she agrees with statements
such as, “I have a hard time breaking bad habits,”
“I never allow myself to lose control,” or “I am able
to work effectively toward long-term goals.” Alternatively,
participants might be asked to report their recent
self-control behaviors, such as how often they have
eaten too much or lost control of their temper. Some
self-control questionnaires measure the ability to exert
self-control more generally, whereas other questionnaires
focus on more specific self-control behaviors,
such eating, illegal activities, or drug and alcohol use.
One measure of personality assesses the related construct
of conscientiousness. Questionnaire measures,
like direct assessments of behavior, have also linked
self-control with several positive outcomes.
Studies on self-control have demonstrated how selfcontrol
operates. When exerting self-control, individuals
first monitor themselves or pay attention to the
target behavior. For instance, a dieter will first keep
track of how much food he or she eats. Progress
toward a goal is then compared with some standard,
such as an ideal diet. People are far more successful at
self-control if they monitor their behavior and set realistic
standards than if they do not monitor their behavior
or do not set standards.
If a person’s behavior or current state matches the
desired goal, then the person no longer exerts selfcontrol.
A dieter who reaches his or her ideal weight,
for instance, will probably stop dieting. If a person’s
behavior or current state falls short of the goal, however,
then the person will exert self-control by changing
his or her behavior until the desired goal is reached.
Although the process of self-control may seem
straightforward, actually exerting self-control is difficult
and demanding. Many people fail at self-control. For
example, many people fail to follow their New Year’s
resolutions, even during the first week of the year.
Why is exerting self-control so difficult? One reason
seems to be that the ability to exert self-control is
limited. Consistent with the idea of willpower, people
seem to use up their self-control energy, and so
they are less likely to succeed at self-control later on.
In one study, for instance, participants were given a
plateful of delicious cookies and a bowl full of
radishes. Some participants were told they could eat
whatever they wanted, whereas other participants
were told to resist eating the cookies and to eat the
radishes instead. It takes self-control to avoid eating
cookies and instead eat radishes, and so participants
who had to eat the radishes should have used up their
self-control energy. To test this idea, the researchers
then had participants watch a funny film and asked
them to hide or suppress any signs of enjoyment or
laughter. Participants who had resisted eating the
cookies were less able to hide their enjoyment than
were participants who had eaten freely, consistent
with the idea that exerting self-control had depleted
their self-control or willpower. Thus, people probably
fail at self-control because they have limited selfcontrol
energy. Indeed, after completing an initial
task requiring self-control, people show poorer selfcontrol
in numerous areas. They fail to control their
spending, inappropriate sexual behavior, and drinking,
and they seem less able to avoid thinking about
unpleasant topics, such as death!
See also Delay of Gratification; Ego Depletion;
Individual Differences; Research Methods;
Self-Regulation; Traits
Further Readings
Self-Control Measures———801
Matthew T. Gailliot
Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. (1994).
Losing control: How and why people fail at selfregulation.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Peake, P. K. (1988). The nature of
adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of
gratification. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 54, 687–696.
Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004).
High self-control predicts good adjustment, less
pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success.
Journal of Personality, 72, 271–322.

802———Self-Deception
SELF-DECEPTION
Definition
Self-deception is the act of lying to yourself. You have
likely noticed this puzzling behavior in others, that is,
cases in which people apparently believe something
that they must know is false. This behavior does not
include exaggeration, faking, or simple lying—those
are cases in which the individual is well aware of
uttering a falsehood. Instead, self-deception is something
deeper and more complicated, even paradoxical.
Consider some typical examples. An otherwise
pleasant young man drinks too much alcohol but gets
angry if anyone suggests he has a drinking problem.
He refuses to believe he is an alcoholic even though
the evidence is obvious: Empty bottles are hidden
throughout his apartment, and his boss has often sent
him home for drinking on the job. Again, it does not
count as self-deception if he knows he is an alcoholic
but is simply lying about it.
Consider another case in which a young woman
has a deep-seated hatred of her mother but cannot
admit it to herself. The signs of this hatred are abundant;
she angers quickly at any mention of her mother
and makes a face when mentioning her. But the young
woman cannot admit it because much guilt and shame
would ensue.
The mother of a criminal cannot believe the things
the police say about him. Her reason for living, her pride
and joy, would be destroyed, so she won’t let herself
believe it. Still she startles at every ring of the phone,
fearing that it is the police calling about her son again.
The more one analyzes such cases, the more complex
the notion of self-deception appears. Explaining
them requires an acknowledgment of the unconscious
part of the mind. Only in the unconscious can an emotional
conflict actually influence an individual’s
behavior and yet be inaccessible. At a conscious
level, the truth about an individual’s particular problem
area is unavailable or, at least, obscure. The
unconscious, however, knows the truth.
Therefore, self-deception is not simply being mistaken
about oneself. You may well be in error about
many aspects of your life. But most of them are not
the result of any self-deceptive process. For example,
you may not have been told that you are adopted: In
that case, others may have purposely deceived you. Or
you may believe that you have a genius-level IQ
because you accidentally mis-scored a take-home IQ
test. Your recall of the fact that you hated your parents
at age 10 may have faded along with other memories.
None of these cases qualifies as self-deception.
History and Background
Because the unconscious appears to be involved, selfdeception
is often discussed in the context of Sigmund
Freud’s famous psychoanalytic theory. Rather than
being one of the traditional defense mechanisms, selfdeception
is thought to be a necessary component of
all defense mechanisms. Each one has the paradoxical
element noted earlier: There must be at least one
moment of self-deception for a defense mechanism
to work. Those readers familiar with such defenses as
projection, intellectualization, and repression will
understand that, in each case, a person has to be both
unaware and hyperaware of the disturbing information.
Psychoanalytic theory is pessimistic about your
ability to ever recognize self-deception in yourself.
That conclusion is probably too severe: A person should
be able to recognize his or her own self-deception at
some point after it occurs—when the person has
cooled down and has a more objective perspective on
the issue.
The Paradox of Self-Deception
When Freud first wrote about self-deception, he was
attacked by a famous philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Like many nonphilosophers, Sartre dismissed the idea
of self-deception as impossible. How can you know
something and not know it at the same time?
This criticism is a powerful one. How can you
avoid a thought without knowing it is there? An analogy
would be the goal of avoiding someone you hate:
You cannot effectively avoid the fellow unless you are
continuously vigilant for his possible appearance.
Similarly, the task of avoiding potentially upsetting
self-knowledge requires that you continuously turn
your mind away from it. Success at this task would
seem impossible if you don’t know the threatening
thought is even there.
Freud flatly rejected Sartre’s critique. A true understanding
of the unconscious, Freud argued, would
reveal that self-deception can occur. Its feasibility has
indeed been supported by recent developments in
cognitive psychology.
For example, we now know that many processes are
unconscious. Moreover, we know humans’ cognitive
apparatus allows for multiple versions of the same

information: Contradictory information can be stored
in two different parts of the brain. Finally, we also
know that the emotional part of a stimulus is
processed more quickly than is the content. For example,
with a polygraph, the emotional impact of a word
can be detected before the word is understood.
Given the solid evidence for these mental
processes, the possibility of self-deception becomes
quite feasible. Incoming information is processed by
two different brain systems. One is the cognitive system
that deals with the informational value of the stimulus;
the other is the emotional system. Furthermore,
the emotional system operates first, thereby allowing
the mind to set up preemptive roadblocks for the
informational system.
Evolutionary Basis
Given that self-deception has been mentioned from
the earliest writings of human beings, many psychologists
suspect that it has an evolutionary basis. That is,
human beings engage in self-deception because it
is built in to the genes of our species. According to
evolutionary theory, such psychological tendencies
are part of our genetic makeup because they proved to
give a survival advantage to those who engaged in it.
Individuals without this tendency did not survive as
well as those who did.
But how could such irrationality be adaptive? An
anthropologist, Robert Trivers, pointed out that complete
awareness of our motives would interfere with
their effectiveness. Your ability to remain brave in the
face of extreme danger is enhanced if you really believe
you can deal with the threat. Your overconfidence that
you can make the Olympic team will actually aid in
making it come true. In both cases, there are negative
consequences if you are wrong: In one case, you may
exhaust yourself in 4 years of futile workouts; in the
other case, you may unnecessarily risk your life.
The Evidence for Self-Deception
Thus, it appears that self-deception is possible. But
the bulk of the direct evidence for its existence comes
from the clinical experiences of psychologists and
psychiatrists. Most clinicians can report instances
where their patients have clearly deceived themselves,
usually with unhealthy consequences.
The experimental evidence for self-deception is
much less abundant. In fact, only the two
studies described later claim to have demonstrated
Self-Deception———803
self-deception. Of course, it just takes one valid
demonstration to prove that human beings can selfdeceive.
But such demonstrations have proved to be
extremely difficult to carry out even in controlled laboratory
studies. The reader can decide whether the
two studies are convincing or not.
Psychologists Harold Sackeim and Ruben Gur
started with the idea that people typically don’t like
the sound of their own voices. On the main experimental
task, participants were asked to pick out their
own voices from a series of voices that did, in fact,
include their own. They said “Me” or “not Me” to
indicate that a voice was theirs or not. At the same
time, they are hooked up to a polygraph, which
measures emotional response. So we have two pieces
of information, an oral response and an emotional
response measured by polygraph.
The polygraph invariably shows a blip when the
subject’s own voice comes on, but many false denials
can occur. The oral response is not accurate; it is your
voice and you deny it, but the polygraph recognizes it
as you. The false denials, coupled with the polygraph,
suggest the person knows something and does not
know it at the same time; the person is unaware of his
or her own beliefs.
When Sackeim and Gur lowered the self-esteem of
subjects beforehand, there were more false denials.
False denials substantially increased when the person
was motivated to avoid self-confrontation.
According to Sackeim and Gur, the false denials
show that subjects believe X and do not believe X at
the same time. Their lack of awareness is motivated
by lowering their self-esteem. They argue that this single
demonstration of self-deception is all that is
needed to show self-deception occurs.
The second study claiming to demonstrate selfdeception
was conducted by psychologists George
Quattrone and Amos Tversky. They used a cold pressor
test, in which participants are asked to immerse
one hand in very cold water and keep it there as long
as they can stand it.
Some of the participants in the study were told
something scary before taking the test: “People who
feel a lot of pain from the cold water have a weakness
in their cardiovascular system. This defect leads to
early heart attacks and a short lifespan.”
Results showed that participants receiving this
information rated the task as less painful. They even
held their hand in the cold water longer. They seemed
to be trying to convince themselves that they didn’t
have the life-threatening cardiovascular problem.

804———Self-Defeating Behavior
They were engaging in self-deception, according to
Quattrone and Tversky, because they wouldn’t
acknowledge, even to themselves, the pain that they
surely were experiencing.
You may or may not be convinced that these
studies demonstrate self-deception. What you should
be convinced of is that proving self-deception is
incredibly difficult. Remember that a convincing
experiment has to show that a person believes something
and disbelieves it at the same moment. It is not
surprising then that only two empirical studies have
claimed to demonstrate the phenomenon. Instead,
the bulk of writing on self-deception is published by
philosophers who, unlike psychologists, do not
have to collect data to support their claims. Instead,
philosophers’ method consists of developing logical,
persuasive arguments for their position on an issue.
The Importance of Self-Deception
The examples discussed earlier suggest a deep-seated
powerful psychological process. In each case, the person
has the information to draw the correct conclusion
but, for strong emotional reasons, will not do so.
A number of everyday positive illusions seem to
have the flavor of self-deception but are less dramatic.
You might set your watch 10 minutes ahead to ensure
that you get to an appointment on time. How can that
possibly work? You know very well your watch is
10 minutes fast; you aren’t fooling anyone. Yet people
say it helps them to be on time. Or take procrastination:
People know the strategy hasn’t paid off in the
past, yet they promise themselves that they’ll make
that unpleasant phone call later. They come up with
amazing rationalizations for staying in bed or waiting
until the last minute to write a paper.
Labeling such cases as self-deception is a stretch.
They are better placed into the category of strategic
coping mechanisms. The term self-deception should
be reserved for cases in which strong psychological
forces prevent a person from acknowledging a threatening
truth about himself or herself.
In short, the importance of self-deception to social
psychology cannot be overestimated. The concept is
central to the human necessity to trade off or, at least,
balance two fundamental motivations. People want
accurate information about their world and its complexity;
at the same time, they need to defend against
information that would destroy the ideas that their
lives are built on.
Delroy L. Paulhus
See also Deception (Lying); Dual Process Theories;
Nonconscious Processes; Positive Illusions; Procrastination;
Projection; Self-Enhancement; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1993). Lying to yourself: The enigma of
self-deception. In M. Lewis & C. Saarni (Eds.), Lying and
deception in everyday life (pp. 166–183). New York:
Guilford Press.
Goleman, D. (1985). Vital lies, simple truths: The psychology
of self-deception. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Gur, R. C., & Sackeim, H. A. (1979). Self-deception:
A concept in search of a phenomenon. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 147–169.
Krebs, D. L., & Denton, K. (1997). In J. A. Simpson &
D. T. Kenrick (Eds.), Evolutionary social psychology
(pp. 21–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lockard, J. S., & Paulhus, D. L. (1988). Self-deception:
An adaptive mechanism? New York: Prentice Hall.
SELF-DEFEATING BEHAVIOR
For social psychologists, a self-defeating behavior is
any behavior that normally ends up with a result that
is something the person doing the behavior doesn’t
want to happen. If you are trying to accomplish some
goal, and something you do makes it less likely that
you will reach that goal, then that is a self-defeating
behavior. If the goal is reached, but the ways you used
to reach the goal cause more bad things to happen
than the positive things you get from achieving the
goal, that is also self-defeating behavior. Social
psychologists have been studying self-defeating
behaviors for at least 30 years. And although they
have identified several things that seem to lead to selfdefeating
behaviors, much more can be learned about
what self-defeating behaviors have in common, and
how to get people to reduce the impact of these behaviors
in their lives.
Background and History
Social psychologists began thinking about selfdefeating
behaviors as a class of behaviors in the late
1980s. Interest in this topic spread following the controversy
that took place in the 1980s about whether or
not a psychological disorder called the self-defeating
personality disorder should be included in the official
handbook of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

The group revising the DSM in the 1980s wanted to
include a disorder where people showed “a pervasive
pattern of self-defeating behaviors.” Some people
didn’t want this to be included because they said that
there wasn’t enough research to show that a disorder
like this really existed; some people didn’t want it to
be included because they said that the behaviors that
supposedly made up the self-defeating personality
disorder were really parts of other personality disorders;
and finally, some people didn’t want it to be
included because they were afraid that the disorder
would be biased against women and would excuse
spouse abusers, blaming their victims by claiming that
the victims had self-defeating personality disorder.
In the edition of the DSM published in 1987 (called
the DSM-III-R), self-defeating personality disorder was
included in an appendix and was not considered an official
diagnosis. More recent editions of the DSM do not
mention the self-defeating personality disorder at all.
Even though social psychologists were inspired
by this controversy, they are interested in studying
behaviors of normal people, not those of people who
are mentally ill. Although some psychiatrists believe
that all humans are driven to harm themselves, most
people are not motivated in this way. Most humans are
interested in accomplishing their goals, not in harming
themselves.
Types
Social psychologists have divided self-defeating
behaviors into two types. One type is called counterproductive
behaviors. A counterproductive behavior
happens when people try to get something they want,
but the way they try to get it ends up not being a good
one. One type of counterproductive behavior occurs
when people persevere at something beyond the time
that it is realistic for them to achieve the desired outcome.
For example, students taking a class, and doing
very poorly, sometimes refuse to drop the class. They
think that if they stick it out, they will be able to pull
their grades up and pass the class. But, it may just be
too late for some, or they may not have the ability to
really pass the class. Most students’ goals are to get a
degree with as high a grade point average as possible,
so refusing to drop the class is a self-defeating behavior.
Counterproductive behaviors usually happen
because the person has a wrong idea either about himself
or herself or about the situation the person is in.
The students have an incorrect idea about their own
abilities; they think they can succeed, but they can’t.
Self-Defeating Behavior———805
The second type of self-defeating behavior is called
trade-offs. We make trade-offs in our behavior all the
time. For example, you may decide not to go to a party
so you can study for an exam. This is a trade-off: You
are trading the fun you will have at the party for the
benefit you will get from studying (a better grade).
This example of a trade-off is not self-defeating.
You are probably going to come out a winner: The
benefit of studying will, in the end, outweigh the benefit
of going to the party. But, some kinds of trade-offs
are self-defeating: The cost that you have to accept is
greater than the benefit that you end up getting. One
example is neglecting to take care of yourself physically.
When people don’t exercise, go to the dentist, or
follow the doctor’s orders, they are risking their health
to either avoid some short-term pain or discomfort
(such as the discomfort of exercise or the anxiety that
the dentist causes).
Another example of a self-defeating trade-off is
called self-handicapping. Self-handicapping is when
people do something to make their success on a task
less likely to happen. People do this so that they will
have a built-in excuse if they fail. For example,
students may get drunk the night before a big exam.
If they do poorly on the exam, they have a built in
excuse: They didn’t study and they were hungover.
This way they avoid thinking that they don’t have the
ability to do well in the class.
Some common self-defeating behaviors represent
a combination of counterproductive behaviors and
trade-offs. Procrastination is a familiar example. When
you think about why people procrastinate, you probably
think about it as a trade-off. People want to do
something more fun, or something that is less difficult,
or something that allows them to grow or develop
more, instead of the thing they are putting off. But,
sometimes people explain why they procrastinate in
another way: That they do better work if they wait
until the last minute. If this is really the reason people
procrastinate (instead of something people just say to
justify their procrastination), then it is a counterproductive
strategy; they believe that they will do better
work if they wait until the last minute, but that is not
usually the case. (Research shows that college
students who procrastinate get worse grades, have
more stress, and are more likely to get sick.)
Alcohol or drug abuse is another self-defeating
behavior. Many people use alcohol and drugs responsibly,
and do it to gain pleasure or pain relief. But for
addicts, and in some situations for anyone, substance
use is surely self-defeating. Substance use may be a

806———Self-Determination Theory
trade-off: A person trades the costs of using drugs or
alcohol (health risks, addiction, embarrassing or dangerous
behavior, legal problems) for benefits (feeling
good, not having to think about one’s inadequacies).
Usually over the long run, however, the costs are
much greater than the benefits.
Even suicide can be looked at as either a selfdefeating
trade-off or counterproductive behavior.
People who commit suicide are trying to escape from
negative things in their life. They are trading off the fear
of death, and the good things in life, because they think
the benefit of no longer feeling the way they do will be
greater than what they are giving up. But, suicide can
also be thought of as a counterproductive behavior.
People may think that taking their life will allow them
to reach a certain goal (not having problems).
Causes and Consequences
Causes of different self-defeating behaviors vary; however,
most self-defeating behaviors have some things
in common. People who engage in self-defeating
behaviors often feel a threat to their egos or selfesteem;
there is usually some element of bad mood
involved in self-defeating behaviors. And, people who
engage in self-defeating behaviors often focus on the
short-term consequences of their behavior, and ignore
or underestimate the long-term consequences.
Procrastination is an example that combines all
three of these factors. One reason people procrastinate
is that they are afraid that when they do the thing they
are putting off, it will show that they are not as good
or competent as they want to be or believe they are
(threat to self). Also, people procrastinate because the
thing they put off causes anxiety (a negative emotion).
Finally, people who procrastinate are focusing on the
short-term effects of their behavior (it will feel good
right now to watch TV instead of do my homework),
but they are ignoring the long-term consequences (if I
put off my homework, either I’ll get an F or I will have
to pull an all-nighter to get it done).
These three common causes are all related to each
other. If you have a goal for yourself, or if other
people expect certain things from you, and you fail or
think you will fail to meet the goal, this is a threat to
your self-esteem or ego. That will usually make you
feel bad (negative mood). So, ego-threats make you
have negative moods.
But, negative moods also can lead to ego threats.
When people are in negative moods, they set higher
standards or goals for themselves. So, this will make
them more likely to fail. Here is a vicious cycle:
Failing to meet your goals is a threat to your ego,
which leads to negative emotion, which leads you to
set higher standards, which makes you fail more.
Negative moods also can lead you to think more about
the immediate consequences of your actions, instead
of the long-term consequences. This, too, can make
people do something self-defeating.
Steve Scher
See also Procrastination; Risk Taking; Self-Handicapping;
Suicide; Sunk Cost; Threatened Egotism Theory of
Aggression
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Esteem threat, self-regulatory
breakdown, and emotional distress as factors in
self-defeating behavior. Review of General Psychology,
1, 145–174.
Baumeister, R. F., & Scher, S. J. (1988). Self-defeating
behavior patterns among normal individuals: Review and
analysis of common self-destructive tendencies.
Psychological Bulletin, 104, 3–22.
Curtis, R. C. (Ed.). (1989). Self-defeating behaviors:
Experimental research, clinical impressions, and practical
implications. New York: Plenum.
Fiester, S. J. (1995). Self-defeating personality disorder. In
W. J. Livesley (Ed.), The DSM–IV personality disorders
(pp. 341–358). New York: Guilford Press.
Widiger, T. A. (1995). Deletion of self-defeating and sadistic
personality disorders. In W. J. Livesley (Ed.), The
DSM–IV personality disorders (pp. 359–373). New York:
Guilford Press.
SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY
The self-determination theory (SDT), formulated by
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, is a broad
theory of human motivation for which the concept of
basic or universal psychological needs for competence,
relatedness, and self-determination and the
differentiation of types of motivation (autonomous,
controlled) are central and defining features. SDT
posits that the type, rather than amount, of motivation
is the more important predictor of outcomes, and that
the type of motivation is determined by the degree of

satisfaction of the basic needs. The theory predicts,
and empirical evidence has confirmed, that satisfaction
of the basic needs, and being motivated
autonomously, are associated with important positive
outcomes, such as enhanced well-being, improved
learning, and greater persistence. Studies also show
that when authority figures are autonomy supportive,
taking the other person’s perspective and providing
choice, the other person tends to become more autonomously
motivated.
Basic Psychological Needs
SDT proposes that, in addition to requiring various
physical forms of sustenance (e.g., food and water),
humans have evolved to require certain psychological
experiences for optimal functioning and psychological
health. SDT has identified three psychological
experiences that are universally required for optimal
growth, integrity, and well-being: the needs for competence,
relatedness, and self-determination. The
postulate that these needs are universal means that
they are essential for all people, regardless of sex,
ethnicity, socioeconomic status, or cultural values.
Consider each need in turn.
The first psychological experience that has been
identified as a need is the feeling of competence, that
is, the feeling that one is effective in dealing with
one’s inner and outer worlds. This concept originated
in the writings of Robert White, who spoke of being
motivated by effectance. White suggested that when
children play, they do it because it is fun, but children
are also learning and becoming more effective or
competent while they are playing. The feeling of competence
or effectance applies to learning to manage
oneself, for example, learning to regulate one’s emotions
effectively, just as it applied to learning to function
in the larger social milieu. The realization that
one is improving in any important activity or meaningful
aspect of one’s life is very gratifying and can be
understood as representing satisfaction of the basic
need for competence.
The second type of psychological experience that
is a need within SDT is relatedness. The experience of
relatedness is broadly defined as feeling connected to
other human beings: of loving and being loved, of caring
for and being cared for, of belonging to groups or
collectives, and of having enduring relationships characterized
by mutual trust. When someone shares a
meaningful conversation, writes or receives a letter
Self-Determination Theory———807
from a friend or family member, or hugs someone he
or she cares for, the person is likely to experience satisfaction
of the need for relatedness.
The third basic need within self-determination theory
is the need for autonomy or self-determination.
The concept of self-determination evolved from the
writings of Richard deCharms, who distinguished
between internal and external perceived loci of causality.
DeCharms suggested that when people have an
internal perceived locus of causality, they will feel as
though they are the origin of their own actions, rather
than being a pawn, which involves feeling pushed
around by external forces. Being self-determined
involves feeling a sense of volition or full willingness,
having a feeling of choice about what one is doing, of
endorsing one’s actions fully, and experiencing freedom
in one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. Having
these experiences provides satisfaction of the basic
need for autonomy or self-determination. Although
other psychologists may use one or another of these
terms to mean something other than what it means in
self-determination theory, the use of these multiple
descriptors is intended to give one a real sense of what
the terms mean within SDT. In short, SDT maintains
that human beings have a fundamental need to fully
endorse their actions and to feel free with respect to
constraints and pressures.
To summarize, SDT posits that each of these three
types of experiences—the experiences of competence,
relatedness, and autonomy—contribute importantly to
people’s psychological and physical well-being. To
the extent that any one of these needs is thwarted or
denied to people, they will suffer some type of psychological
or physical decrement as a result. Furthermore,
these psychological needs are identified as the
sources of energy for one type of motivation referred
to as intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic Motivation and
Extrinsic Motivation
Intrinsic motivation is the type of motivation characterized
by the experience of interest and enjoyment.
The reward for intrinsic motivation is said to be in the
doing of the activity rather than in what it leads to. In
other words, intrinsically motivated behaviors are
maintained by the spontaneous feelings that accompany
the activity. Activities that you truly enjoy—
perhaps playing lacrosse or golf, perhaps reading or
drawing, perhaps climbing a mountain or taking a dip

808———Self-Determination Theory
in the ocean—are intrinsically motivated. The concept
of intrinsic motivation is used to describe the full
range of behaviors that are willingly enacted in the
absence of contingencies of reward or punishment.
The prototypic example of intrinsic motivation is a
child at play, running madly around the playground,
building a snowman, digging in a sandbox, or turning
a large cardboard box into a clubhouse. All these
activities require the exertion of energy, yet the
rewards are entirely intrinsic to the activities themselves.
From an SDT perspective, the energy for such
activities originates from the basic psychological
needs (e.g., competence, relatedness, and autonomy).
The complement to intrinsic motivation, that is, the
type of motivation that energizes and directs other
human activities, is referred to as extrinsic motivation.
This type of motivation is characterized by an instrumentality
between the behavior and some separable
consequence. The classic example of extrinsic motivation
is doing an activity for a reward. In that case, the
person is not doing the activity because the activity
itself is interesting and enjoyable but rather because
doing the activity allows the person to earn the
reward. Doing things to avoid a punishment, to please
a parent or spouse, to be accepted by a group, to look
better than someone else are all examples of being
extrinsically motivated.
Undermining Intrinsic Motivation
One of the phenomena for which SDT is well known
is the undermining of intrinsic motivation by extrinsic
rewards. In the early 1970s, some surprising research
suggested that there might be a dark side to using
task-contingent tangible rewards, such as money or
prizes, to help motivate people to do interesting activities,
such as learning or playing. The initial experiment
by Deci found that when college students
worked on interesting puzzles to earn money, they
ended up finding the puzzles less interesting and
enjoyable than did other students who had worked on
the same puzzles without being offered money. The
students who had been paid for solving the puzzles
were less likely to return to the puzzle activity during
a subsequent free-play period. In other words, when
people were given a reward for doing an interesting
activity, they lost interest in the activity and were less
likely to engage the activity later.
From the perspective of SDT, the reason for this
drop in intrinsic motivation was that the rewards
tended to make individuals feel controlled. They
became dependent on the rewards and lost their
sense of doing the activity autonomously. Because
satisfaction of the need for autonomy is essential for
maintaining people’s interest and vitality for the
activity—that is, their intrinsic motivation—they
lost intrinsic motivation when their behavior was
controlled.
Interestingly, another early experiment by Deci
showed that when people received positive feedback
for doing an interesting activity, their intrinsic motivation
tended to increase rather than decrease. The SDT
explanation was that the information contained in
the positive feedback about people’s effectiveness at
the activity provided satisfaction of the need for competence
and enhanced their intrinsic motivation.
Because positive feedback is sometimes referred to
as verbal rewards, this experiment helped make the
important point that rewards do not always undermine
intrinsic motivation. Instead, they tend to undermine
intrinsic motivation when people feel controlled by
the rewards.
More than 100 published experiments have
explored the effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation.
In general, across all these studies, the results
indicate that tangible rewards tend to decrease intrinsic
motivation whereas verbal rewards tend to enhance
it. Still other studies have examined the effects of
other motivators such as surveillance, deadlines,
evaluations, and pressure to win a competition. These
studies suggest that each of these motivators tends to
undermine intrinsic motivation because they diminish
people’s experience of autonomy.
Autonomous Motivation and
Controlled Motivation
The diminishment of intrinsic motivation by extrinsic
motivators via the thwarting of people’s need for
autonomy raised an interesting question: Do all
extrinsic motivations tend to control people? Put
differently, is it possible to be self-determined while
doing an extrinsically motivated activity? SDT proposes
that people can internalize external prompts or
contingencies and accept them as their own. For
example, a request from a parent that a child participate
in the chores around the house to help the family
would be an extrinsic motivator. The child might initially
do the chores to please the parent. Gradually,
however, the child could internalize the value of helping
and the regulation of the behavior and, thus, would
be more autonomous in doing the chores. However,

SDT also suggests that values and regulations can be
internalized to varying degrees. If the child were simply
to take in the regulation and use it to force himself
or herself to help, the child would still be relatively
controlled. The child might be doing it to avoid feeling
guilty or worthless, which, although internalized,
does not represent autonomous self-regulation.
To become autonomous, the child would need to identify
with the importance of the activity and integrate
its value and regulation into his or her own sense of
who he or she is. Considerable research has shown that
it is possible to internalize and integrate values and
regulations, and that doing so is associated with higher
levels of psychological well-being. Accordingly, over
time, SDT changed the most important differentiation
in the theory from intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to
autonomous and controlled motivation. Autonomous
motivation consists of intrinsic motivation plus fully
internalized extrinsic motivation. Controlled motivation,
in contrast, consists of regulation by external
contingencies and by partially internalized values or
contingencies—what in SDT are called introjects.
Being autonomously motivated involves feeling a
sense of choice as one fully endorses one’s actions or
decisions. People do intrinsically motivated behaviors
because they find the activities interesting and enjoyable;
they do well-internalized extrinsically motivated
behaviors because they find them personally important.
So, interest and importance are the two bases of
autonomous motivation, and doing activities for either
reason allows people to feel satisfaction of the three
basic psychological needs. Controlled motivation, in
contrast, involves acting because one feels pressured
to do so, either through coercion or seduction. When
controlled, people may behave because they feel lured
into it by seductive rewards, feel forced into it by
authority figures, or have introjected a demand and do
it to bolster a fragile sense of self-esteem. When controlled,
people might feel a sense of competence or
relatedness, but they will not be satisfying their need
for autonomy. From the prospective of SDT, satisfaction
of all three of the basic psychological needs is
necessary for autonomous motivation and for optimal
well-being.
Positive Outcomes Associated
With Autonomous Motivation
By virtue of the definition of basic needs within SDT,
satisfaction of these needs promotes positive psychological
health. More than three decades of research has
Self-Determination Theory———809
confirmed that being autonomously motivated and satisfying
the psychological needs are vital to both mental
and physical well-being. Greater autonomous motivation
relative to controlled motivation has been linked to
more positive emotions and less stress. This pattern
emerges in samples of both children and adults, in countries
as varied as Germany, Bulgaria, Russia, South
Korea, Turkey, and the United States, among others.
Autonomous motivation also leads to greater
maintained lifestyle change, better conceptual understanding
and deep learning, greater job satisfaction
and performance, and higher creativity. For example,
research has demonstrated that when people are
autonomously motivated to eat a healthier diet and
exercise more, they tend to maintain those behaviors
more effectively over the long run. When students
in school are more autonomously motivated, they
tend to get better grades and are less likely to drop
out. Employees at large companies are more likely to
receive positive work evaluations when they are
autonomously motivated. And the paintings and
collages created by individuals whose motivation is
autonomous are likely to be rated as more creative by
expert judges. The merits of autonomous motivation
are numerous and varied.
Promoting Autonomous Motivation
Many studies have shown that it is possible to enhance
autonomous motivation. Research has indicated that
when authority figures, such as parents, managers,
teachers, coaches, or physicians are more autonomy
supportive, their children, subordinates, students,
athletes, or patients become more autonomously
motivated. Being autonomy supportive means that
authority figures consider and understand the other
person’s perspective and relate to that person with consideration
of this perspective. For example, autonomysupportive
teachers relate to their students in terms of
the students’ skill levels and encourage them to move
on from there. Furthermore, the autonomy-supportive
authority figure offers choice, provides meaningful
explanations for why requested behaviors are important,
and encourages exploration and experimentation.
In these ways, authority figures can facilitate
autonomous motivation, basic psychological need satisfaction,
and greater health and well-being.
Arlen C. Moller
Edward L. Deci
Richard M. Ryan

810———Self-Disclosure
See also Autonomy; Control; Intrinsic Motivation;
Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A metaanalytic
review of experiments examining the effects of
extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological
Bulletin, 125, 627–668.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and
self-determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory
and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social
development and well-being. American Psychologist,
55, 68–78.
White, R. W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept
of competence. Psychological Review, 66, 297–333.
SELF-DISCLOSURE
Definition
Self-disclosure refers to the process of revealing
personal, intimate information about oneself to others.
Through self-disclosure, two individuals get to know
one another. Self-disclosure is considered a key aspect
of developing closeness and intimacy with others,
including friends, romantic partners, and family members.
However, self-disclosure also functions as a way
for people to express their feelings about a situation,
to give others their thoughts and opinions about a
topic, to elicit reassurance about their feelings, or to
get advice.
Context and Importance
Self-disclosure varies by the level of intimacy. For
example, information can range from being relatively
superficial, such as disclosing where you are from and
what your favorite flavor of ice cream is, to being more
private, such as revealing that your parents are going
through a divorce or that you once cheated on your
boyfriend or girlfriend. Self-disclosure also varies in
how many different topics that are disclosed. When
individuals disclose private information, their disclosure
is high in depth. When individuals disclose a wide
range of topics about themselves, their disclosure is
high in breadth. Most relationships begin with the
exchange of superficial information, which gradually
turn into more meaningful disclosures when the
superficial conversation is rewarding. That is, people
are likely to move the conversation to a deeper level by
increasing both the breadth and the depth of the conversation
when they are enjoying a conversation they
are having.
When a relationship is new, early conversations
tend to involve self-disclosure reciprocity. Put another
way, new acquaintances tend to match one another’s
disclosures; when one partner opens up and discloses,
the other ends up disclosing as well. As one partner’s
disclosure increases in intimacy, so too does the other
partner’s disclosure. Because self-disclosure is reciprocal,
it both influences and is influenced by the
intimacy level between two people. Thus, if you want
to get to know someone, one strategy is to disclose
personal information about yourself to the person you
want to get to know. Most likely, this person will open
up to you in turn. Over time and over the course of
a number of conversations, a relationship becomes
increasingly more intimate.
Three important factors determine whether an
interaction will be intimate. First is the content of the
individual’s disclosure. For example, the disclosure of
personal desires, fantasies, anxieties, and emotions is
more important for the development of intimacy than
is the disclosure of facts. This is because the disclosure
of emotions provides an opportunity for the partner to
validate and demonstrate that he or she cares for, supports,
and accepts the individual. The second is the
partner’s response to the disclosure. When the partner
is responsive, feelings of closeness are increased and
further communication is facilitated. When a partner is
not responsive, he or she is indicating a lack of interest
in further conversation and intimacy is decreased.
Third is the individual’s interpretation of and reaction
to the partner’s behavior. If the individual perceives the
partner as supportive and understanding, the conversation
is likely to become more intimate because the
individual is likely to disclose again or prompt the
partner to disclose. If the individual perceives the partner
as unsupportive or intrusive, the conversation is not
likely to become intimate. Thus, when disclosure is
high, the partner is responsive and the individual perceives
the partner as caring, the conversation will most
likely become more intimate over time.
Pioneering research by Sidney Jourard revealed
that self-disclosure and liking for another person are
linked. Later research has demonstrated that people
(a) like those who disclose, (b) disclose to those they
like, and (c) after disclosing, like the person to whom

they disclosed even more. It feels good to disclose
your inner feelings to another, and it is gratifying to be
singled out for somebody else’s disclosure because it
is a signal that they like and trust you. Furthermore, it
is rewarding to find out that someone has the same
beliefs and values you do.
However, social norms govern appropriate selfdisclosure.
When people are just getting to know each
other, a person who discloses at a medium level of
intimacy is better liked than is a person who discloses
at a too low or too high level. People like those who
disclose at the same level as they do and are deterred
by those who are too reserved or too revealing. In
addition, a person who reciprocates an intimate selfdisclosure
is liked more than is a person who reciprocates
an intimate disclosure with a superficial one.
When a person reciprocates an intimate disclosure
with a superficial disclosure, it is a signal that they
do not want to get to know the other person and the
conversation is not as rewarding. Typically, however,
superficial information is disclosed to strangers and
more intimate information is disclosed to close others.
Revealing highly personal information to a stranger
is perceived as inappropriate. For example, it is
improper for somebody you barely know to come up
to you and reveal the intimate details of his or her sex
life. Yet in a close relationship, such a revelation could
strengthen the relationship and make two people even
closer. A person who reveals too much information
early on is perceived by others as unbalanced.
Self-disclosure fosters love as well as liking.
Couples who engage in more extensive and intimate
self-disclosure to one another tend to have longer,
more satisfying relationships. This is because disclosing
personal information about yourself is one way
to get your needs met, and having your needs met
increases feelings of love and affection, companionship,
and a sense of belonging. Partners believe that
their relationship contains a high level of intimacy
when they can express their thoughts, opinions, and
feelings to their partners, and feel their partners are
able to express themselves as well. This is why many
researchers believe that experiencing intimacy through
self-disclosure may be the most important factor that
determines the health of a relationship.
Gender and Individual Differences
We expect women to be more expressive than men.
When a woman is not expressive, others perceive
her as maladjusted. Likewise, men are expected to be
inexpressive, and when a man is expressive, he is perceived
as unstable. And, in fact, women tend to disclose
more than men do in general. However, although
women disclose more to their female friends and to
their romantic partners than men do, they do not disclose
more to their male friends any more than men
do. Furthermore, women tend to elicit self-disclosure
from others, even from those who do not usually disclose
very much about themselves. One reason for this
is that women tend to be responsive listeners, which in
turn promotes further disclosure by the speaker.
Traditional gender roles are changing, however,
and men are becoming more expressive in the context
of their close romantic relationships and view disclosure
as an important part of the relationship. Therefore,
couples nowadays are exhibiting patterns of
full and equal self-disclosure, which has produced
relationships that foster mutual respect and trust. Relationships
that contain a high level of self-disclosure
have been found to be both more intimate and more
satisfying for both partners.
Some people are better able to self-disclose than
others are. This is because self-disclosure can be
threatening. Self-disclosure can leave you vulnerable
to rejection, manipulation, and betrayal. Some
individuals are so concerned about these dangers of
self-disclosure that they have trouble opening up and
revealing intimate details about themselves, even in
the appropriate contexts. They worry about the impression
they are making on others and readily perceive
rejection in others’ intentions. Consequently, these
individuals frequently feel lonely and isolated from
others and tend to have fewer close, satisfying relationships
with others.
See also Intimacy; Need to Belong; Social Support
Further Readings
Self-Disclosure———811
Amy B. Brunell
Altman, I., & Taylor, D. A. (1973). Social penetration: The
development of interpersonal relationships. New York:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Collins, N. L., & Miller, L. C. (1994). Self-disclosure and
liking: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin,
116, 457–475.
Laurencau, J., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998).
Intimacy as an interpersonal process: The importance of
self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner
responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1238–1251.

812———Self-Discrepancy Theory
Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal
process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal
relationships: Theory, research, and interventions
(pp. 239–256). New York: Wiley.
SELF-DISCREPANCY THEORY
Self-discrepancy theory was developed in an attempt
to answer the following question: Why is it that when
people are emotionally overwhelmed by tragedies or
serious setbacks in their lives—such as the death of
their child, the loss of their jobs, or the break-up of
their marriages—some suffer from depression whereas
others suffer from anxiety? Even when the tragic event
is the same, people’s emotional reactions can be very
different. The answer proposed by self-discrepancy
theory is that even when people have the same specific
goals, such as seniors in high school wanting to go
to a good college or older adults wanting a good
marriage, they often vary in how they represent these
goals. Some individuals represent their goals (or standards),
called self-guides in self-discrepancy theory, as
hopes or aspirations: ideal self-guides. Other individuals
represent their self-guides as duties or obligations:
ought self-guides. According to self-discrepancy theory,
this difference between ideals and oughts holds
the answer to the mystery of people having different
emotional reactions to the same negative life events.
Self-Guides
Self-discrepancy theory proposes that people represent
a negative life event as saying something about
their current state, their actual self now. This actual
self is compared with their self-guides, the kind of
person they want or desire to be (e.g., going to a good
college, having a good marriage). When there is a discrepancy
between individuals’ actual self and their
self-guides, a self-discrepancy, people suffer emotionally.
When the actual self is discrepant from an
ideal, people feel sad, disappointed, discouraged—
dejection-related emotions that relate to depression.
When the actual self is discrepant from an ought,
people feel nervous, tense, and worried—agitationrelated
emotions that relate to anxiety. Thus, selfdiscrepancy
theory proposes that people’s emotional
vulnerabilities depend on the type of self-guide that
motivates their lives: dejection/depression when ideals
dominate and agitation/anxiety when oughts dominate.
The rationale behind these predictions is that different
emotions are associated with different psychological
situations that people experience: Success or
failure to meet your ideals produce different psychological
situations than success or failure to meet your
oughts. Specifically, with an ideal (i.e., one of your
hopes and aspirations), you experience success as the
presence of a positive outcome (a gain), which is a
happy experience, and you experience failure as the
absence of positive outcomes (a nongain), which is a
sad experience. In contrast, with an ought (i.e., one of
your duties and obligations), you experience success
as the absence of a negative outcome (a nonloss),
which is a relaxing experience, and you experience
failure as the presence of a negative outcome (a loss),
which is a worrying experience.
Self-discrepancy theory also makes predictions
about the kind of parenting that is likely to result in
children having strong ideal self-guides and the kind
that is likely to result in children having strong ought
self-guides. Again, these predictions are based on the
underlying idea that self-regulation in relation to ideals
involves experiencing successes in the world as the
presence of positive outcomes (gains) and failures as
the absence of positive outcomes (nongains), whereas
self-regulation in relation to oughts involves experiencing
successes as the absence of negative outcomes
(nonlosses) and failures as the presence of negative
outcomes (losses). When children interact with their
parents (or other caretakers), the parents respond to the
children in ways that make the children experience one
of these different kinds of psychological situations.
Over time, the children respond to themselves as their
parents respond to them, producing the same specific
kinds of psychological situations, and this develops
into the kind of self-guide (ideal or ought) that is associated
with those psychological situations. The pattern
of parenting that is predicted to create strong ideals in
children is when parents combine bolstering (when
managing success) and love withdrawal (when disciplining
failure). Bolstering occurs, for instance, when
parents encourage the child to overcome difficulties,
hug and kiss the child when he or she succeeds, or set
up opportunities for the child to engage in success
activities; it creates an experience of the presence of
positive outcomes in the child. Love withdrawal
occurs, for instance, when parents end a meal when
the child throws some food, take away a toy when the
child refuses to share it, or stop a story when the child
is not paying attention; this creates an experience of
the absence of positive outcomes in the child.

The pattern of parenting that is predicted to create
strong oughts in children is when parents combine
prudence (when managing success) and punitive/
critical (when disciplining failure). Prudence occurs,
for instance, when parents childproof the house, train
children to be alert to potential dangers, or teach
children to mind their manners; this creates an experience
of the absence of negative outcomes in the child.
Punitive/critical occurs, for instance, when parents
play roughly with children to get their attention,
yell at children when they don’t listen, or criticize
children when they make mistakes; this creates an
experience of the presence of negative outcomes.
Self-discrepancy theory makes another distinction:
between when individuals’ self-guides are from their
own independent viewpoint or standpoint (“What are
my own goals and standards for myself?”) and when
individuals’ self-guides are from the standpoint of a
significant person in their lives, such as their father or
mother (“What are my mother’s goals and standards
for me?”). The theory proposes that there are individual
differences in whether it is discrepancies from
independent self-guides or discrepancies from significant
other self-guides that most determine individuals’
emotional vulnerabilities.
Research
Research testing these predictions of self-discrepancy
theory has been conducted with both clinical and nonclinical
populations. A questionnaire has been developed
that measures individuals’ actual self-discrepancies
from their ideals and from their oughts (for both their
own independent self-guides and their significant
others’ guides for them). Research with clinically
depressed and clinically anxious patients has found
that discrepancies between patients’ actual selves and
their ideal self-guides predict their suffering from
depression more than such discrepancies predict their
suffering from anxiety disorders, whereas discrepancies
between patients’ actual selves and their ought
self-guides predict their suffering from anxiety disorders
more than such discrepancies predict their suffering
from depression. Because some individuals have
actual-self discrepancies from both their ideal and
their ought self-guides, one or the other kind of discrepancy
can be made temporarily more active by
exposing them either to words related to an ideal they
possess or to an ought they possess. When such priming
of either an ideal or an ought occurs in an experiment,
participants whose actual-ideal discrepancy is
Self-Discrepancy Theory———813
activated suddenly feel sad and disappointed and fall
into a depression-like state of low activity (e.g., talk
slower). In contrast, participants whose actual-ought
discrepancy is activated suddenly feel nervous and
worried and fall into an anxiety-like state of high
activity (e.g., talk quicker).
The results of many such studies support the
predictions of self-discrepancy theory regarding the
distinct emotional vulnerabilities from actual-self discrepancies
to ideals versus oughts. Moreover, consistent
with the underlying logic of the theory, several
studies have found that individuals with strong ideals
are especially sensitive to events reflecting the absence
or the presence of positive outcomes (gains and nongains),
whereas individuals with strong oughts are
especially sensitive to events reflecting the presence or
absence of negative outcomes (nonlosses and losses).
Evidence also supports the predicted parenting relations
between bolstering plus love withdrawal parenting
and developing strong ideals, and between
prudence plus critical/punitive parenting and developing
strong oughts. Finally, as predicted, individual
differences have been found in whether discrepancies
from independent self-guides or discrepancies from
significant other self-guides that most determine emotional
vulnerabilities. In particular, in North America at
least, discrepancies from independent self-guides are a
more important determinant of emotional vulnerabilities
for males than for females, whereas discrepancies
from significant other self-guides are more important
for females than for males.
Impact
Self-discrepancy theory has had both a practical and
a theoretical impact. Practically, a new method of clinical
treatment for depression and for anxiety, called selfsystem
therapy, is based on the conceptual and empirical
contributions of self-discrepancy theory. This new
therapy has been shown to help some patients more than
does standard drug treatment or cognitive-behavioral
therapy. Studies have also found that actual-self discrepancies
from ideals is a vulnerability factor for
bulimic eating disorders, whereas discrepancies from
oughts is a vulnerability factor for anorexic eating disorders.
Theoretically, the psychological mechanisms
identified by self-discrepancy theory were the foundation
for another psychological theory, regulatory focus
theory, which itself has increased understanding of the
motivational underpinnings of decision making and
performance. What self-discrepancy theory highlights

814———Self-Efficacy
is that it is not the specific goals of people that are
critical. Rather, the more general concerns, the viewpoints
on how the world works—a world of gain and
nongains or a world of nonlosses and losses—determine
the quality of people’s emotional and motivational lives.
E. Tory Higgins
See also Anxiety; Bulimia; Depression; Goals; Emotion;
Self-Awareness; Self-Concept
Further Readings
Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory relating self
and affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319–340.
Higgins, E. T., & Tykocinski, O. (1992). Self-discrepancies
and biographical memory: Personality and cognition at
the level of psychological situation. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 18, 527–535.
Moretti, M. M., & Higgins, E. T. (1999). Internal
representations of others in self-regulation: A new look at
a classic issue. Social Cognition, 17, 186–208.
Strauman, T. J. (1989). Self-discrepancies in clinical
depression and social phobia: Cognitive structures that
underlie emotional disorders? Journal of Abnormal
Psychology, 98, 14–22.
Strauman, T. J., & Higgins, E. T. (1987). Automatic
activation of self-discrepancies and emotional syndromes:
When cognitive structures influence affect. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1004–1014.
SELF-EFFICACY
Definition
Self-efficacy is defined as people’s beliefs in their
capabilities to produce desired effects by their own
actions. Self-efficacy theory maintains that selfefficacy
beliefs are the most important determinants
of the behaviors people choose to engage in and how
much they persevere in their efforts in the face of
obstacles and challenges. Self-efficacy theory also
maintains that these self-efficacy beliefs play a crucial
role in psychological adjustment, psychological problems,
and physical health, as well as in professionally
guided and self-guided behavioral change strategies.
Since the publication of Albert Bandura’s 1977
Psychological Review article titled “Self-Efficacy:
Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavior Change,” the
term self-efficacy has become ubiquitous in psychology
and related fields. Hundreds of articles on every
imaginable aspect of self-efficacy have appeared in
journals devoted to psychology, sociology, kinesiology,
public health, medicine, nursing, and other fields.
This article addresses three basic questions: What are
self-efficacy beliefs? Where do they come from? Why
are they important?
History and Background
Although the term self-efficacy is recent, interest in
beliefs about personal control has a long history in
philosophy and psychology. Benedict Spinoza, David
Hume, John Locke, William James, and (more
recently) Gilbert Ryle have all struggled with understanding
the role of volition and the will in human
behavior. In the 20th century, the theories of effectance
motivation, achievement motivation, social learning,
and learned helplessness are just a few of the many theories
that sought to explore relationships between
perceptions of personal competence and human behavior
and psychological well-being. Bandura’s 1977 article,
however, both formalized the notion of perceived
competence as self-efficacy and offered a theory of how
it develops and how it influences human behavior and
defined it in a way that made scientific research on it
possible. The essential idea was not new; what was new
and important was the empirical rigor with which this
idea could now be examined. Bandura also has placed
self-efficacy theory in the context of his broader social
cognitive theory.
What Are Self-Efficacy Beliefs?
One of the best ways to get a clear sense of how selfefficacy
is defined and measured is to distinguish it
from related concepts. Self-efficacy is not perceived
skill; it is what one believes one can do with one’s
skills under certain conditions. Self-efficacy beliefs are
not simply predictions about behavior. Self-efficacy is
concerned not with that one believes one will do but
with what one believes one can do. Self-efficacy is not
an intention to behave or an intention to attain a particular
goal. An intention is what one says one will probably
do, and research has shown that intentions are
influenced by several factors, including, but not limited
to, self-efficacy beliefs. A self-efficacy belief is

not the same as a goal but is a belief about one’s
ability to do what it takes to achieve one’s own goals.
Self-efficacy is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is what
one generally believes about oneself, and how one
generally feels about what one believes about oneself.
Self-efficacy beliefs are specific beliefs about exercising
specific abilities in specific domains. Self-efficacy
is not a motive, drive, or need for control. One can
have a strong need for control in a particular domain
but still hold weak beliefs about one’s self-efficacy for
that domain. Self-efficacy beliefs are not outcome
expectancies (or behavior-outcome expectancies). An
outcome expectancy is one’s belief that a specific
behavior may lead to a specific outcome in a specific
situation. A self-efficacy belief, simply put, is one’s
belief that one can perform the behavior that produces
the outcome. Self-efficacy is not a personality trait but,
rather, beliefs about one’s own ability to coordinate
skills and abilities to attain desired goals in particular
domains and circumstances. Self-efficacy beliefs can
generalize from one situation to another, but specific
self-efficacy beliefs are not caused by a personality
trait called general self-efficacy.
Where Do Self-Efficacy
Beliefs Come From?
Self-efficacy beliefs develop over time and through
experience. The development of such beliefs begins in
infancy and continues throughout life. The early
development of self-efficacy is influenced primarily
by two interacting factors: the development of the
capacity for symbolic thought, particularly the capacity
for understanding cause–effect relationships, and
the capacity for self-observation and self-reflection.
The development of a sense of personal agency begins
in infancy and moves from the perception of the
causal relationship between events to an understanding
that actions produce results, to the recognition that
one can produce actions that cause results. Children
must learn that one event can cause another event,
that they are separate from other things and people,
and that they can be the origin of actions that effect
their environments. As children’s understanding of language
increases, so does their capacity for symbolic
thought and, therefore, their capacity for self-awareness
and a sense of personal agency.
Second, the development of self-efficacy beliefs is
influenced by the responsiveness of environments,
especially social environments, to the infant or child’s
attempt at manipulation and control. Environments
that are responsive to the child’s actions facilitate the
development of self-efficacy beliefs, whereas nonresponsive
environments retard this development.
Parents can facilitate or hinder the development of this
sense of agency by their responses to the infant or
child’s actions and by encouraging and enabling the
child to explore and master his or her environment.
Self-efficacy beliefs and a sense of agency continue
to develop throughout the life span as people continually
integrate information from five primary sources,
presented here in roughly their descending order of
importance in shaping self-efficacy beliefs. People’s
own performance experiences—their own attempts to
control their environments—are the most powerful
source of self-efficacy information. Successful attempts
at control that one attributes to one’s own efforts will
strengthen self-efficacy for that behavior or domain.
Perceptions of failure at control attempts usually diminish
self-efficacy. Self-efficacy beliefs are influenced
also by observations of the behavior of others and the
consequences of those behaviors—referred to as vicarious
experiences. People use this information to form
expectancies about their own behavior and its consequences.
People also can influence self-efficacy beliefs
by imagining themselves or others behaving effectively
or ineffectively in hypothetical situations. Self-efficacy
beliefs can be influenced by verbal persuasion—what
others say to a person about what they believe the person
can or cannot do. The potency of verbal persuasion
as a source of self-efficacy expectancies will be influenced
by such factors as the expertness, trustworthiness,
and attractiveness of the source. Physiological and
emotional states influence self-efficacy when a person
learns to associate poor performance or perceived
failure with aversive physiological arousal and success
with pleasant feeling states. In activities involving
strength and stamina, such as exercise and athletic
performances, perceived self-efficacy is influenced by
such experiences as fatigue and pain.
Why Are Self-Efficacy
Beliefs Important?
Self-Efficacy———815
Self-efficacy beliefs influence everyday behavior in
multiple and powerful ways. Most philosophers and
psychological theorists agree that a sense of control
over one’s behavior, one’s environment, and one’s own

816———Self-Efficacy
thoughts and feelings is essential for happiness and
a sense of well-being. Feelings of loss of control are
common among people who seek the help of psychotherapists
and counselors. Self-efficacy beliefs
play a major role in several common psychological
problems, as well as in successful interventions for
these problems. Low self-efficacy expectancies are an
important feature of depression. Depressed people
usually believe they are less capable than are other
people of behaving effectively in many important areas
of life. Dysfunctional anxiety and avoidant behavior
are often the direct result of low self-efficacy expectancies
for managing threatening situations. Self-efficacy
beliefs play a powerful role in attempts to overcome
substance abuse problems and eating disorders. For
each of these problems, enhancing self-efficacy for
overcoming the problem and for implementing selfcontrol
strategies in specific challenging situations is
essential to the success of therapeutic interventions.
Self-efficacy beliefs influence physical health in
two ways. First, they influence the adoption of healthy
behaviors, the cessation of unhealthy behaviors, and the
maintenance of behavioral changes in the face of challenge
and difficulty. All the major psychological theories
of health behavior, such as protection motivation
theory, the health belief model, and the theory of reasoned
action/planned behavior include self-efficacy as
a key component. In addition, enhancing self-efficacy
beliefs is crucial to successful change and maintenance
of virtually every behavior crucial to health, including
exercise, diet, stress management, safe sex, smoking
cessation, overcoming alcohol abuse, compliance with
treatment and prevention regimens, and disease detection
behaviors such as breast self-examinations.
Second, self-efficacy beliefs influence a number of
biological processes that, in turn, influence health and
disease. Self-efficacy beliefs affect the body’s physiological
responses to stress, including the immune
system. Lack of perceived control over environmental
demands can increase susceptibility to infections and
hasten the progression of disease. Self-efficacy beliefs
also influence the activation of catecholamines, a family
of neurotransmitters important to the management of
stress and perceived threat, along with the endogenous
painkillers referred to as endorphins.
Self-efficacy beliefs are also crucial to successful
self-regulation. Self-regulation depends on three interacting
components: goals or standards of performance,
self-evaluative reactions to performance, and selfefficacy
beliefs. Goals are essential to self-regulation
because people attempt to regulate their actions,
thoughts, and emotions to achieve desired outcomes.
Self-evaluative reactions are important in self-regulation
because people’s beliefs about the progress they are
making (or not making) toward their goals are major
determinants of their emotional reactions during goaldirected
activity. These emotional reactions, in turn,
can enhance or disrupt self-regulation. Self-efficacy
beliefs influence self-regulation in several ways. First,
self-efficacy influences the goals people set. The
higher people’s self-efficacy in a specific achievement
domain, the loftier will be the goals that they set for
themselves in that domain. Second, self-efficacy
beliefs influence people’s choice of goal-directed
activities, expenditure of effort, persistence in the face
of challenge and obstacles, and reactions to perceived
discrepancies between goals and current performance.
Strong self-efficacy beliefs make people more resistant
to the disruptions in self-regulation that can result
from difficulties and setbacks. As a result, strong
self-efficacy beliefs lead people to persevere under
difficult and challenging circumstances. Perseverance
usually produces desired results, and this success then
strengthens self-efficacy beliefs. Third, self-efficacy
for solving problems and making decisions influences
the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving
and decision making. When faced with complex decisions,
people who have confidence in their abilities to
solve problems use their cognitive resources more
effectively than do those people who doubt their cognitive
skills. Such self-efficacy usually leads to better
solutions and greater achievement.
Self-efficacy beliefs are crucial to the success of
psychotherapy and other interventions for psychological
problems. Different interventions, or different components
of an intervention, may be equally effective
because they equally enhance self-efficacy beliefs for
crucial behavioral and cognitive skills. Self-efficacy
theory emphasizes the importance of arranging experiences
designed to increase the person’s sense of selfefficacy
for specific behaviors in specific problematic
and challenging situations. Self-efficacy theory suggests
that formal interventions should not simply
resolve specific problems, but should provide people
with the skills and sense of self-efficacy for solving
problems themselves.
The notion of self-efficacy can also be extended
from the individual to the group through the concept
of collective efficacy—the extent to which members of
a group or organization believe that they can work
together effectively to accomplish shared goals. Collective
efficacy has been found to be important in several

domains. The more efficacious that spouses feel about
their shared ability to accomplish important shared
goals, the more satisfied they are with their marriages.
The collective efficacy of an athletic team can be raised
or lowered by false feedback about ability and can subsequently
influence its success in competitions. The
individual and collective efficacy of teachers for effective
instruction seems to affect the academic achievement
of school children. The effectiveness of work
teams and group brainstorming also seems to be related
to a collective sense of efficacy. Researchers also are
beginning to understand the origins of collective efficacy
for social and political change.
James E. Maddux
See also Achievement Motivation; Control; Depression;
Learned Helplessness; Reasoned Action Theory; Self-
Regulation; Social Learning; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory
of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 191–215.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control.
New York: Freeman.
Maddux, J. E. (Ed.). (1995). Self-efficacy, adaptation, and
adjustment: Theory, research and application
(pp. 143–169). New York: Plenum.
Maddux, J. E. (1999). Expectancies and the social-cognitive
perspective: Basic principles, processes, and variables.
In I. Kirsch (Ed.), How expectancies shape behavior
(pp. 17–40). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
SELF-ENHANCEMENT
Definition
People engage in self-enhancement whenever they
seek, interpret, or distort evidence about themselves
in a way designed to maintain, create, or amplify a
positive self-image. Self-enhancement is cognitive or
interpersonal activity aimed at boosting beliefs that
one is a lovable and capable human being. A related
concept is motivated reasoning, which is thought that
is expressly aimed at reaching congenial conclusions
about one’s self and place in the world.
Self-enhancement needs to be distinguished from
other similar activities that people may engage in.
Self-improvement refers to the motive to become
a better individual in reality; self-enhancement instead
refers to the motive to create the perception that one
is a competent and capable individual, regardless of
reality. Self-assessment refers to the motive to obtain
an accurate view of the self, whether that view be positive
or negative; people engage in self-enhancement
when they shade their treatment of the evidence toward
creating positive perceptions of self. Self-verification
refers to activity people engage in to confirm previously
held notions about themselves, whether those
perceptions be desirable or undesirable; people engaging
in self-enhancement only want to confirm the
desirable and deny the undesirable in themselves.
Self-enhancement is also related to a self-protection
motive. People engage in self-protection when
they strive to deny undesirable aspects of themselves.
Self-enhancement refers to claiming as much good as
one can about one’s strengths and achievements. Selfenhancement
is also related to, but different from, a
self-presentation motive, which is creating a positive
self-image to convince other people that one is competent
and capable, regardless of what one believes
about one’s self.
History and Evidence
The idea that people manage information about
themselves to convince themselves that they are
capable beings has a long history, at least in Western
thought. Indeed, in ancient Greece, the Epicureans
raised self-enhancement to a moral principle, asserting
that people should entertain only those thoughts
about themselves that gave them pleasure.
Scholars in Western thought and in psychology
have long assumed that people gather and distort
evidence about themselves to maintain positive selfimages,
and modern psychology has spent a good deal
of effort cataloging many of the tactics that people use
in the service of self-enhancement. A few of the major
ones, all somewhat interrelated, are discussed here.
Biased Hypothesis Testing
Self-Enhancement———817
People frame the questions they ask themselves to
bolster a perception of competence and success. For
example, if students contemplate whether they will
obtain a good job after they graduate, they usually
frame the question as, “Will I get a good job?”
Framing the question in this way tends to make people
think about positive evidence of success (e.g., “Gee,

818———Self-Enhancement
I’ve gotten good grades so far”). People do not adopt
a frame that would pull for negative evidence, such as
using a negative frame like “Will I fail to get a good
job?” Asking the question this way tends to pull for
negative and unpleasant evidence (e.g., “Gee, a lot of
other people have good grades, too”).
Breadth of Categorization
People adopt broad categorizations to describe
their successes and narrow ones to characterize
their failures. Suppose two people take a test of South
American geography. The first does well and is likely
to categorize the behavior broadly as indicating
intelligence and worldliness. The second person does
poorly and is likely to conclude narrowly that this performance
only indicates that he or she does not know
much about that particular continent.
Self-Serving Attributions
People reach self-serving conclusions about the
causes of their successes and failures. People who
succeed make internal attributions and give credit to
themselves, thus enhancing their self-images as capable
human beings. People who fail make external
attributions and blame the failure on luck, difficulty of
the task, or some outside agent, thus avoiding the conclusion
that their failures indicate personal weakness.
Differential Scrutinization of
Good and Bad News
People tend to accept good news at face value.
They hold bad news to a higher standard and scrutinize
it more closely. For example, if people take a
medical test that shows that they are healthy, they
accept the verdict and move on. However, if the test
indicates they have a health problem, they are likely to
search more carefully for reasons to accept or reject
the test’s verdict—or even ask to retake the test.
Differential Discounting of
Good and Bad News
Whereas people take self-enhancing news at face
value, and thus rarely question it, they try to find reasons
to discount, dismiss, or belittle bad news. That is,
the scrutiny that people give to bad news is often not
even-handed but instead an attempt to find ways to
discredit the evidence. If a student fails a course exam,
he or she might expressly look for reasons to suggest
that his or her failure was an aberration. The student
might conclude that he or she was ill the night before
the test, or that the questions on the test were picky, or
the professor unfair. The key for this student is that he
or she is discounting the relevance of the test performance
for predicting future outcomes.
Re-Analyzation of Importance
If people fail in their attempts to discount or dismiss
bad news, they may then downplay the importance
of the outcome. For example, if a pre-medical
student unambiguously fails a math test, he or she
might decide that knowing math is not all that important
for being a good doctor. On the other hand,
students excelling at a task may decide that it is an
important one. A student who aces the same math test
may decide that mathematical ability is an essential
attribute for being a successful doctor.
Definition of Success
People may also define success in ways to ensure a
positive image of self. People often want to claim positive
traits, such as intelligent, for themselves. One
easy route to do so is to define those traits in ways that
ensure a positive self-concept. A person who is good
at math, knows a foreign language, and can play the
violin can guarantee a positive self-image by merely
concluding that those skills are central to intelligence.
Students who lack those skills can de-emphasize those
skills in their definition of intelligence and instead
emphasize those idiosyncratic skills that they possess.
Implications
A lifetime of self-enhancement activity can leave one
with significantly distorted and unrealistic views of
self. And, indeed, a good deal of recent research suggests
that people tend to hold positive views of themselves
that simply cannot be true. These unrealistic
self-views are exhibited in a number of ways. Here are
some of the ones that have received the most attention
in recent research.
Above-Average Effects
People on average think they are anything but average.
The typical person, for example, thinks he or she

is more disciplined, socially skilled, idealistic, and
moral than the average person, but this is impossible.
It is impossible for the average person to be above
average, given the logic of mathematics. People also
think they are more likely to achieve positive outcomes
(have a happy marriage, get a high-paying job)
and less likely to face aversive ones (get fired, contract
cancer) than are their peers, although, again, it is
mathematically impossible for the average person to
be more likely to achieve good outcomes and avoid
bad ones than the mathematical average.
Overpredictions of
Desirable Actions and Outcomes
When forecasting the future, people overpredict
the chance that they will take desirable actions and
achieve favored outcomes. Business school students
overpredict the likelihood that they will receive a
high-paying offer. College students overpredict, for
example, how likely they are to give to charity, vote,
and maintain their romantic relationships. These types
of overpredictions can have economic consequences:
People often predict they will work out frequently
when they buy gym memberships—and then fail to go
to the gym on more than a sporadic basis. Indeed,
often, they would have been better off financially if
they had just paid for the few individual visits they
actually did manage to make rather than buying the
more expensive membership.
One caveat, however, must be made about the
motive to self-enhance and the unrealistic self-images
that the motive creates. Researchers have found ample
evidence that people consistently engage in selfenhancement
in North America and Western Europe,
but there is increasing (albeit controversial) evidence
that people in some other parts of the world do not
engage in such activity. Namely, people in Far East
Asia appear not to extol the positive in themselves
and to deny the negative. Indeed, they show signs of
attuning to failures and weaknesses so that they may
improve upon them. They also show less evidence of
the above-average effect described earlier. As such,
the motive to self-enhance may be pervasive, but only
within certain cultures.
David Dunning
See also Motivated Reasoning; Self-Affirmation Theory;
Self-Evaluation Maintenance; Self-Presentation;
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Newman, L. S. (1994). Self-regulation
of cognitive inference and decision processes. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 3–19.
Dunning, D. (2005). Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on
the path to knowing thyself. New York: Psychology Press.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning.
Psychological Bulletin, 108, 480–498.
SELF-ESTEEM
Definition
Self-Esteem———819
Self-esteem is such a commonly used term you probably
already know what it is: thinking highly of yourself.
You have probably heard self-esteem mentioned
on talk shows, in magazine articles, and even in
popular songs (the song “The Greatest Love of All” is
about loving yourself, and there’s a song by the band
The Offspring called “Self-Esteem.”) But social psychology
research has discovered a lot of things about
self-esteem that have not yet made it to popular culture,
and this research might surprise you.
Academic psychologists recognize two types of
self-esteem. The first is general self-esteem, often
measured using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
(which includes items such as “I take a positive attitude
toward myself”). The second type of self-esteem
is specific, often measuring self-esteem in a particular
domain such as school, work, athletics, or appearance.
These subdomains are then combined to form a complete
self-esteem score (for example, in scales such as
the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale or the Coopersmith
Self-Esteem Inventory). Although nonpsychologists
sometimes use the term self-esteem to refer to body
and appearance concerns, a psychologist is more specific
and instead calls these body image or appearance
self-esteem.
People high in self-esteem seem to know more
about themselves and their preferences. They can furnish
longer lists of their likes and dislikes, and they
are more confident about their self-ratings. They are
also more self-serving; they are more likely to take
credit for their successes and blame outside sources
for their failure. Self-esteem is also correlated with
emotional stability: People with low self-esteem experience
negative moods more often and report more
fluctuation in their moods.

820———Self-Esteem
Differences and Predictors
Which groups of people are high in self-esteem, and
which are low? You might have heard that teenage girls
have very low self-esteem, but this is not true. Men and
boys do score higher on self-esteem than women and
girls, but the difference is small; gender explains only
about 1% of the differences in self-esteem (this number
tells you how much of the variation in self-esteem
is caused by a specific variable—here, gender—rather
than by other factors). The gap does widen a bit during
adolescence, with gender explaining about 2.6% of the
differences and boys scoring higher. But this doesn’t
happen because girls’ self-esteem drops at adolescence;
girls’ self-esteem rises between middle school
and high school, but just not as much as boys’ does.
Between high school and college, women’s selfesteem
increases sharply, and the gender difference
shrinks back to 1% of the variance.
Are rich and well-educated people higher in selfesteem?
Yes, but not by much—socioeconomic status
explains less than 1% of the variance in self-esteem.
The correlation between socioeconomic status and
self-esteem peaks during middle age, but even then, it
accounts for only 1.5% of the differences. So social
status and money are only very weak predictors of
self-esteem.
What about racial and ethnic differences—are
racial minorities, many of whom experience prejudice,
more likely to be low in self-esteem? The
answers here are complex: Overall, racial differences
in self-esteem seem to be caused more by cultural
differences than by racial discrimination. Black
Americans, who probably experience the most prejudice
and discrimination in the United States, actually
score higher in self-esteem than are White
Americans (though this is yet another of those 1% of
the variance small findings). This might occur
because they protect their self-esteem by attributing
criticism to prejudice (a theory called stigma as selfprotection).
However, Hispanic Americans score
lower than Whites do in self-esteem (though this is a
very small difference accounting for only about .2%
of the variance), and they experience prejudice as
well. So prejudice alone cannot explain why Blacks
score higher on self-esteem measures. Cultural differences
provide a more consistent explanation.
Black American culture champions self-respect,
whereas Asian cultures emphasize humility and selfcriticism.
Sure enough, Asian Americans score lower
on self-esteem than do Whites, a somewhat larger
difference that explains 2.2% of the variance. Asians
living in Asia score even lower compared with White
Americans, a difference that explains about 4.5% of
the variance. These differences are all consistent
with the idea that cultural ideas about the self influence
levels of self-esteem.
Cultural differences can happen over time and generations
as well. The culture of 1950s America was
very different from the culture of 1990s America, and
one of the main differences is the increased emphasis
on the self during recent decades. And indeed, 1990s
college students scored higher on self-esteem measures
than did 1960s college students, a difference that
explains 9% of the variance in self-esteem scores.
Overall, culture (of time and regions) is a stronger
influence on self-esteem than is being a certain race,
gender, or income level.
Outcomes
So what does self-esteem cause? In psychological
language, what are the outcomes of self-esteem? You
might have heard that high self-esteem leads to better
academic achievement and less bad behavior like
aggression and teen pregnancy. However, a large body
of research suggests that this is not the case. Selfesteem
does explain about 5% of the variance in school
achievement, a small but statistically significant effect.
However, as in any correlational study, there are three
possibilities: High self-esteem could cause school
achievement, school achievement could cause high selfesteem,
or a third variable (such as income level) could
cause both. To use a common analogy, the horse could be
pulling the cart, or things could be reversed and the cart
has been put before the horse. A third variable resembles
the horse and the cart being towed on a flatbed truck:
Neither the cart nor the horse is causing the motion in the
other even though they are moving together.
Most studies have found that achievement leads
to self-esteem, not vice versa. Another set of studies
finds that controlling for third variables (such as
family income) eliminates the correlation. This occurs
because rich kids are both higher in self-esteem and
do better in school. Self-esteem is also not consistently
correlated with alcohol and drug abuse or teen
pregnancy. Some studies have found that high selfesteem
actually predicts earlier intercourse among
teens. Overall, self-esteem does not seem to cause
good outcomes for kids; the two are unrelated.

Despite this research, numerous school programs
aim to increase children’s self-esteem. A 2006 Google
search showed that more than 300,000 elementary
schools mention self-esteem in their mission statements.
Most of these say that they seek to encourage or
develop children’s self-esteem. Some of these programs
promote self-esteem without rooting it in
achievement, in the belief that children should feel
good about themselves no matter what they do.
Although the results of these programs are continuing
to be debated, it seems likely that they will not have
much impact if self-esteem does not cause achievement
and good behavior (which appears to be the case).
There has recently been some debate about whether
low self-esteem leads to antisocial behavior.
Experimental lab studies consistently find no correlation
between self-esteem and aggression. Two recent
correlational studies, however, found that low selfesteem
was correlated with delinquent behavior in a
sample of adolescents, even after controlling for academic
achievement, income, and parental support. Other
variables, such as associating with delinquent friends,
might explain the effect, which accounts for about 4%
of the variance in delinquent behavior. Overall, the evidence
suggests that self-esteem is not correlated with
aggression, but that low self-esteem is linked to a
slightly higher incidence of delinquent behavior.
Some evidence also indicates that low self-esteem
is linked to eating disorders such as anorexia and
bulimia. However, low self-esteem only predicts eating
disorders when women are perfectionistic and feel
overweight. Low self-esteem might also follow, rather
than precede, eating disorders: People might start to
feel badly about themselves after they develop an
eating disorder.
One thing self-esteem does strongly predict is
happiness. People who are high in self-esteem report
being happy, and they are also less likely to be
depressed. However, these studies have not proven
causation and ruled out other third variable explanations,
so further research needs to be done: It is not yet
known if self-esteem causes happiness, happiness
causes self-esteem, or if some other variable causes
both. Self-esteem also leads to greater persistence on
tasks, though the causation is not known here, either,
and self-control is a better predictor of persistence.
Self-esteem is also correlated with greater relationship
confidence. High self-esteem people who experience
a threat to their self-worth are subsequently more certain
of their partners’ regard for them; in contrast, low
self-esteem people began to doubt their partners’ feelings,
which can cause problems in the relationship.
The stability of self-esteem also plays a role.
People whose self-esteem fluctuates wildly, or whose
self-esteem heavily depends on a particular outcome,
are more likely to be depressed and anxious. Stable
self-esteem, and self-esteem that does not depend on
certain things happening, is correlated with better
mental health.
Origins
Where does self-esteem come from, and how does it
develop in a child? One theory proposes that self-esteem
is a sociometer, or a gauge of how accepted people feel
by other people. Thus, self-esteem arises from feeling
loved by others and belonging to groups. This theory
also helps explain the main difference between selfesteem
and narcissism. Narcissism is an inflated sense
of self, but it goes beyond simply having very high selfesteem.
Narcissists believe that they are better than others
in achievement realms such as intellectual ability
and sports. However, they acknowledge that they are not
particularly friendly or moral. Perhaps as a result, narcissism
is correlated with poor relationship outcomes:
Narcissists lack empathy, are more likely to derogate
their partners, and are more likely to cheat. They are also
more aggressive in response to threat.
Implications
Self-Esteem———821
People are very motivated to preserve their self-esteem
and good feelings about themselves, and this motive
explains a surprising amount of human behavior. Many
people tend to credit themselves when things go well,
and blame others or luck when things go badly. This is
called self-serving bias, and you can easily see how it
preserves good self-feelings. Self-esteem boosting also
explains ingroup bias, in which people believe that
their own group is better than other groups. In other
words, prejudice against people unlike ourselves may
be rooted in our desire to feel good about ourselves.
One set of researchers believes that the ultimate selfpreservation—pushing
away thoughts about death—
explains patriotism and ingroup bias. They find that
when people are reminded of death, they strongly
defend their own worldviews. Another study found
that when high self-esteem people are threatened, they
respond by acting more boastful and rude.
Overall, self-esteem does not explain as many
things as most people believe it does. Self-esteem is

822———Self-Esteem Stability
good for relationships, but only if it does not cross
over into narcissism. People with high self-esteem are
happier, but their self-esteem does not cause good
things to happen in their lives. Instead, the pursuit of
self-esteem can sometimes lead people to behave in
ways that they might later regret.
Jean M. Twenge
See also Contingencies of Self-Worth; Happiness;
Narcissism; Self-Esteem Stability; Sociometric Status;
Threatened Egotism Theory of Aggression
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. E., &
Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better
performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or
healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public
Interest, 4, 1–44.
Twenge, J. M., & Campbell, W. K. (2001). Age and birth
cohort differences in self-esteem: A cross-temporal
meta-analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
5, 321–344.
SELF-ESTEEM STABILITY
Definition
Some people possess immediate feelings of self-worth
that fluctuate considerably from day to day or even
within a given day. These people are said to have
unstable self-esteem. Other people possess immediate
feelings of self-worth that rarely, if ever, change. These
people are said to have stable self-esteem. Consider
Ashley who, when asked to consider the question
“How worthy a person do you feel at this moment?”
each morning and evening for 5 days, gives answers
that vary considerably from “I feel very worthy” to
“I feel useless.” Ashley possesses unstable self-esteem.
In contrast, Heather’s responses to that same question
remain essentially the same over the same period (“I
feel very worthy”), as do Mark’s responses (“I feel
pretty useless”). Both Heather and Mark possess stable
self-esteem. Importantly, considerable research indicates
that the degree to which one’s self-esteem is
stable or unstable has important implications for one’s
psychological health and well-being.
Unstable Self-Esteem
Unstable self-esteem reflects fragile and vulnerable
feelings of self-worth that are affected by positive and
negative experiences that either are internally generated
(i.e., a person’s own negative self-evaluations) or
externally provided (e.g., getting an A+ on an exam).
Moreover, people with unstable self-esteem are said
to be highly ego-involved in their everyday activities,
which means that they experience their self-esteem as
continually being on the line as they go about their
lives. For example, whereas someone with unstable
self-esteem feels stupid and worthless (reactions that
imply negative feelings of self-worth) after receiving
a poor grade, someone with stable self-esteem feels
badly (e.g., feels disappointed or frustrated) about his
or her performance without implicating his or her
overall feelings of self-worth. Researchers have examined
a number of implications of the heightened
self-esteem investment of individuals with unstable
self-esteem.
First, daily negative events have a greater adverse
impact on individuals with unstable as opposed to
stable self-esteem. Researchers found that daily hassles
(those irritating events that people experience
at times, such as having too much work to do or
not enough money to buy what they want), or doing
poorly on an important exam, triggers greater
increases in depressive symptoms among people with
unstable as opposed to stable self-esteem.
Second, people with unstable self-esteem are
especially concerned about, and responsive to, potential
self-esteem threats. Among sixth-grade children,
those with unstable self-esteem report that they are
more likely to get angry because of the self-esteem
threat (e.g., feeling weak) rather than the goal-thwarting
aspect (e.g., having to be thirsty longer) of negative
interpersonal events (e.g., someone butting ahead
of you in line at the water fountain).
Third, everyday positive and negative events have
a greater immediate impact on the self-feelings of
people with unstable as opposed to stable self-esteem.
When asked to rate the extent to which their most positive
and negative daily events made them feel better
or worse about themselves over a 2-week period,
college students with unstable as opposed to stable
self-esteem reported that positive events made them
feel better about themselves and negative events made
them feel worse about themselves to a greater extent.
Fourth, people with unstable self-esteem have a
weaker sense of self (i.e., are less self-determining,

have relatively confused self-concepts) than do
people with stable self-esteem. Possessing a strong
sense of self is a marker of positive mental health.
Research has shown that individuals who feel
autonomous and self-determining (i.e., make choices
about how to behave based on their own values and
interests) have more positive mental health than do
individuals who feel controlled and pressured about
how to behave by outside people and events. The
same is true for individuals who have a clear rather
than confused sense of their identity. Researchers
have shown that, compared with individuals with stable
self-esteem, individuals with unstable self-esteem
report feeling less autonomous and self-determining
and have less clear self-concepts than do individuals
with stable self-esteem.
Childhood Factors
Of considerable importance is the role that family
environments play in the development of children’s
self-esteem. Researchers asked 12- and 13-year-old
children to report individually on how their mothers
and fathers communicated with them. Importantly,
children’s perceptions of many aspects of parent–child
communication patterns (especially with respect to
fathers) related to the extent to which they possessed
unstable self-esteem. For example, children who
perceived their fathers to be highly critical, to engage
in insulting name calling, and to use guilt arousal
and love withdrawal as control techniques, had
more unstable (as well as lower) self-esteem than did
children who did not perceive their fathers in this
manner. Moreover, compared with children with
stable self-esteem, children with unstable self-esteem
indicated that their fathers less frequently talked about
the good things that they (the children) had done and
were less likely to use value-affirming methods (e.g.,
hug or spend time with them) when they did show
their approval. Still other findings indicated that, compared
with fathers of children with low self-esteem,
fathers of children with stable high self-esteem, but
not unstable high self-esteem, were perceived as using
better problem-solving methods to solve disagreements
with their children. Perceptions of mothers’
communication styles more consistently related to
children’s self-esteem level than to their self-esteem
stability. The findings for self-esteem stability that did
emerge, however, were largely consistent with those
that emerged for fathers.
Levels of Self-Esteem
Level of self-esteem refers to people’s general or typical
feelings of self-worth, whereas stability of selfesteem
refers to whether people’s immediate feelings
of self-worth exhibit considerable short-term fluctuations.
These two self-esteem components (level, stability)
are relatively independent of each other. Thus,
people can have high self-esteem that is stable or
unstable, or low self-esteem that is stable or unstable.
Considerable research indicates that whereas unstable
high self-esteem is fragile, stable high self-esteem is
secure. For example, people with unstable high selfesteem
are more defensive and self-promoting than
are their stable high self-esteem counterparts, yet they
are lower in psychological health and well-being.
Feelings of self-worth are more brittle among unstable
as compared with stable high self-esteem individuals.
Compared with individuals with stable high selfesteem,
individuals with unstable high self-esteem are
more (a) prone to anger and hostility, (b) likely to
show increased depression in the face of daily hassles,
(c) verbally defensive when interviewed about potentially
threatening events in their past, (d) likely to
report increased tendencies to get even in response to
hypothetical romantic partner transgressions, and
(e) likely to report lower quality romantic relationships.
These and other findings indicate that stable high
self-esteem is a healthy form of self-esteem whereas
unstable high self-esteem is an unhealthy form of
self- esteem. Thus, a more complete understanding of
self-esteem requires taking into consideration both
level and stability of self-esteem.
See also Contingencies of Self-Worth; Narcissism;
Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Self-Esteem Stability———823
Michael H. Kernis
Kernis, M. H. (2003). Toward a conceptualization of optimal
self-esteem. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 1–26.
Kernis, M. H. (2005). Measuring self-esteem in context: The
importance of stability of self-esteem in psychological
functioning. Journal of Personality, 73, 1569–1605.
Kernis, M. H., & Goldman, B. M. (2006). Assessing stability
of self-esteem and contingent self-esteem. In M. H.
Kernis (Ed.), Self-esteem issues and answers: A
sourcebook of current perspectives (pp. 77–85).
New York: Psychology Press.

824———Self-Evaluation Maintenance
Kernis, M. H., Grannemann, B. D., & Barclay, L. C. (1989).
Stability and level of self-esteem as predictors of anger
arousal and hostility. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 56, 1013–1022.
SELF-EVALUATION MAINTENANCE
Sometimes the success of others is a source of good
feelings. People take pride in their friends’ or their
spouse’s accomplishments, and this brings people
closer to their friends or spouse. Sometimes the
accomplishments of friends are threatening and may
even disrupt the relationships. These kinds of complex
interpersonal dynamics are the focus of the selfevaluation
maintenance (SEM) model.
The SEM model is based on two broad assumptions:
(1) People want to maintain a positive evaluation
of the self. (2) The way people evaluate
themselves is at least partially determined by the
accomplishments of the people around them, particularly
the people to whom they are close. These
assumptions appear to be useful in understanding a
variety of social and personal behaviors. The SEM
model specifies two antagonistic processes: A comparison
process in which a close other’s achievements
are threatening and could lead to changes in
self-identity and negative consequences for the interpersonal
relationship, and a reflection process in
which a close other’s good performance has positive
personal and relational consequences.
Reflection and Comparison Processes
Everyone has seen the reflection process in action.
Imagine a conversation at a cocktail party. Inevitably
someone casually lets it be known that he or she has
some connection with someone who is notably rich,
smart, creative, well connected, and so on. That person
has not been instrumental in the accomplishments
of those others, so it appears as if he or she points out
these associations simply to bask in reflected glory.
Such associations appear to raise the individual’s
self-evaluation and are associated with feelings such
as pride in the other.
The reflection process has two distinct components:
closeness and performance. The reflection
process is not enabled by any successful other person.
To bask in reflected glory, one must have some
connection to the other. Thus, closeness counts.
Closeness is defined in very broad terms. Anything
that psychologically connects one individual to
another increases closeness. Closeness may be based
on similarity, family relationships, geographic proximity,
and so on.
The second component of the reflection process is
the other’s performance. If the other’s performance is
not particularly good, then regardless of how psychologically
close he or she is, self will not gain in
reflected glory. For example, it is difficult to imagine
anyone basking in the reflected glory of a neighbor
who tried out for the local orchestra but was not
selected or a cousin who was the 25th out of 100 to be
eliminated in a spelling bee.
According to the SEM model, the closeness and
performance components combine multiplicatively.
If there is no association between self and another,
then even if that other’s performance is superb, there
is little potential for gains to the self via reflection.
When closeness goes to zero, the level of performance
ceases to matter—anything multiplied by zero is zero.
In short, the reflection process will produce gains in
self-evaluation to the extent that another is psychologically
close and that his or her performance is good.
A close other’s good performance can raise selfevaluation
through the reflection process, but it can
also lower self-evaluation through the comparison
process. Self’s own performance pales in comparison
with that of someone who performs better, resulting in
a lower self-evaluation and emotions such as envy and
jealousy, and decreases in pride. Closeness and performance
also play a leading role in the comparison
process. If a person has nothing in common with
another person, if a person is different with respect to
age, gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, he or she is
unlikely to draw comparisons with the other person.
However, if the other is psychologically close, comparison
processes are more likely to be engaged. A
performance that is better than one’s own can be a blow
to self-evaluation, whereas a mediocre performance is
not threatening. Again, closeness and performance
combine multiplicatively. If there is no connection to
the other person, that is, closeness, then even if the
other’s performance is superb, there is little threat from
comparison. If the others’ performance is mediocre, not
as good as one’s own, then regardless of how close the
other is, there is little threat from comparison.

Weighting by Relevance
The reflection and comparison processes have
identical components but opposite effects on selfevaluation.
However, these processes are generally
not equally important. Sometimes self-evaluation will
be more affected by the reflection process; other times
self-evaluation will be more affected by the comparison
process. Which process will be more or less
important is determined by the relevance of the other’s
performance to one’s self-definition.
People recognize and value good performance on
any number of dimensions: marathon running, violin
playing, and so on. One’s own aspirations, however,
exist only with respect to a small subset of these. A
person wants to be a good cabinetmaker, or a good
tennis player, or a physician. But almost no one
aspires to all these things. Another’s performance,
then, is relevant to the extent that it is on one of those
few dimensions that are self-defining for a person. (A
performance dimension is any dimension that has a
“good” pole and along which it is possible to rank
order people. For example, even though beauty does
not require the kind of skill we usually think of when
we think of performance, it is better to be beautiful
than ugly and it is possible to rank order people
with respect to their looks.) Thus, if one aspires to be
a good surfer, but does not play the piano, then
another’s surfing performance is high in relevance but
his or her piano performance is not.
The relevance of another’s performance increases the
importance of the comparison process relative to the
reflection process. When relevance is high, a good
performance by another is threatening to self-evaluation
(via comparison) and the closeness of that other
increases the threat. When relevance is low, another’s
good performance will bolster one’s self-evaluation (via
reflection), especially when that other is close.
Understanding and Predicting Behavior
The reflection and comparison processes are crucial to
understanding and predicting behavior. However, only
performance, closeness, and relevance actually manifest
themselves in behavior, and the theory aspires to
predict and understand performance, closeness, and
relevance. The predictions derived from the SEM
model regarding performance, closeness, and relevance
have been confirmed in several studies.
Self-Evaluation Maintenance———825
Predicting Performance
When will a person help another do well? Who is
most likely to receive such help? According to the
SEM model, when relevance is high, the comparison
process is important and another’s good performance
is threatening to self-evaluation, particularly the
performance of a close other. Thus, to avoid the threat
of being outperformed, when relevance is high,
the model predicts interference rather than helping,
particularly when the other person is close. When
relevance is low, the reflection process is important.
The good performance of another provides a potential
gain to self-evaluation. To realize this gain, the model
predicts helping, particularly when the other person is
close. Contrary to common sense, these predictions
suggest that people are sometimes kinder to strangers
than to friends.
Predicting Closeness
When will a person try to spend more time with
another? When less? When will a person initiate a
relationship? When will a person terminate it? The
predictions for closeness follow the SEM logic: When
relevance is high, comparison is important and self
will suffer by the better performance of another. Thus,
when relevance is high, the better another’s performance
is, the more the self should distance himself or
herself from the other. When relevance is low, however,
the better another’s performance is, the greater is
the potential boost to self-evaluation via reflection.
Closeness should intensify those positive selffeelings,
so when relevance is low, the better the
other’s performance, the more the self should increase
closeness. The SEM model suggests that the aphorism,
“Everyone loves a winner,” is only half true, that
is, only when the performance dimension is low in
personal relevance.
Predicting Relevance
Relevance refers to the importance of a performance
domain to one’s own self-definition. Related
to relevance are questions such as, What should I
major in? How will I spend my free time? What kind
of work should I choose? Although common sense
might suggest that people want to be like those closest
to them, the SEM model reminds us that performance

826———Self-Expansion Theory
differentials will play an important role in this. Again,
relevance determines the relative importance of the
comparison process over the reflection process. If
another person outperforms the self, then comparisons
would be threatening, particularly if the other person
were close. Reducing relevance avoids the threat of
comparison and increases the potential for reflection,
particularly if the other is psychologically close. When
self performs better than the other, however, there is
little to be gained by reflection and the comparison
may be flattering. Thus, self will be motivated to
increase relevance, particularly with a close other.
Abraham Tesser
See also Basking in Reflected Glory; Close Relationships; Self
Further Readings
Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance
model of social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances
in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 181–227).
New York: Academic Press.
SELF-EXPANSION THEORY
Definition
Close relationships open up new worlds to people. As
you interact with roommates, close friends, and relationship
partners in college, you will probably start to
notice small parts of yourself changing to become a
little more like them and vice versa. For example, you
might notice that you start taking more interest in
sports if you have a partner who always watches basketball
and football games on television. Before you
know it, you might think of yourself as a sports buff!
Relationships can help shape our identities, and
they can provide us with shared resources. If your
partner owns a car and you do not, you will likely
occasionally get a ride to get groceries or go out to
dinner. Or if you have a nicer apartment than your
partner’s, he or she will likely benefit by spending
more time at your place. Besides developing a sense
of ourselves and receiving extra resources, we can
also develop different perspectives from close relationships.
For example, if your partner is from a small
town in the Midwest and you are from a large East
Coast city, you will likely learn a lot about each
other’s worldviews just by interacting and talking.
These changes to people’s identities, resources,
and perspectives that occur in relationships are
described in and explained by self-expansion theory.
This theory says that it is very important for people’s
sense of self to expand and grow throughout their
lives for them to feel satisfied with their lives.
Although close relationships can provide us with a
rich source of potential expansion, people can experience
this type of growth in other ways: through spirituality,
creativity, and their interactions with valued
objects.
People really enjoy the feeling of self-expansion,
and as a result, they try very hard to look for selfexpansive
opportunities. People can do this in various
ways. For example, some people might look for new
relationships to keep the positive feeling of growth
alive, whereas others might instead try new activities
with current relationship partners as a way to increase
their self-expansion.
What happens if your best friend bombs a chemistry
midterm? Will you react to his or her failure as
if it was your own, or will you suddenly want to
shrink away from your friend? It makes sense that
people include others’ positive elements in their selfconcepts
when they grow. After all, it usually feels
good to have successful friends. However, selfexpansion
is not necessarily selfish: People don’t
only include the good elements of others in themselves
when they grow. The fact that some people
might even include others’ negative elements in
themselves shows how strong the need to selfexpand
is; it might even be stronger than our need to
make ourselves feel good! Finally, like other human
motivations, self-expansion is not necessarily a conscious
one; a person may not always be aware of
why he or she wants to meet new people and try new
things.
Background and History
The motivation to self-expand is tied to people’s
ability to accomplish their goals, thus self-expansion
is related to psychological models of self-efficacy,
intrinsic motivation, self-actualization, and the selfimprovement
motivation. The idea that the self is created
through relationships with close others goes back
to Martin Buber’s conception of the “Thou” and “I”
uniting and is also related to George Herbert Mead’s
work on social interactions. Carl Jung believed that
relationship partners could draw out otherwise hidden
aspects of the self to create greater wholeness, and

Abraham Maslow thought that loved ones could be
included in people’s self-concepts. Within social psychology,
Fritz Heider’s concept of the unit relation
that can form between close others comes closest to
Art and Elaine Aron’s recent idea of inclusion of
others in the self.
Research Evidence
One of the most common ways that humans selfexpand
is through their relationships with others. In
relationships, people can feel distant and completely
different from the other person, or they can feel a close
sense of oneness called psychological overlap. Psychological
overlap with close others is measured with
the Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale, which is a set
of seven pairs of circles with gradually increasing levels
of overlap. Participants are asked to select the pair
of circles that most represents their relationship.
This scale measures both feelings of closeness and
behaviors related to closeness. Psychological overlap
as measured by this scale is strongly related to relationship
satisfaction, commitment, relationship investment
and importance, and the percentage that dating
partners use the pronouns we and us when discussing
their relationship. This scale also predicts whether
people stay in a relationship in a 3-month posttest.
According to research, the idea that the self
expands through relationships can be taken literally.
For example, people in close relationships describe
their self-concepts with more complexity do than
those who are not in close relationships. As well,
people who report falling in love describe themselves
with more different domains of self-content
compared with their baseline “not in love” state and
compared with those who are not in love.
Relationships high in self–other overlap are
characterized by expanded identities, resources, and
perspectives from the relationship partner. When the
self expands to include another, people may even
confuse their own personality traits and memories
with close others’ traits and memories. Identity and
self-knowledge literally overlap with a highly overlapped
other.
In a sense, there is also a literal overlap of resources
and possessions with highly overlapped others, perhaps
reflecting an awareness of shared outcomes.
People treat close others as if they are indistinguishable
from themselves: They allocate more resources to
close others, giving approximately equal amounts to
themselves and their partner when the partner in a
money allocation game is a close other but giving
more to themselves when the partner is an acquaintance
or stranger.
Self-expansion theory also suggests that people may
make more situational and less dispositional attributions
to explain the behavior of close others, an evaluation
more consistent with how information is processed
about the self. For example, when your best friend fails
on a chemistry test, you will likely consider situational
variables that affected your friend’s performance (e.g.,
having a cold that day) in the same way that you would
for yourself, rather than making trait-based attributions
as you would for strangers or acquaintances (e.g., they
are unmotivated or unintelligent).
Implications
Self-expansion theory can help provide explanations
for both people’s initial attraction to others and the
eventual decline in relationship satisfaction that
occurs over time. It suggests that one of the main reasons
people initially enter romantic relationships is
because of the opportunity to self-expand and that
attraction is the result of a nonconscious calculation of
how much the potential partner can contribute to one’s
self-expansion. Extremely high levels of relationship
satisfaction that typically occur at the beginning of a
relationship are explained by positive feelings resulting
from self-expansion, which quickly fade as the
two people get to know each other better and opportunities
for self-expansion decline. Importantly, the
model specifies why relationship satisfaction declines
over time and how to increase relationship satisfaction.
This has been successfully done in the laboratory
through inducing couples to participate in
self-expanding activities together (e.g., completing a
difficult maze) and in real life by asking couples to
spend time doing exciting things together (e.g., learning
to dance).
Sara Konrath
See also Close Relationships; Interdependent
Self-Construals; Romantic Love; Transactive Memory
Further Readings
Self-Expansion Theory———827
Aron, A., & Aron, E. (1997). Self-expansion motivation and
including other in the self. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of
personal relationships (2nd ed., pp. 251–270). Chichester,
UK: Wiley.

828———Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Aron, A., McLaughlin-Volpe, T., Mashek, D., Lewandowski,
G., Wright, S., & Aron, E. (2004). Including others in the
self. European Review of Social Psychology, 15, 101–132.
Aron, A., Norman, C., & Aron, E. (1998). The self-expansion
model and motivation. Representative Research in Social
Psychology, 22, 1–13.
SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
Definition
A self-fulfilling prophecy is a process through which
someone’s expectations about a situation or another
person leads to the fulfillment of those expectations.
Thus, the expectancy becomes a cause, so that what is
expected comes true because it was expected. The
process includes three steps: (1) A perceiver forms an
expectation of a situation or target person, (2) the perceiver’s
expectations affects how he or she behaves in
the situation or treats the target person, and (3) the situation
or the target person is affected by the perceiver’s
behavior in a way that confirms the perceiver’s initial
expectation.
Background and History
The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy was initially
introduced by a sociologist, Robert K. Merton. In
Merton’s conception, a self-fulfilling prophecy applied
to social as well as nonsocial phenomena. For example,
Merton discusses how a self-fulfilling prophecy could
lead a stable bank to experience failure. Imagine that a
group of individuals comes to believe that a bank is on
the verge of bankruptcy. As a result, those individuals
withdraw their savings from the bank. In turn, other
depositors start to worry that their funds are not safe
and consequently withdraw their funds. In the end,
many depositors withdrawing their funds actually leads
to the bank becoming bankrupt. Therefore, the individuals’
expectations influenced their own behavior and
ultimately the very situation about which they were
concerned. The type of self-fulfilling prophecy that
leads to a bank failure is one that depends on the beliefs
and actions of many individuals. However, most of the
social psychological research on self-fulfilling prophecies
has focused on how one person’s belief about
another person leads to confirmation of that belief.
One of the best-known studies that demonstrates
the effect of self-fulfilling prophecies at the interpersonal
level was conducted by Robert Rosenthal and
Lenore Jacobson in the late 1960s. In this study, the
researchers led classroom teachers to believe that
some of their students were “potential bloomers,” who
would show substantial IQ gains during the school
year. In actuality, the students labeled as “bloomers”
were randomly chosen by the researchers and were
not really different from their classmates. So the
teachers’ beliefs about the potential bloomers were
initially false. Nonetheless, at the end of the school
year, these bloomers had higher gains in their IQ compared
with the other students. The teachers’ expectations
that bloomers would experience IQ gains caused
them to treat these students differently. For example,
teachers were more likely to give feedback to the
bloomers and challenge them more than they did their
other students. These differences in the teachers’
behavior led these students to perform better. This
study was important in demonstrating that individuals
may unwittingly cause outcomes that they expect by
changing their own behavior and thereby influencing
the behavior of others.
The early research on the self-fulfilling nature of
teacher expectations on student achievement faced
criticism about the ethics of the research and the very
existence of the self-fulfilling prophecy. Experimental
laboratory research, however, convincingly demonstrated
that people can subtly affect the behavior of
others because of their own expectations and that these
self-fulfilling prophecies do occur in many situations.
The experimental studies on self-fulfilling prophecies
typically led perceivers to expect something of a target
and then measured the target’s behavior. Because the
expectations perceivers held for the targets were initially
false, if the behavior of the target confirmed the
expectation, this was taken as evidence of a self-fulfilling
prophecy. For example, perceivers might be led to believe
that a target person with whom they would interact was
physically attractive by showing the perceiver a picture
of an attractive person. Because people tend to believe
that physically attractive individuals are friendly and
outgoing, perceivers would expect an attractive interaction
partner to be sociable. Perceivers would then
interact with someone who was objectively physically
attractive or not. In general, perceivers acted in ways
that elicited the type of behavior they expected from
their interaction partners. So, for example, perceivers
were themselves more friendly and outgoing if they
believed that they were interacting with an attractive
person rather than if they thought they were interacting
with an unattractive person. In turn, targets who experienced
friendliness from the perceiver responded by

eing warm and friendly, regardless of their objective
levels of physical attractiveness. These types of laboratory
studies were important in demonstrating that selffulfilling
prophecies do occur, even in situations in
which people do not know each other very well or have
repeated contact, as a teacher might have with students.
Recent research has even demonstrated that perceivers’
expectations may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies even
when perceivers are unaware or not consciously thinking
of their beliefs. Something in the environment may
bring to mind a perceiver’s expectation, and even if the
perceiver is not actively thinking about the belief, it
might influence his or her behavior, and the behavior
of individuals with whom they interact, leading to selffulfilling
prophecies.
Although false expectations can lead to self-fulfilling
prophecies, some researchers questioned whether
these effects occur in the real world and how powerful
they are. For example, do teacher expectations that
have not been created by researchers influence student
performance in real classrooms? Although self-fulfilling
prophecies are not as powerful in the real world as they
are in the laboratory, perceivers’ expectations do have
a small effect on targets’ behaviors. But, in some situations
perceivers’ expectations are unlikely to lead to
the target confirming those expectations. If a person
knows that others have negative expectations about
him or her, he or she may work hard to disconfirm,
rather than confirm, the expectations. The result might
thus be a self-defeating prophecy, the opposite of a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
Importance
Self-fulfilling prophecies demonstrate that people
often play an active role in shaping, and even creating,
their own social realities. Self-fulfilling prophecies
can influence many interactions and situations, but
the impact of these prophecies is particularly evident
in two major areas: (1) stereotyping and perceptions
of members of groups that are negatively viewed in
society and (2) the effects of teacher expectations on
student achievement.
Stereotypes are beliefs about the traits, personalities,
and abilities that characterize the typical individual
of a group, and these beliefs are often difficult to
change. Self-fulfilling prophecies may be one reason
that this is the case. As an example, consider the case
of women. One component of the stereotype of
women is that the typical group member is dependent.
A perceiver who expects women to be dependent may
be especially likely to treat women in ways that
elicit dependence. For example, a perceiver may offer
help to a woman with a flat tire (even if help is not
requested, or is unnecessary), and the woman may
respond by accepting the offer. In such an interaction,
the woman depended on another person for help, and
therefore the perceiver’s stereotype of the group is confirmed.
Because stereotypes are usually widely shared
within a society, these types of stereotype confirming
interactions are likely to occur repeatedly in the society
and thus have a much stronger impact than the idiosyncratic
expectations that one individual has about
another individual. But the influence of self-fulfilling
prophecy on stereotypes is even more pernicious when
one considers that individuals do not need to be actively
or consciously thinking about a stereotype for it to
affect their behavior. Just being aware of a stereotype
may lead the belief to automatically come to mind and
influence the behavior of the perceiver when he or she
interacts with members of the stereotyped group.
The second application of research on self-fulfilling
prophecies harkens back to the original research of
Rosenthal and Jacobson on the effect of teachers’
expectation on student achievement. Rosenthal and
Jacobson showed that high expectations from teachers
can improve student performance, but the converse is
also true; teachers’ negative expectations may impair
student performance. Students from some ethnic
minority groups and those with low socioeconomic
status tend to achieve less academically than do their
White and more economically advantaged students.
These outcome differences may be partly due to teachers’
expectations. Teachers’ expectations do affect performance
in real classrooms. Research has shown that
self-fulfilling prophecies have stronger effects on poor
and ethnic minority students, about whom teachers are
likely to have the most negative expectations. So, it is
important for teachers to think about their expectations
for their students because these expectations have real
consequences for important outcomes.
Collette Eccleston
See also Expectations; Experimenter Effects; Stereotypes and
Stereotyping
Further Readings
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy———829
Jussim, L., Eccles, J., & Madon, S. (1996). Social perception,
social stereotypes, and teacher expectations: Accuracy and
the quest for the powerful self-fulfilling prophecy.

830———Self-Handicapping
In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social
psychology (Vol. 28, pp. 281–388). San Diego,
CA: Academic Press.
Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the
classroom: Teacher expectations and student intellectual
development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Snyder, M., Tanke, E. D., & Berscheid, E. (1977). Social
perception and interpersonal behavior: On the
self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 656–666.
SELF-HANDICAPPING
Definition
Self-handicapping was first defined in 1978 by Steven
Berglas and Edward Jones as “any action or choice of
performance setting that enhances the opportunity to
externalize (or excuse) failure and to internalize (reasonably
accept credit for) success.” Self-handicapping
involves putting a barrier or handicap in the way of
one’s own success. If one fails, then the failure can be
blamed on the handicap rather than on (the lack of)
one’s innate ability. If one succeeds despite the
handicap, then one can claim extra credit for success
because one succeeded despite the impediment to success.
Thus, self-handicapping both protects the person
from the implications of failure and enhances the
success if one should succeed despite the handicap.
Self-handicapping may be used to protect or enhance a
person’s own self-image and public reputation.
Although self-handicapping may protect one from
implications of failure, self-handicapping is a trade-off,
and there are both short and long-term consequences of
self-handicapping. Self-handicapping limits success and
increases the probability for failure, both immediately
and in the future. Chronic self-handicappers also exhibit
poorer achievement and poorer adjustment over time.
Examples
One example of self-handicapping is staying out and
partying the night before a big exam. If the person
does poorly on the exam, he or she can blame it on
partying all night. If the person does well on the exam,
he or she can take credit for doing well on the
exam despite partying the night before. Researchers
have cited many other examples of self-handicapping,
which include procrastination, underachievement (or
low effort), alcohol or drug use or abuse, test anxiety,
getting too little sleep, underpreparing or inadequate
practice before evaluation, exaggerating the effects of
an injury or illness, complaints of physical symptoms
or hypochondriacal complaints, traumatic life events,
shyness, and choosing extremely difficult or unattainable
goals.
Causes and Purpose
Researchers believe that self-handicapping is caused
by feelings of uncertainty about future performance,
especially when others have high expectations of success.
Self-handicapping appears to be a self-protective
mechanism, protecting one’s self-esteem from the potentially
damaging effects of failure while enhancing
attributions for success. If one fails, a self-handicapper
can blame failure on external causes and can thus
maintain and protect self-esteem. If one succeeds, a
self-handicapper can take credit for succeeding
despite external obstacles, increasing self-esteem.
There has been debate about whether one engages
in self-handicapping to protect and enhance one’s own
self-image or to protect and enhance one’s public reputation.
Berglas and Jones’s original self-handicapping
construct defined self-handicapping as a strategy to
protect both a person’s self and public images and presented
evidence consistent with both the public and
private functions of the attributions. Other research
has suggested, however, that self-handicapping only
protects a person’s public reputation. For instance,
one study found that self-handicapping was reduced
when others were not present to evaluate the person’s
performance on a task. Current consensus is that selfhandicapping
sometimes may occur for the protection
of private self-image, but it is even more common in
public circumstances.
If a person self-handicaps to protect his or her public
image, however, the strategy may backfire and may
not improve a person’s reputation. Research has found
that people do not like those who self-handicap. Selfhandicappers
are disliked more and rated more negatively
on several variables by others evaluating them
than are those who do not self-handicap.
Costs and Benefits
Self-handicapping has both immediate costs and benefits,
thus representing a trade-off. Self-handicapping

involves constructing a barrier to one’s own success.
The self-handicapper reduces his or her chances for
success, but also protects himself or herself from the
implications of failure. Self-handicapping, however,
also appears to have long-term costs. For instance,
research has shown that chronic self-handicappers do
more poorly academically and have poorer adjustment
over time. In addition, as mentioned previously, there
may be several interpersonal consequences for a person
who engages in self-handicapping. Furthermore, some
researchers believe that frequent self-handicapping may
lead to the development of chronic self-destructive
patterns, such as alcoholism or drug abuse.
A person’s self-esteem affects the motivation for
self-handicapping. People with high self-esteem selfhandicap
for self-enhancement motives (or to enhance
their success). People with low self-esteem, however,
self-handicap for self-protective motives (or to protect
themselves from the esteem-threatening implications
of failure). Research has also suggested that
high self-handicappers actually enjoy an activity more
when they engage in self-handicapping strategies,
supposedly decreasing worries about failure and
increasing the intrinsic motivation for engaging in or
completing the activity.
Gender Differences
Gender differences in self-handicapping have been
studied extensively. Some research has shown that
men are more likely to self-handicap than women are.
Other research has shown that men and women selfhandicap
differently, with men being more likely to
engage in behavioral self-handicapping, such as
using alcohol or underpreparing, and women being
more likely to engage in self-reported handicapping,
such as complaining of illness or traumatic life
events. Other research, however, has found no sex
differences in the incidence of self-handicapping.
Research has found, however, that women are more
critical of those who self-handicap, evaluating selfhandicappers
more negatively than men do. Women
were also less likely to excuse self-handicapping than
were men.
Dianne M. Tice
See also Anxiety; Procrastination; Self-Defeating Behavior;
Self-Enhancement; Self-Esteem; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy;
Self-Serving Bias
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Scher, S. J. (1988). Self-defeating
behavior patterns among normal individuals: Review and
analysis of common self-destructive tendencies.
Psychological Bulletin, 104, 3–22.
Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a selfhandicapping
strategy in response to noncontingent
success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
36, 405–417.
Hirt, E. R., McCrea, S. M., & Boris, S. I. (2003). “I know
you self-handicapped last exam”: Gender differences in
reactions to self-handicapping. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 84, 177–193.
Tice, D. M. (1991). Esteem protection or enhancement?
Self-handicapping motives and attributions differ by trait
self-esteem. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 60, 711–725.
Zuckerman, M., Kieffer, S. C., & Knee, C. R. (1998).
Consequences of self-handicapping: Effects on coping,
academic performance, and adjustment. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1619–1628.
SELF-MONITORING
Self-Monitoring———831
Definition
Self-monitoring is a personality trait that captures
differences in the extent to which people control the
image they present to others in social situations. High
self-monitors are motivated and skilled at altering
their behavior to influence the impressions others
have of them. In contrast, low self-monitors tend to
focus on remaining true to their inner attitudes by
presenting a relatively consistent image of themselves
to others regardless of the situation.
Background and History
The theory of self-monitoring was introduced by Mark
Snyder in 1974 at a time when personality and social
psychologists were grappling with two fundamental
debates. First, the impact of personality traits versus
the situation on behavior was a source of contention
between personality and social psychologists. Second,
the disconnect between inner attitudes and external
behavior was also perplexing researchers at that time.
Self-monitoring offered a partial resolution to these
debates by introducing an individual difference
variable that addressed both sides of the debate;

832———Self-Monitoring
self-monitoring emphasized the power of the situation
on high self-monitors’ behavior and the power
of personality traits on low self-monitors’ behavior.
Moreover, self-monitoring partly addressed the
attitude–behavior consistency debate because such
consistency could be expected among low but not high
self-monitors.
Measurement Issues
Perhaps because it dealt with such contentious issues,
the theory and measurement of self-monitoring have
been subject to much scrutiny and debate. Individual
differences in self-monitoring are typically measured
using a version of Snyder’s paper-and-pencil Self-
Monitoring Scale that was revised and shortened by
Snyder and Steve Gangestad in 1986. There has been
some debate about whether three or four components
make up the self-monitoring scale. This debate
prompted researchers to clearly distinguish the concept
of self-monitoring from other similar concepts,
most notably the Big Five trait Extraversion.
Currently, the three most commonly accepted components
measured by the self-monitoring scale are
acting, extraversion, and other-directedness. The role
of each component is generally recognized as vital for
identifying and measuring self-monitoring.
Another long-standing debate in the measurement
of self-monitoring concerns whether there are two distinct
categories of people, high and low self-monitors,
or whether there is a self-monitoring continuum. This
debate reaches beyond the trait of self-monitoring to
the theoretical foundations of personality psychology,
and so is mentioned only briefly here. Researchers
investigating self-monitoring tend to follow Snyder’s
original method of creating and comparing dichotomous
categories of high and low self-monitoring.
Much of the work on self-monitoring was conducted
in the 1980s when researchers were first identifying the
implications and limitations of this trait. Research continues,
further refining and applying our understanding
of self-monitoring in light of modern developments in
both social and personality psychology.
Importance and Implications
Self-monitoring is important for understanding how
people behave in social situations. Research has examined
the influence of self-monitoring in many ways,
including but not limited to how people behave over
time, express their attitudes, perceive social cues and
others’ behavior, approach interpersonal relationships,
behave nonverbally, and make consumer judgments.
Because of their sensitivity to the situation, high
self-monitors behave less consistently across different
situations than do low self-monitors and, hence, have
relatively weaker correspondence between their attitudes
and behavior. In addition, high self-monitors
tend to tailor the attitudes they express to correspond
with those of their audience and to appreciate the
effect of the social context on others’ behavior.
Self-monitoring also influences the types of situations
people select for themselves. High self-monitors prefer
to engage in situations that are clearly defined to
facilitate their behavior adaptation, whereas low selfmonitors
select situations that converge with their
personal dispositions.
Interpersonal Relationships
The social worlds of high and low self-monitors
are characterized distinctly. The social groups of high
self-monitors tend to differ depending on the context;
they have different friends in different situations.
Conversely, low self-monitors tend to have a
stable group of friends who are similar to them in a
global way.
Commitment and relationship longevity differ
between high and low self-monitors in a way that corresponds
to the contextually driven versus constant
approaches to their social networks. Both friendships
and romantic relationships tend to be approached with
greater sense of commitment and intimacy among low
self-monitors relative to high self-monitors. High selfmonitors
tend to report having more casual friendships
and sexual partners, having greater quantities of
shorter romantic liaisons, and relying on outward
appearances when judging others to a greater degree
than do low self-monitors.
Nonverbal Cues
The tendency to use nonverbal displays of behavior
strategically is also influenced by self-monitoring, at
both conscious and nonconscious levels, stemming
from differences in attempts to control images
presented to others. High self-monitors are better able
to expressively convey internal states and to actively
conceal socially inappropriate emotional displays
than are low self-monitors.

In general, people will nonconsciously mimic
the nonverbal behavior (e.g., foot shaking) of others.
Mimicry is a strategy used nonconsciously to achieve
social connection. The mimicry of high self-monitors
is context dependent. They mimic especially when the
other person is affiliated with them in some way (e.g.,
has power over them in an upcoming task, or is a member
of a peer group instead of a more senior or junior
group). Thus, the process of regulating behavior to
accord with social cues may operate outside of conscious
awareness among high self-monitors. Low selfmonitors
do not show this sensitivity to affiliation with
others when nonconsciously mimicking behavior.
Application to Consumer Behavior
The study of consumer behavior is one area to
which researchers have applied knowledge of selfmonitoring.
In line with their propensity toward managing
outward appearances, high self-monitors tend to
prefer advertisements that appeal to a particular image
and will select products that will help them convey an
image in a certain situation. Low self-monitors prefer
advertisements that focus on a product’s quality and
are less swayed by attractive packaging than are high
self-monitors.
See also Impression Management; Mimicry; Self-
Presentation; Traits
Further Readings
Catherine D. Rawn
Gangestad, S. W., & Snyder, M. (2000). Self-monitoring:
Appraisal and reappraisal. Psychological Bulletin,
126, 530–555.
Snyder, M. (1987). Public appearances/public realities:
The psychology of self-monitoring. New York: Freeman.
SELF-PERCEPTION THEORY
In everyday life, people observe other people’s actions
and behaviors and make inferences about others’ attitudes
based on what they observe. When people see
how another person acts in a particular situation, they
often attribute the behavior to the person’s traits and
attitudes. For example, if you view someone in a park
Self-Perception Theory———833
recycling a plastic water bottle rather than throwing it
in the garbage, you might infer that the individual is
concerned about the environment. Similarly, if you
witness a school child scowling at her teacher, you
might infer that she is upset or angry with the teacher.
Interestingly, sometimes people also observe their
own behavior, much as an outsider might do, and
make similar inferences about their own attitudes
based on their behavior. According to self-perception
theory, when people are unsure of their own attitudes,
one way to infer them is by looking at their behaviors.
Daryl Bem proposed self-perception theory in 1967
when he argued that people sometimes analyze their
own behavior in the same fashion as they would analyze
someone else’s behavior.
At the time, Bem was proposing something that
was counter to how people’s attitudes and behaviors
were thought of. Most people would agree, for example,
that a person who perceives himself or herself
as interested in road biking may, as a result of that
interest, buy bicycling equipment and go on long
cycling rides. That is, the person’s attitudes and selfperception
influence his or her behavior. Bem, however,
reversed this relation by suggesting that it is also
possible that people understand their attitudes and
interests because they have made inferences based on
their behavior. Thus, this person could infer that he or
she is interested in road biking on the basis of frequent
cycling trips and lavish spending on a nice road bike.
Self-perception theory provides a similar explanation
for emotion by suggesting that people infer their
emotions by observing their bodies and their behaviors.
In other words, people’s emotions and other
feelings come from such actions as facial expressions,
postures, level of arousal and behaviors. In this way,
feelings are consequences of behavior rather than the
other way around. People are angry because they
scowl and are happy because they smile—this is the
self-perception effect.
Everyone has experienced the self-perception
effect. Imagine for a moment that you have had a
terrible day—several things have gone wrong and you
feel very irritable and grouchy. However, you have
made previous plans to meet up with some friends for
a small social gathering that evening. When you
arrive, you smile and elicit warm, polite behavior.
When others at the gathering greet you with “Hi,
how’s it going?” you respond with “Fine, how are
you?” It is challenging to scowl and maintain your
irritability at a party with friends. So, you smile

834———Self-Perception Theory
instead and—in effect—pretend to be happy. For most
of us, our original feelings of irritability decrease after
smiling and exhibiting “happy” behavior. Our behavior
changes our attitude.
Even the way people walk can affect the way they
feel. Test this with yourself. When you get up, walk
back and forth across the room, shuffling with your
shoulders hunched and your eyes looking down at
the floor. What do you feel? Similarly, imagine sitting
slouched over all day, sighing when people speak to
you and talking in a really low voice. You probably
feel a bit down or depressed. Now try walking across
the room taking long strides, swinging your arms
high, and smiling. These different behaviors can elicit
a different emotional experience.
Research Support
Several studies have been done since the proposal
of self-perception theory that support Bem’s hypothesis.
As self-perception theory predicts, research has
demonstrated that people who are induced to act as if
they feel something, such as happiness, report actually
feeling it, even when they are unaware of how their
feelings arose. This effect has been demonstrated
for a wide variety of feelings and with an even wider
variety of behaviors.
For example, in a simple study designed to
demonstrate whether facial expression influenced
affective responses—a phenomenon closely related
to self-perception—psychologists examined whether
facial expressions influenced individuals’ emotion
responses to cartoons. To manipulate facial expressions
or facial activity, subjects were asked to hold a
pen in their mouth in one of two ways: (1) between
their teeth with their lips open to facilitate the muscles
typically associated with smiling or (2) pursed
between their lips because it inhibited the muscles
used during smiling. (Try this to see if you can get a
sense of what your facial expressions would have been
if you were in the experiment.) The task for the participants
was to read a series of cartoons, with the pen in
their mouth, and rate them for their degree of funniness.
As self-perception theory would predict, the psychologists
found that those who were holding the pen
in between their teeth (facilitating a smile) reported
higher levels of humor based on the cartoons than did
the participants who were holding the pen between
their lips. The researchers concluded that the perceived
funniness of the cartoons depended on producing the
muscle action involved in smiling.
The self-perception effect might also carry over to
later behavior. For example, imagine that ordinarily
you are shy at parties but have recently decided that
you want to make new friends. You have decided that
at the next party, you will make an effort to be especially
talkative to meet new people and it goes well.
This behavior influences your attitude about social
behavior and leads you to perceive a greater outgoingness
in yourself. The next time you are at a party, you
exhibit outgoing social behavior without nearly as
much effort. Act as if you are outgoing and you might
become more so.
In a study demonstrating this carryover effect,
researchers looked at the impact of a community service
experience on adolescent volunteers’ levels of
empathy, social responsibility, and concern for others.
The findings from this study suggest that community
service positively influences sympathy and compassion
for others, sense of concern for society at large,
and a willingness to take action to help others and the
community. This demonstrates that the behavior—
engaging in volunteer helping experience—can create
a shift toward more caring and helping attitudes and
sustained action in service.
In another interesting investigation of how behaviors
affect attitudes, Mark Lepper and colleagues
found giving people external reasons (e.g., monetary
rewards) for performing a behavior they already enjoy
decreases their intrinsic motivation to do it—a phenomenon
called overjustification effect. For example,
in a study testing this effect, children who were initially
interested in a drawing activity reported significantly
lower intrinsic interest in drawing after two
weeks of receiving extrinsic reward, whereas children
who did not receive external reward for engaging in
the activity did not report a reduction in interest after
the two weeks. According to self-perception theory,
people undergo overjustification effect when their
actions can no longer be attributed to their intrinsic
motivation but, rather, to the anticipation of an extrinsic
reward. In the previous example, the principles of
self-perception theory would argue that the children’s
initial interest in the activity was undermined by creating
a situation in which activity was an explicit means
to an extrinsic goal—in other words, the extrinsic
rewards turned “play” (i.e., an activity engaged in for
it’s own sake) into “work” (i.e., an activity engaged in
only when extrinsic incentives are present).
In the decades following Bem’s original article, a
great deal of research was aimed at trying to distinguish
self-perception theory from the widely accepted

cognitive dissonance theory, which argues that the
inconsistency presented by believing one thing and
doing another generates emotional discomfort that
directs behavior toward the goal of reducing the inconsistency
or dissonance. However, dissonance arises
when there is inconsistency or hypocrisy between attitudes,
beliefs, or behaviors. Thus, attitudes or beliefs
in these situations are known. Years of research in
this area have led to the conclusion that cognitive
dissonance and self-perception theories have different
applications: Self-perception theory is more applicable
in situations in which people’s attitudes are initially
vague, ambiguous, or weak.
Importance and Implications
Because self-perception theory suggests that when
people’s internal awareness of their attitudes or emotions
is weak or ambiguous they can view themselves
in much the same way as an outside observer, it is possible
to rely upon external cues or behaviors to infer
people’s inner states. You may be able to relate to the
following experiences: “This is my second sandwich;
I guess I was hungrier than I thought,” or, “I’ve been
biting my nails all day; something must be bugging
me.” In both cases, attitudes or emotions are inferred
from the behavior. Thus, even if people are generally
self-aware, they cannot always be accurate about why
they feel the way they do. The self-perception effect
allows people to gather important cues from their
external environment and apply them to understand
what attitudes or emotions they are experiencing
internally.
The self-perception effect also may have an
important application when attitudes and behaviors
are incongruent or when behavior change is desired.
For example, therapists working with individuals with
alcohol addiction have reported that the principles
of self-perception theory assist in creating change.
Individuals who begin to consciously observe the
amount they are drinking might infer from their
behavior that they are tense or anxious and then do
something about it other than drinking. Similarly,
behavior change might inform individuals of their
internal attitudes about drinking. For example, individuals
who communicate their intentions about
drinking out loud may infer their attitudes about
drinking from hearing themselves speak. In other
words, the behavior of telling others, “I am going
to cut down on my drinking” may allow individuals to
infer the attitude or internal awareness that their
drinking has created problems for themselves or
others. In sum, researchers in psychology have applied
the self-perception theory to a wide variety of attitudes
and behaviors with very interesting and important
implications.
Shelly Grabe
Janet Shibley Hyde
See also Attitude Change; Attitudes; Cognitive Dissonance
Theory; Emotion; Facial Expression of Emotion; Facial-
Feedback Hypothesis; Introspection; Looking-Glass Self;
Overjustification Effect
Further Readings
Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-perception: An alternative
interpretation of cognitive dissonance phenomena.
Psychology Review, 74, 183–200.
Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz
(Ed.), Advances in experimental psychology (Vol. 6,
pp. 1–62). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Lepper, M. R., Greene, D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1973).
Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic
reward: A test of the “overjustification” hypothesis.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 28,
129–137.
SELF-PRESENTATION
Self-Presentation———835
Definition
Self-presentation refers to how people attempt to present
themselves to control or shape how others (called
the audience) view them. It involves expressing
oneself and behaving in ways that create a desired
impression. Self-presentation is part of a broader set of
behaviors called impression management. Impression
management refers to the controlled presentation of
information about all sorts of things, including information
about other people or events. Self-presentation
refers specifically to information about the self.
History and Modern Usage
Early work on impression management focused on
its manipulative, inauthentic uses that might typify a
used car salesperson who lies to sell a car, or someone
at a job interview who embellishes accomplishments
to get a job. However, researchers now think of selfpresentation
more broadly as a pervasive aspect of

836———Self-Presentation
life. Although some aspects of self-presentation are
deliberate and effortful (and at times deceitful), other
aspects are automatic and done with little or no
conscious thought. For example, a woman may interact
with many people during the day and may make
different impressions on each person. When she starts
her day at her apartment, she chats with her roommates
and cleans up after breakfast, thereby presenting
the image of being a good friend and responsible
roommate. During classes, she responds to her professor’s
questions and carefully takes notes, presenting
the image of being a good student. Later that day, she
calls her parents and tells them about her classes and
other activities (although likely leaving out information
about some activities), presenting the image of
being a loving and responsible daughter. That night,
she might go to a party or dancing with friends, presenting
the image of being fun and easygoing.
Although some aspects of these self-presentations
may be deliberate and conscious, other aspects are
not. For example, chatting with her roommates and
cleaning up after breakfast may be habitual behaviors
that are done with little conscious thought. Likewise,
she may automatically hold the door open for an
acquaintance or buy a cup of coffee for a friend. These
behaviors, although perhaps not done consciously or
with self-presentation in mind, nevertheless convey an
image of the self to others.
Although people have the ability to present images
that are false, self-presentations are often genuine; they
reflect an attempt by the person to have others perceive
him or her accurately, or at least consistent with how the
person perceives himself or herself. Self-presentations
can vary as a function of the audience; people present
different aspects of themselves to different audiences or
under different conditions. A man likely presents different
aspects of himself to his close friends than he does
to his elderly grandmother, and a woman may present a
different image to her spouse than she does to her
employer. This is not to say that these different images
are false. Rather, they represent different aspects of the
self. The self is much like a gem with multiple facets.
The gem likely appears differently depending on the
angle at which it is viewed. However, the various
appearances are all genuine. Even if people present a
self-image that they know to be false, they may begin
to internalize the self-image and thereby eventually
come to believe the self-presentation. For example, a
man may initially present an image of being a good
student without believing it to be genuine, but after
attending all his classes for several weeks, visiting the
professor during office hours, and asking questions during
class, he may come to see himself as truly being a
good student. This internalization process is most likely
to occur when people make a public commitment to the
self-image, when the behavior is at least somewhat consistent
with their self-image, and when they receive
positive feedback or other rewards for presenting the
self-image.
Self-presentation is often directed to external audiences
such as friends, lovers, employers, teachers,
children, and even strangers. Self-presentation is more
likely to be conscious when the presenter depends on
the audience for some reward, expects to interact with
the audience in the future, wants something from
the audience, or values the audience’s approval. Yet
self-presentation extends beyond audiences that are
physically present to imagined audiences, and these
imagined audiences can have distinct effects on
behavior. A young man at a party might suddenly
think about his parents and change his behavior from
rambunctious to reserved. People sometimes even
make self-presentations only for themselves. For
instance, people want to claim certain identities, such
as being fun, intelligent, kind, moral, and they may
behave in line with these identities even in private.
Goals
Self-presentation is inherently goal-directed; people
present certain images because they benefit from the
images in some way. The most obvious benefits are
interpersonal, arising from getting others to do what
one wants. A job candidate may convey an image of
being hardworking and dependable to get a job; a salesperson
may convey an image of being trustworthy and
honest to achieve a sale. People may also benefit from
their self-presentations by gaining respect, power, liking,
or other desirable social rewards. Finally, people
make certain impressions on others to maintain a sense
of who they are, or their self-concept. For example, a
man who wants to think of himself as a voracious
reader might join a book club or volunteer at a library,
or a woman who wishes to perceive herself as generous
may contribute lavishly to a charitable cause. Even
when there are few or no obvious benefits of a particular
self-presentation, people may simply present an
image that is consistent with the way they like to think
about themselves, or at least the way they are accustomed
to thinking about themselves.

Much of self-presentation is directed toward
achieving one of two desirable images. First, people
want to appear likeable. People like others who are
attractive, interesting, and fun to be with. Thus, a sizable
proportion of self-presentation revolves around
developing, maintaining, and enhancing appearance
and conveying and emphasizing characteristics that
others desire, admire, and enjoy. Second, people want
to appear competent. People like others who are
skilled and able, and thus another sizable proportion
of self-presentation revolves around conveying an
image of competence. Yet, self-presentation is not so
much about presenting desirable images as it is about
presenting desired images, and some desired images
are not necessarily desirable. For example, schoolyard
bullies may present an image of being dangerous or
intimidating to gain or maintain power over others.
Some people present themselves as weak or infirmed
(or exaggerate their weaknesses) to gain help from
others. For instance, a member of a group project may
display incompetence in the hope that other members
will do more of the work, or a child may exaggerate
illness to avoid going to school.
Avenues
People self-present in a variety of ways. Perhaps most
obviously, people self-present in what they say. These
verbalizations can be direct claims of a particular
image, such as when a person claims to be altruistic.
They also can be indirect, such as when a person discloses
personal behaviors or standards (e.g., “I volunteer
at a hospital”). Other verbal presentations emerge
when people express attitudes or beliefs. Divulging
that one enjoys backpacking through Europe conveys
the image that one is a world-traveler. Second, people
self-present nonverbally in their physical appearance,
body language, and other behavior. Smiling, eye contact,
and nods of agreement can convey a wealth of
information. Third, people self-present through the
props they surround themselves with and through their
associations. Driving an expensive car or flying first
class conveys an image of having wealth, whereas
an array of diplomas and certificates on one’s office
walls conveys an image of education and expertise.
Likewise, people judge others based on their associations.
For example, being in the company of politicians
or movie stars conveys an image of importance, and
not surprisingly, many people display photographs of
themselves with famous people. In a similar vein, high
Self-Presentation———837
school students concerned with their status are often
careful about which classmates they are seen and not
seen with publicly. Being seen by others in the company
of someone from a member of a disreputable
group can raise questions about one’s own social
standing.
Pitfalls
Self-presentation is most successful when the image
presented is consistent with what the audience thinks
or knows to be true. The more the image presented
differs from the image believed or anticipated by
the audience, the less willing the audience will be to
accept the image. For example, the lower a student’s
grade is on the first exam, the more difficulty he or she
will have in convincing a professor that he or she will
earn an A on the next exam. Self-presentations are
constrained by audience knowledge. The more the
audience knows about a person, the less freedom the
person has in claiming a particular identity. An audience
that knows very little about a person will be more
accepting of whatever identity the person conveys,
whereas an audience that knows a great deal about a
person will be less accepting.
People engaging in self-presentation sometimes
encounter difficulties that undermine their ability to
convey a desired image. First, people occasionally
encounter the multiple audience problem, in which
they must simultaneously present two conflicting
images. For example, a student while walking with
friends who know only her rebellious, impetuous
side may run into her professor who knows only her
serious, conscientious side. The student faces the
dilemma of conveying the conflicting images of rebellious
friend and serious student. When both audiences
are present, the student must try to behave in a way
that is consistent with how her friends view her, but
also in a way that is consistent with how her professor
views her. Second, people occasionally encounter
challenges to their self-presentations. The audience
may not believe the image the person presents.
Challenges are most likely to arise when people are
managing impressions through self-descriptions and
the self-descriptions are inconsistent with other
evidence. For example, a man who claims to be good
driver faces a self-presentational dilemma if he is ticketed
or gets in an automobile accident. Third, selfpresentations
can fail when people lack the cognitive
resources to present effectively because, for example,

838———Self-Promotion
they are tired, anxious, or distracted. For instance, a
woman may yawn uncontrollably or reflexively check
her watch while talking to a boring classmate, unintentionally
conveying an image of disinterest.
Some of the most important images for people to
convey are also the hardest. As noted earlier, among
the most important images people want to communicate
are likeability and competence. Perhaps because
these images are so important and are often rewarded,
audiences may be skeptical of accepting direct claims
of likeability and competence from presenters, thinking
that the person is seeking personal gain. Thus,
people must resort to indirect routes to create these
images, and the indirect routes can be misinterpreted.
For example, the student who sits in the front row of
the class and asks a lot of questions may be trying to
project an image of being a competent student but
may be perceived negatively as a teacher’s pet by
fellow students.
Finally, there is a dark side to self-presentation. In
some instances, the priority people place on their
appearances or images can threaten their health.
People who excessively tan are putting a higher priority
on their appearance (e.g., being tan) than on their
health (e.g., taking precautions to avoid skin cancer).
Similarly, although condoms help protect against sexually
transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy,
self-presentational concerns may dissuade partners or
potential partners from discussing, carrying, or using
condoms. Women may fear that carrying condoms
makes them seem promiscuous or easy, whereas men
may fear that carrying condoms makes them seem
presumptuous, as if they are expecting to have sex.
Self-presentational concerns may also influence
interactions with health care providers and may lead
people to delay or avoid embarrassing medical tests
and procedures or treatments for conditions that are
embarrassing. For example, people may be reluctant
to seek tests or treatment for sexually transmitted
diseases, loss of bladder control, mental disorders,
mental decline, or other conditions associated
with weakness or incompetence. Finally, concerns
with social acceptance may prompt young people
to engage in risky behaviors such as excessive
alcohol consumption, sexual promiscuity, or juvenile
delinquency.
Meredith Terry
Kate Sweeny
James A. Shepperd
See also Deception (Lying); Ego Depletion; Goals;
Impression Management; Phenomenal Self; Self-
Defeating Behaviors; Self-Perception Theory; Social
Desirability Bias
Further Readings
Jones, E. E., Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general
theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.),
Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 1,
pp. 231–260). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Leary, M. R. (1996). Self-presentation: Impression
management and interpersonal behavior. Boulder,
CO: Westview Press.
Leary, M. R., Tchividjian, L. R., & Kraxberger, B. E. (1994).
Self-presentation can be hazardous to your health:
Impression management and health risk. Health
Psychology, 13, 461–470.
Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management: The
self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations.
Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
SELF-PROMOTION
Definition
Self-promotion refers to the practice of purposefully
trying to present oneself as highly competent to other
people. When people self-promote, their primary
motivation is to be perceived by others as capable,
intelligent, or talented (even at the expense of being
liked). Self-promotion becomes especially useful and
prominent when a person competes against others for
desirable—often scarce—resources, such as a good
job or an attractive partner. People can self-promote
their abilities in general or in a specific domain.
Context
Self-promotion exists as part of a general yet extremely
pervasive human motivation: to be perceived favorably
by others. In the case of self-promotion, people
want to be perceived by others as being competent.
Not surprisingly, then, people generally only selfpromote
in public, and around people they want to
impress, such as superiors at work. For example, someone
completing a self-evaluation at work would be
much less likely to self-promote if a supervisor would
never read the self-evaluation, or if the self-evaluation
was anonymous.

How Do People Self-Promote?
Researchers have identified several tactics people use
to self-promote. First, people may self-promote by
speaking of themselves in flattering terms: They may
highlight their leadership skills, prowess at school or
work, or adeptness at overcoming obstacles. Second,
if they are personally involved in a positive event,
they may claim more responsibility for the event than
they objectively deserve, or they may exaggerate the
importance of the event in the hopes it will sound
more impressive. People can self-promote more tactfully
by (1) guiding the course of a conversation to a
point where it is fitting to mention prior achievements
and honors, (2) trying to avoid conversation topics in
which others may be experts, or (3) providing opportunities
for other people to promote them, such as by
covertly making a substantial salary raise known to
gossipy coworkers.
The Problem of Integrating
Self-Promotion and Likeability
When self-promoting, people face an important problem:
Their behavior might come across as conceited,
if not fraudulent. Although the key motivation underlying
self-promotion is to be perceived as competent,
situations arise where self-promotion must be successfully
integrated with likeability, even though these
two motivations may conflict. Probably the most
prominent example of this concern is the classic job
interview. Applicants interviewing for a job need to
appear both competent and likeable to impress their
potential supervisor, but expressing both of these
qualities during the interview may be tricky! For
example, to convey confidence and competence,
applicants know they must highlight their relevant
experience and accomplishments. At the same time,
applicants do not want to appear conceited or arrogant
to the interviewer.
Evidence: Does Self-Promotion Work?
Researchers have examined quite extensively whether
self-promotion actually helps people appear more
competent. By far the biggest research arena for selfpromotion
has been in business settings, especially in
the interview process, for reasons mentioned previously.
Specifically, researchers have studied whether selfpromotion
helps people secure jobs and promotions.
Self-Promotion———839
In a typical study, researchers will ask both the applicant
and the interviewer to complete post-interview surveys
that ask about instances of self-promotion used by
the applicant throughout the interview; researchers
might also ask permission to film the interview. The
researchers then either contact the participants later to
see if they secured the job for which they interviewed
or subsequently ask the interviewers which applicants
they might consider hiring. With this information, the
researchers can then examine whether self-promotion
during the interview influenced hiring decisions.
Results from these studies are mixed. Overall,
researchers often conclude self-promotion has little
effect on hiring decisions (though studies certainly
exist that find either positive or negative effects).
Unfortunately, researchers have not offered conclusive
reasons to account for these null findings, but
they probably reflect the interviewers’ expectation
that most people will self-promote in some way during
the interview, thus negating the self-promotion
attempt.
The effect of self-promotion on job promotions is
largely inconclusive as well. Self-promoting at work
can sometimes result in promotion, but plenty of
studies demonstrate self-promotion really has no
effect on being promoted. These conflicting results
probably reflect the intricacies of the individual job
environments, as well as personal characteristics and
preferences of the people involved.
The Added Problem of Gender
Self-promotion poses a unique problem for women
because women have been traditionally perceived as
less competent and competitive than men. To counteract
such stereotypes, women probably need to
highlight their skills and talents more than men do,
especially when competing for the same job. Unfortunately,
self-promotion by women is generally received
more poorly than is self-promotion by men. In fact,
studies have shown women themselves rate other
women who self-promote less favorably than men who
self-promote! This discrepancy may stem from culturally
ingrained stereotypes, wherein women have been
traditionally socialized to adopt more passive, subservient,
and modest roles compared with men.
Therefore, self-promotion may enhance how others
perceive a woman’s qualifications, but at the expense
of social appeal. Indeed, women who self-promote are
often perceived as competent, yet socially unattractive.

840———Self-Reference Effect
Implications
Self-promotion is an extremely common strategy
people employ to create and maintain an impression
of competence. Sometimes self-promotion works, but
other times it fails. The factors underlying successful
self-promotion have not been conclusively determined,
but it seems likely that tactful self-promotion
would work best. Unfortunately, women shoulder the
additional burden of battling ingrained social stereotypes
that prescribe female modesty. Historically,
these stereotypes may have contributed both to the
disproportionate rates of hiring men over women for
certain positions, as well as fewer opportunities for
women to be promoted. However, the ever-changing
role of women in present-day society may eventually
help lessen these disparities.
Scott J. Moeller
Brad J. Bushman
See also Impression Management; Self-Enhancement;
Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Higgins, C. A., & Judge, T. A. (2004). The effect of applicant
influence tactics on recruiter perceptions of fit and hiring
recommendations: A field study. Journal of Applied
Psychology, 89, 622–632.
Rudman, L. A. (1998). Self-promotion as a risk factor for
women: The costs and benefits of counterstereotypical
impression management. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 74, 629–645.
SELF-REFERENCE EFFECT
Definition
The self-reference effect refers to people’s tendency
to better remember information when that information
has been linked to the self than when it has
not been linked to the self. In research on the selfreference
effect, people are presented with a list of
adjectives (e.g., intelligent, shy) and are asked to
judge each word given a particular instruction. Some
people are told to decide whether each word describes
them. In this case, people make a decision about each
word in relation to their knowledge of themselves—a
self-referent comparison. Other people are instructed
to decide whether each word is long—a nonself-referent
comparison that requires making a decision about
each word that does not use information about the
self. According to the self-reference effect, if people
are later asked to remember the words they rated in
a memory task that they do not expect, they will be
more likely to remember the words if they thought
about them in relation to the self (Does the word
describe them?) than if they thought about them without
reference to the self (Is the word long?). Although
some studies have failed to support the self-reference
effect, a recent meta-analysis supports that, overall,
the self-reference effect is robust.
The different instructions are thought to lead to
differences in the likelihood of self-referent encoding.
Encoding is the process putting information into memory,
of taking a stimulus from the environment and
processing it in a way that leads to storage of that stimulus
in a person’s mind. In the case of the self-reference
effect, the stimulus is encoded or processed with information
about the self. Information about the self is
highly organized in memory because people frequently
use and add to their information about themselves.
Therefore, information encoded with respect to self
becomes part of a highly organized knowledge structure.
The benefit of encoding something with respect
to an organized knowledge structure is that new information
is encoded more efficiently and effectively,
which can lead to easier retrieval and recall. People
also tend to think deeply about concepts that relate to
the self. Therefore, when people are asked to think
about words in relation to the self, those words benefit
from deeper encoding and are better elaborated, connected,
and integrated in memory. Because people
habitually use the self to process information in their
daily lives, they are particularly practiced at encoding
information in a self-referent way. More elaborated
encoding provides additional cues for words to be later
retrieved from memory.
One extension of the self-reference effect examined
whether memory after self-referent judgments differed
from other-referent judgments (Does this word describe
someone else?). Self-referent memory is superior to
other-referent memory when people are asked to rate
whether words describe a person who is not well known
(Does this word describe the study experimenter?). The
memory advantage of self-referent encoding decreases,
but is not eliminated, if people rate whether the words
describe an intimate other (Does this word describe
your mother?) whose characteristics may also be wellorganized
and elaborated in memory.

Background and History
The first research on the self-reference effect was
published by T. B. Rogers and colleagues in 1977.
Research at that time was particularly interested in
how personality information was organized in people’s
minds, and Rogers and his colleagues set out to extend
Fergus I. M. Craik’s and Endel Tulving’s research on
depth of processing. The depth of processing perspective
suggests that certain types of information are
processed more deeply, or in a more elaborated way,
than are other types of information. For example,
words are better remembered when people are asked to
think about them in a semantic way (Does the word
mean the same thing as another word?) than when
people are asked to think about them phonemically
(Does the word rhyme with another word?), and are
remembered least if people are asked to think about
them in a structural way (Is the word written in capital
letters?). These three instructions differ in the depth of
processing required to make the judgment (it requires
more processing to make judgments of meaning of the
word compared with the sound or the structure of the
word). Memory for words is weaker when depth of
processing is lower. Rogers and colleagues hypothesized
that self-referent encoding would involve even
deeper processing than semantic encoding and would
result in better memory for the words. Research supported
this hypothesis, thereby supporting the idea that
self-knowledge was uniquely represented in memory.
Individual Differences
Among people given the self-referent instructions,
research consistently shows a memory bias for words
that they rate as like themselves (This word describes
me) compared with words that people rate as unlike
themselves (This word doesn’t describe me). This
suggests that the self-reference effect is strongest for
traits that people actually endorse about themselves.
Follow-up studies confirm this bias in various groups
and situations in which the self-reference effect is
observed. For example, depressed individuals show
increased memory for depressed traits, and nondepressed
individuals showed increased memory for
nondepressed traits. People given failure feedback
show a greater self-reference effect for negative traits,
whereas those who are given success feedback show a
greater self-reference effect for positive traits. People
also differ in the degree to which they chronically
think about the world in self-referent ways. People
who are high in private self-consciousness are more
likely than are those low in private self-consciousness
to think about the world in terms of self, and low private
self-conscious people are less likely to show the
self-reference effect compared with high private selfconscious
people. Similarly, situations in which people
experience low self-awareness (e.g., people who are
intoxicated) reduce the likelihood of self-referent
encoding and thus the self-reference effect.
Jennifer J. Tickle
See also Encoding; Memory; Salience; Self; Self-Awareness
Further Readings
Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977).
Self-reference and the encoding of personal information.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
35, 677–688.
Symons, C. S., & Johnson, B. T. (1997). The self-reference
effect in memory: A meta-analysis. Psychological
Bulletin, 121, 371–394.
SELF-REGULATION
Self-Regulation———841
Definition
Self-regulation refers to the self exerting control over
itself. In particular, self-regulation consists of deliberate
efforts by the self to alter its own states and
responses, including behavior, thoughts, impulses or
appetites, emotions, and task performance. The concept
of self-regulation is close to the colloquial terms
self-control and self-discipline, and many social psychologists
use the terms interchangeably.
History and Background
Early social psychologists did not use the term selfregulation
and, if they thought about it at all, regarded
it as a minor, obscure, technical problem. However,
as the study of the self expanded and researchers
became more interested in inner processes, interest in
self-regulation expanded. By the 1990s, self-regulation
had become widely recognized as a central function of
the self, with both practical and theoretical importance,
and a broad range of research sought to contribute
to the rapidly expanding research literature on
self-regulation.

842———Self-Regulation
Modern self-regulation theory has several roots.
One is in the study of animal learning. Skinnerian
behaviorists taught that animals learn behaviors based
on past rewards and punishments. In that way, behavior
patterns are molded by the external environment.
Recognizing that human behavior was more complex
and internally guided than much animal behavior,
thoughtful behaviorists such as Albert Bandura
proposed that people self-regulate by administering
rewards and punishments to themselves. For example,
a person might say, “If I can get this task done by
7 o’clock, I will treat myself to ice cream,” or “If I don’t
get this paper written today, I won’t go to the movies.”
A second root is in research on delay of gratification.
In the 1960s, researchers such as Walter Mischel began
to study how people would choose between a small
immediate reward and a larger, delayed one. For example,
a child might be told, “You can have one cookie
now, but if you can wait for 20 minutes without eating it,
you can have three cookies.” In adult life, most work and
study activities depend on the capacity to delay gratification,
insofar as work and studying bring delayed rewards
but are often not immediately satisfying (as compared
with relaxing or engaging in hobbies). This line of
research found that successful delaying of gratification
depended on overriding immediate impulses and focusing
attention away from the immediate gratification. The
immediate response to a tempting stimulus is to enjoy it
now, so it requires self-regulation to override that
response to wait for the delayed but better reward.
A third root is in the study of self-awareness.
During the 1970s, researchers began studying how
behavior changes when people focus attention on
themselves. In 1981, the book Attention and Self-
Regulation by Charles Carver and Michael Scheier
proposed that one main function of self-awareness is to
aid in self-regulation. That is, you reflect on yourself
as a way of deciding how and whether improvement
would be desirable.
The fourth root of self-regulation theory is in
research on human personal problems, many of which
revolve around failures at self-control. Across recent
decades, research has steadily accumulated to reveal
the importance of self-regulation in many spheres of
behavior. Eating disorders and obesity partly reflect
failures to regulate one’s food intake. Alcohol and drug
addiction likewise indicate poor regulation of use of
these substances. Research on these and related issues
has provided much information that self-regulation
theorists could use.
Importance
Self-regulation has implications for both psychological
theory and for practical, applied issues. In terms of theory,
self-regulation has come to be seen as one of the
most important operations of the human self. Indeed,
the human capacity for self-regulation appears to be far
more advanced and powerful than is self-regulation in
most other animals, and it helps set the human self apart
from selfhood in other species. Some theorists believe
that the capacity for self-regulation was one decisive
key to human evolution.
Self-regulation depicts the self as an active controller.
Social psychology’s early theories and
research on the self focused mainly on issues such as
self-concept and self-knowledge, and in that sense,
the self was treated as an accumulated set of ideas. In
contrast, self-regulation theory recognizes the self as
an active agent that measures, decides, and intervenes
in its own processes to change them. Some psychologists
link self-regulation to the philosophical notion of
free will, understood as the ability to determine one’s
actions from inside oneself rather than being driven by
external forces.
The practical importance of self-regulation can
scarcely be understated. Most personal and social
problems that plague modern society have some
degree of self-regulation failure at their core. These
include addiction and alcoholism, obesity and binge
eating, anger management, and other emotional control
problems. Crime and violence are often linked
to poor self-regulation (especially of aggressive
and antisocial impulses). Sexual problems, including
unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases,
can be avoided with effective self-regulation.
underachievement in school and work often reflects
inadequate self-regulation. Money problems, whether
in the form of gambling losses, failure to save for
the future, or impulsive shopping and credit card
debt, can also indicate inadequate self-regulation.
Many health problems could be prevented by selfregulation,
such as to ensure that one exercises regularly,
brushes and flosses teeth, takes vitamins, and
eats a proper diet.
More broadly, self-regulation appears to be an
important predictor of success in life. People with
good self-regulation have been shown to be more popular
and have better, more stable relationships, to get
better grades in school and college, to have fewer
personal pathologies, and to have better adjustment.

Self-regulation is also a key to moral behavior, and
some theorists have argued that it is the master virtue
that underlies most or all virtuous behavior because
such behavior typically requires overcoming an antisocial
or immoral impulse (e.g., to cheat, harm, or
betray someone) to do what is morally valued.
Standards and Goals
Effective self-regulation requires standards, which
are concepts of how something ideally should be.
Researchers on self-awareness noted very early that
when people reflect on themselves, they do not simply
notice how they are. Rather, they compare how they
are with some standard, such as their personal ideals,
other people’s expectations, how they were previously,
or the average person. Self-regulation begins by
noting discrepancies between how you are and how
you want to be. For example, a diet often begins by
noting that the person weighs more than his or her
ideal weight, and the diet is intended to bring the
weight down to the desired weight (the standard).
Self-regulation can be impaired if standards
conflict, such as if two parents make inconsistent
demands on the child. A lack of clear standards also
makes self-regulation difficult.
Self-regulation goals can be sorted into prevention
and promotion. Preventive self-regulation focuses on
some undesirable outcome and seeks to avoid it. In
contrast, promotional self-regulation focuses on some
desirable outcome and seeks to approach it. A related
distinction is between ideal and ought standards.
Ideals are positive concepts of how one would like to
be. Ought standards, such as moral rules, typically
emphasize some bad or undesired possibility and center
on the importance of not performing such actions.
Standards do not automatically activate selfregulation.
People must be motivated to change. How
people choose their goals and standards, and why they
sometimes abandon these, is an important topic for
further study.
Monitoring and Feedback Loops
Monitoring refers to keeping track of particular
behaviors. It is almost impossible to regulate a behavior
effectively without monitoring it. (Imagine trying
to have a successful diet without ever weighing yourself
or keeping track of what you eat.) As stated earlier,
many experts believe that a main functional purpose of
Self-Regulation———843
self-awareness is to serve self-regulation by enabling
people to monitor their behavior. Monitoring is more
than noticing the behavior itself, though, because it
also compares the behavior to standards.
Poor monitoring is an important cause of selfregulation
failure. People lose control when they stop
keeping track of their behavior. Alcohol intoxication
leads to many kinds of self-regulation failure (including
overeating, violent activity, overspending, and
further drinking), partly because intoxicated people
cease to monitor their actions. In contrast, the simplest
way to improve self-regulation is to improve monitoring,
such as by using external records. For example,
people who want to control their spending can often
benefit by keeping a written record of each time they
spend money.
Self-regulation theory has incorporated the concept
of feedback loops from cybernetic theory (that is, a
theory originally designed for guided missiles and
other mechanical control devices). The feedback loop
is represented by the acronym TOTE, which stands for
test, operate, test, exit. One commonly invoked example
is the thermostat that controls indoor room temperature.
The test phase compares the present status
with the standard (thus, is the room as warm as the
temperature setting?). If there is a discrepancy, then
the operate phase begins, which initiates some effort
to resolve the problem and bring the reality in line
with the standard, just as a thermostat will turn on
the furnace to heat the room when it is too cold. As
the operate phase continues, additional tests are performed.
These will indicate whether progress is being
made and, if so, whether the goal or standard has been
reached. As long as the reality is still short of the standard,
the operations are continued. At some point, the
reality reaches the standard, and the test will reveal
this. There is then no need for further operations, and
the loop is exited (the exit phase).
Unlike machines, humans often feel emotions during
self-regulation. Noticing a discrepancy between
self and standard can produce negative emotions,
such as guilt or sadness or disappointment. Reaching
a goal or standard after a successful operate phase
can produce positive emotions such as joy, satisfaction,
and relief. However, it is not necessary to reach
the goal entirely to feel good. Many people experience
positive emotions simply because they note that
they are making progress toward the standard. In
these ways, emotions can sustain and promote effective
self-regulation.

844———Self-Regulation
Strength and Depletion
Successful self-regulation depends on the capacity
to bring about the desired changes. It is not enough to
have goals or standards and to keep track of behavior,
if one lacks the willpower or other capacity to make
the necessary changes. Some people knowingly
do things that are bad for them or that violate their
values.
As the colloquial term willpower implies, the capacity
to regulate oneself seems to depend on a psychological
resource that operates like strength or energy.
Exerting self-regulation uses up some of this resource,
leaving the person in a weakened state called ego depletion.
In that state, people tend to be less effective at further
acts of self-control. Moreover, the same resource is
used for many different kinds of self-regulation and
even for making difficult decisions. For example, when
a person is using self-regulation to try to cope with
stress or meet deadlines, there will be less available for
regulating other habits, and the person may resume
smoking or have atypical emotional outbursts. Some
evidence indicates that strength can be increased with
regular exercise (just like with a normal muscle). That
is, if people regularly perform acts of self-regulation,
such as trying to maintain good posture or speaking
carefully, their capacity for successful self-regulation in
other spheres may improve.
Trait Differences
Different people are successful at self-regulation to
different degrees, though each person’s ability to selfregulate
may fluctuate across time and circumstances.
Some research has shown that children who were more
successful at a delay of gratification task at age 4 years
grew up to be more successful academically and
socially, and this suggests that there is an important
element of stability in people’s self-regulation. (That
is, if someone is good at self-regulation early in life, he
or she is likely to remain good at it for many years.)
June Tangney and colleagues have reviewed some
of the scales designed to measure the capacity for
self-regulation. It does appear to be quite possible to
rely on a self-report measure to distinguish people
by how good at self-regulation they are, although
some responses may be tainted by boastfulness, selfreport
bias, and social desirability bias.
Other Issues
Although self-regulation offers human beings a powerful
psychological tool for controlling and altering their
responses, its effectiveness has important limits. As
already noted, consecutive efforts at self-regulation can
deplete the capability for further regulation. Another
important limit is that not all behaviors can be regulated.
Many responses are automatic or otherwise strongly
activated. The popular term impulse control (referring to
self-regulation of impulsive behaviors such as alcohol
and substance abuse, or violence, or sex, or eating) may
be a misnomer because usually the impulse itself is not
controlled but only the behavior stemming from it. That
is, a reformed smoker usually cannot refrain from wanting
a cigarette and has to be content with refusing to act
on that impulse and to smoke.
Controlling emotions, or affect regulation, is an
important category of self-regulation that confronts
limited power. Most people cannot alter their emotional
states simply by deciding to do so. Put another
way, emotions tend to be beyond conscious control.
Affect regulation typically proceeds by indirect means,
such as by distracting oneself, inducing a different
emotion, or calming oneself down.
An ongoing debate concerns the extent to which
self-regulation failure stems from irresistible
impulses, rather than simply acquiescing. Many
people say that they couldn’t resist, such as when they
spent too much money shopping or ate something fattening
(or indeed engaged in proscribed acts of sex or
violence). However, some research suggests that
people could resist most of the time if they were sufficiently
motivated. Self-deception may be involved in
the process by which people allow themselves to fail
at self-regulation. Undoubtedly, however, there are
some irresistible impulses, such as to breathe, or go to
sleep, or urinate.
Once self-regulation begins to break down, additional
psychological processes may accelerate the failure.
These have been called lapse-activated patterns or,
in the case of alcohol and drug abuse, abstinence violation
effects. A recovering alcoholic may be very careful
and scrupulous about avoiding all alcohol, but after taking
a drink or two on one occasion may cease to keep
track and hence drink more, or may even decide that
because the zero-tolerance pattern has been broken, he
or she might as well enjoy more. Dieters seem particularly
vulnerable to the fallacy that if a caloric indulgence
has spoiled one’s diet for the day, one might as well eat
more forbidden foods and then resume the diet tomorrow.
Such spiraling processes can turn a minor failure at
self-regulation into a destructive binge.
Roy F. Baumeister
See also Ego Depletion; Goals; Self-Control Measures

Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (Eds.). (2004). Handbook of
self-regulation: Research, theory, and applications. New
York: Guilford Press.
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. E. (1981). Attention and selfregulation:
A control theory approach to human behavior.
New York: Springer.
Higgins, E. T. (1996). The “self digest”: Self-knowledge
serving self-regulatory functions. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 71, 1062–1083.
Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004).
High self-control predicts good adjustment, less
pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success.
Journal of Personality, 72, 271–322.
SELF-REPORTS
Definition
The term self-reports refers to information that is
collected from an individual’s own description of the
events, sensations, or beliefs under scrutiny. Selfreports
may be collected with any of several different
methods: for example, surveys and questionnaires,
electronic diaries, and clinical interviews. Self-reports
are distinguished from other methods of data collection
because their only source is the respondent’s
personal account.
Issues Surrounding the
Use of Self-Reports
Most researchers agree that it is naive to believe that all
self-reports are fully accurate. However, it is also simplistic
to assume that because self-reports can be erroneous,
they are not valuable or informative. A better
approach is to attend closely to the various cognitive
and motivational factors that influence people’s ability
and willingness to report on their beliefs, feelings, and
activities. Numerous such factors have been identified.
Although some of these factors concern outright
deception (e.g., when accurate self-reports would be
embarrassing or harmful), more commonly self-reports
are distorted by the limits of people’s ability to store,
save, recall, and summarize information. For example,
research has shown that when asked to describe events
from their past, people are prone to report whatever
information is most accessible at that moment, regardless
of whether that information is correct or was
made accessible by an experimental manipulation.
Self-reports are also known to be biased by an
individual’s motives, goals, and personality. For
example, people high in the personality trait of neuroticism
tend to experience and describe events in
their lives (for example, everyday stressors, pain
symptoms) as more distressing than do people low in
neuroticism.
Whenever possible, it is useful to corroborate
self-reports through other sources, such as historical
records, reports by informed friends and family
members, psychophysiological recording, or behavioral
observation. Systematic comparison of selfreports
with these other sources of data can provide
valuable insights into the processes that contribute
to accuracy and inaccuracy in self-reports. Nevertheless,
many important concepts are either intrinsically
subjective and internal, and therefore
measurable only through self-reports (for instance,
pain, momentary mood, attitudes, feelings about of
another person), or are for pragmatic reasons impossible
to appraise otherwise (for instance, behavior
over a month’s time, events in the distant past). For
this reason, substantial effort has gone into developing
instruments and procedures that maximize the
validity of self-reports.
Harry T. Reis
See also Motivated Cognition; Neuroticism; Self-Deception;
Self-Presentation; Social Cognition
Further Readings
Stone, A. A., Turkhan, J. S., Bachrach, C. A., Jobe, J. B.,
Kurtzman, H. S., & Cain, V. S. (Eds.). (2000). The science
of self-report. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
SELF-SCHEMAS
See SCHEMAS
SELF-SERVING BIAS
Self-Serving Bias———845
Definition
The self-serving bias refers to the tendency to take
credit for successful outcomes in life, but to blame the

846———Self-Serving Bias
situation or other people for failing outcomes. For
example, when an individual gets a promotion at work,
he or she will explain this by citing an internal cause,
such as his or her ability or diligence. In contrast, when
the same individual is fired from a job, he or she will
explain this by pointing to an external cause, such as
an unfair boss or bad luck. In general, the self-serving
bias allows individuals to feel positively about themselves
and to protect themselves from the negative psychological
consequences of failure.
Background and History
The self-serving bias is part of a larger area in social
psychology known as causal attributions, or the way
individuals explain events in the social world. Fritz
Heider, a social psychologist, argued in his classic
work on attribution theory that four basic types of
attributions can be made regarding an individual’s
behavior. These include two internal attributions, ability
and effort, and two external attributions, difficulty
and luck. Internal attributions apply to something
about the person and external attributions apply to
something about the situation. For example, if a person
successfully rows a boat across a lake, his or her
success could be attributed to internal factors: the person’s
ability (e.g., strength or rowing skill) or effort
(e.g., the person was motivated because he or she had
a good friend on the other side or was being chased).
The person’s success could also be attributed to external
factors: the difficulty of the task (e.g., it was a
small lake) or luck (e.g., an unexpected breeze blew
him or her across). Bernard Weiner, who played a central
role in creating modern attribution theory, later
expanded on these ideas.
The self-serving bias occurs when individuals
make attributions for their own (rather than others’)
behavior. When the outcome is positive, individuals
make more internal attributions; when the outcome is
negative, individuals make more external attributions.
This difference in attributions for positive and for
negative outcomes is why the self-serving bias is considered
a bias. This bias is readily apparent when you
think about a group situation. Imagine a classroom of
students who have just gotten grades back on a test.
The students who get A’s are likely to explain their
success by ascribing it to their intelligence and work
ethic; the students who failed are likely to explain
their failure by ascribing it to the fact that the test was
too hard or unfair, or only asked questions about the
one area they didn’t study. Both groups of students
cannot be correct in their attributions. Either the test
was fair and the students who failed were not smart
enough or did not study sufficiently, or the test was
truly unfair and the students who received A’s really
just got lucky. Importantly, although the self-serving
bias in this example leads to a distortion of reality by
many students, it also leads to all students feeling
as good about themselves as possible. The students
with A’s think they are smart, and the students with F’s
think it was not a reflection of their ability or effort.
Situations and Measurement
The self-serving bias can be observed in a wide range
of situations. Individual situations are the most commonly
studied. These simply involve a person engaging
in a task by himself or herself, and then receiving positive
or negative feedback about the performance.
Taking an exam would be an example of an individual
task. Dyadic tasks and group tasks involve more than
one person. In a dyadic task, a person and a partner
work together on a task, and feedback is directed
toward their combined efforts. For example, if two
students worked together on a class project, they would
only receive a single grade for their combined effort.
A group task is similar, but involves more than two
people. For example, a team playing a soccer game
would be an example of a group task. Finally, there are
situations that involve two or more people, but in which
the performance feedback is given to a single person
whom the other directs. For example, in a teacher–
student task, a teacher who has a failing student might
be asked how personally responsible the student is, relative
to the teacher, for the failure. Likewise, a therapist
might be asked how personally responsible the client is,
relative to the therapist, for the failure to get well.
There are two basic strategies for assessing the
self-serving bias. The first is to ask someone to complete
a task, give that person success or failure feedback,
and then ask him or her to attribute responsibility
for the performance to internal or external factors.
When this strategy is completed in a psychology lab,
the participant usually completes a task, such as a
novel creativity test, and then is given randomly determined
success or failure feedback. In other words, the
experimenter will tell the participants at random that
half of them succeeded and half of them failed. When
this strategy is used in a classroom setting and the participants
are students, the students simply take a test
and are given accurate results. They are then asked to
attribute the results to internal or external causes.

The second basic strategy for assessing the selfserving
bias is to use paper and pencil questionnaires.
Participants are presented with a series of hypothetical
situations that have positive or negative outcomes and
then are asked to what they would attribute each outcome.
The most used questionnaire of this type is the
Attributional Style Questionnaire.
Causes, Consequences, and Contexts
The primary cause underlying the self-serving bias is
the desire to protect or enhance the positivity of the
self. The self-serving bias allows individuals to maintain
positive feelings about themselves in the face
of failure (“it wasn’t my fault”) or to feel particularly
good about themselves following success (“I am a
genius!”). This means that the self-serving bias will be
most evident in those individuals or in those situations
in which the desire to protect or enhance the self is the
strongest.
Certain individuals or groups are more likely to
show the self-serving bias than are others. Individuals
who feel particularly good about themselves, such
as those who are narcissistic or in happy moods
are more likely to show the self-serving bias. In contrast,
depressed individuals are less likely to show
the self-serving bias. Individuals who care more
about achievement and success also report a greater
self-serving bias.
At a group level, men show a greater self-serving
bias than do women. This is because men, on average,
are more narcissistic and have higher self-esteem than
do women. Similarly, U.S. citizens and Westerners
more generally show a greater self-serving bias than
do East Asians. Again, this parallels the great narcissism
and higher self-esteem found in the West.
Certain situations also can increase or reduce the
self-serving bias. If the task is important, such as a
major exam, individuals are more likely to show the
self-serving bias than they are on unimportant tasks.
Likewise, moderately challenging tasks are more
likely to elicit the self-serving bias than very easy
tasks. Individuals also show the self-serving bias
more when they choose the task they are participating
in rather than being told what task to complete. For
example, if an individual wants to play tennis in
school, he or she is more likely to show the selfserving
bias than if his or her parents force the individual
to play. Furthermore, the self-serving bias will
be greater when the individual expects to do well on a
task than when he or she expects to perform poorly.
Finally, any situation that makes an individual more
self-aware is likely to increase the self-serving bias.
This is because self-awareness makes people think
about their own internal goals and standards. For
example, if someone completes a musical performance
while being filmed (a simple way to increase
self-awareness), the self-serving bias will increase.
One particularly interesting situation is when the
self-serving bias is reported publicly. In public, individuals
are less likely to show the self-serving bias.
The reason for this is that it often looks better to take
responsibility for failure and share credit for success.
For example, imagine if a quarterback after a winning
football game said at an interview: “I won this game
single-handedly!” The fans would think he was an
arrogant jerk and his teammates would stop supporting
him. This is why most athletes on a winning team
will readily share the credit with other players and
even the fans.
W. Keith Campbell
Elizabeth A. Krusemark
See also Attribution Theory; Narcissism; Self-Enhancement;
Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Self-Serving Bias———847
Campbell, W. K., & Sedikides, C. (1999). Self-threat
magnifies the self-serving bias: A meta-analytic
integration. Review of General Psychology, 3, 23–43.
Mezulis, A., Abramson, L. Y., Hyde, J. S., & Hankin, B. L.
(2004). Is there a universal positivity bias in attributions?
A meta-analytic review of individual, developmental, and
cultural differences in the self-serving attributional bias.
Psychological Bulletin, 130, 711–747.
Miller, D. T., & Ross, M. (1975). Self-serving biases in the
attribution of causality: Fact or fiction? Psychological
Bulletin, 82, 213–225.
Peterson, C., Semmel, A., Von Baeyer, C., Abramson, L. Y.,
Metalsky, G. I., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1982). The
Attributional Style Questionnaire. Cognitive Therapy and
Research, 6, 287–300.
Weary Bradley, G. (1978). Self-serving biases in the
attribution process: A re-examination of the fact or fiction
question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
36, 56–71.
Weiner, B. (1974). Achievement motivation and attribution
theory. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
Zuckerman, M. (1979). Attribution of success and failure
revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well in
attribution theory. Journal of Personality, 47, 245–287.

848———Self-Stereotyping
SELF-STEREOTYPING
Definition
Self-stereotyping occurs when individuals’ beliefs
about their own characteristics correspond to common
beliefs about the characteristics of a group they
belong to. This is generally measured in one of two
ways. The first involves measuring the degree to
which individuals describe themselves using characteristics
that are commonly thought to describe members
of their group in general. For example, it is a
common belief that women in general are poor at
math. Assessing whether individual women feel as if
they are poor at math would be consistent with this
way of measuring self-stereotyping. The second way
researchers measure self-stereotyping is by determining
the amount of similarity between how individual
group members see their group (or a typical group
member) and how they see themselves. For example,
researchers may ask individual members of a fraternity
how similar they are to a typical member of
their fraternity. Some researchers use the term selfstereotyping
to describe when being a member of a
group that is viewed negatively decreases self-esteem,
when members of a group endorse stereotypic beliefs
about their group, or when the behaviors of individual
group members are consistent with stereotypes about
their group. However, these uses of the term do not fit
the prevailing definition.
Importance
Historically, self-stereotyping has been important
in social psychology because prominent theorists
thought that it was an unavoidable consequence of
group membership. Conceptualizing self-stereotyping
more broadly than is done today, they argued that
being viewed a certain way because of one’s group
membership undoubtedly should affect how individual
group members see themselves. The modern
importance of self-stereotyping stems from the functions
it is thought to serve. Some researchers argue
that self-stereotyping can translate into beliefs and
behaviors that help support existing inequalities
between groups in society. Other researchers argue
that self-stereotyping fulfills the need to feel close to
other group members. From this perspective, selfstereotyping
is beneficial in that it creates a sense of
group unity and solidarity. Research documenting
other functions of self-stereotyping needs to be done.
When and Why
Although early theorists thought self-stereotyping
was virtually unavoidable, modern researchers show
that the occurrence of self-stereotyping depends on
several things. One is how easily one’s group membership
comes to mind. The more easily this occurs,
the more likely an individual is to self-stereotype in
line with beliefs about that group. How easily a group
membership comes to mind increases as a function of
how unusual it is within a given social environment.
For example, being the only woman or African
American at a board meeting will bring these group
memberships to mind and, therefore, enhance the likelihood
of self-stereotyping. A group membership will
also come to mind more easily if divisions between
different groups are made noticeable. For example, if
two men and two women engage in a discussion and
tend to find agreement, then their respective gender
identities will remain largely in the background.
However, if a disagreement along gender lines
emerges, then their gender identities will become
more noticeable and self-stereotyping will be more
likely to occur.
Self-stereotyping is also determined by efforts to
maintain an optimal level of closeness to the group.
The closer individuals feel to the group, the more
likely they are to see themselves as possessing
characteristics associated with the group. Conversely,
when group members perceive themselves as distinctly
different from other members of their group,
they engage in self-stereotyping to lessen this feeling.
Feelings as if one’s group is threatened also
increase self-stereotyping. Threat can come in the
form of being a low-status or minority group, as well
as feeling that the group is not sufficiently different
from other groups. Response to threat, however,
depends on how close a person feels to the group.
People who feel very close to their groups are more
likely to respond to temporary and chronic threats to
status with increased self-stereotyping than are people
who feel less close to their group. People who feel
very close to the group are motivated to maintain ties
to the group and thus cope with the threat in ways that
protect the group and their place within it.
Finally, interpersonal relationships act as pathways
through which individuals come to self-stereotype.

People who think close others, or a new person with
whom they want to affiliate, hold stereotypic beliefs
about their group, are more likely to see themselves in
a stereotypic manner.
Future Directions
The understanding of self-stereotyping has evolved
over time. Researchers are now in a better position
to describe how and when it will emerge. However,
several important unanswered questions remain. One
question is whether self-stereotyping occurs for both
positive and negative group characteristics. Some
research has found that self-stereotyping only occurs
for positive traits, whereas other research has found
self-stereotyping on positive and negative traits.
Another question concerns the consequences of selfstereotyping.
For example, it would be useful to know
when self-stereotyping does and does not lead to corresponding
behavior.
Stacey Sinclair
Jeffrey R. Huntsinger
See also Self; Self-Categorization Theory; Self-Concept;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Hogg, M. A., & Turner, J. C. (1987). Intergroup behavior,
self-stereotyping, and the salience of social categories.
British Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 325–340.
Pickett, C. L., Bonner, B. L., & Coleman, J. M. (2002).
Motivated self-stereotyping: Heightened assimilation and
differentiation needs result in increased levels of positive
and negative self-stereotyping. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 82, 543–562.
Sinclair, S., Huntsinger, J., Skorinko, J., & Hardin, C. D.
(2005). Social tuning of the self: Consequences for the
self-evaluations of stereotype targets. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 160–175.
SELF-VERIFICATION THEORY
The self-verification theory proposes that people want
others to see them as they see themselves. For example,
just as those who see themselves as relatively
extraverted want others to see them as extraverted, so
Self-Verification Theory———849
too do those who see themselves as relatively introverted
want others to recognize them as introverts.
The theory grew out of the writings of the symbolic
interactionists, who held that people form self-views
so that they can predict the responses of others and
know how to act toward them. For example, a person’s
belief that he or she is intelligent allows the person to
predict that others will notice his or her insightfulness.
This prediction, in turn, may motivate the person
to pursue higher education at a premier university.
Because people’s self-views play such a critical role
in their lives, they become invested in maintaining
them by obtaining self-verifying information.
Among people with positive self-views, the desire
for self-verification works hand-in-hand with another
important motive, the desire for self-enhancing or
positive evaluations. For example, those who view
themselves as organized will find that their desires for
both self-verification and self-enhancement compel
them to seek feedback that others perceive them as
organized. In contrast, people with negative selfviews
will find that the two motives push them in
opposite directions. Those who see themselves as
disorganized, for example, will find that whereas
their desire for self-verification compels them to seek
evidence that others perceive them as disorganized,
their desire for self-enhancement compels them to
seek evidence that others perceive them as organized.
Self-verification theory suggests that under some conditions
people with negative self-views will resolve
this conflict by seeking self-enhancement, but that
under other conditions they will resolve it by seeking
self-verification.
Seeking Self-Verifying
Settings and Partners
Considerable evidence supports self-verification theory.
In one study, researchers asked participants with
positive and negative self-views whether they would
prefer to interact with evaluators who had favorable
or unfavorable impressions of them. Not surprisingly,
those with positive self-views preferred
favorable partners, but contrary to self-enhancement
theory, those with negative self-views preferred unfavorable
partners.
Many replications of this effect using diverse methods
have confirmed that people prefer self-verifying
evaluations and interaction partners. Both men and
women display this propensity, even if their self-views

850———Self-Verification Theory
happen to be negative. Moreover, it does not matter
whether the self-views refer to characteristics that are
relatively immutable (e.g., intelligence) or changeable
(e.g., diligence), whether the self-views happen to be
highly specific (e.g., athletic) or global (e.g., low selfesteem,
worthless), or whether the self-views refer
to the individual’s personal qualities (e.g., assertive)
or group memberships (e.g., Democrat). Furthermore,
when people choose negative partners over positive
ones, they do not do so merely to avoid positive evaluators
(out of a concern that they might disappoint
them). To the contrary, people choose negative partners
even when the alternative is participating in a different
experiment.
Just as self-verification strivings influence the
contexts people enter initially, so too do they influence
whether or not people remain in particular contexts.
Research on married couples, college roommates, and
dating partners show that people gravitate toward partners
who provide verification and drift away from those
who do not. For instance, just as people with positive
self-views withdraw (either psychologically or through
divorce or separation) from spouses who perceive them
unfavorably, people with negative self-views withdraw
from spouses who perceive them favorably. Similarly,
the more positively college students with firmly held
negative self-views are perceived by their roommates,
the more inclined they are to plan to find a new roommate
(students with positive self-views displayed the
opposite pattern). Finally, self-views determine how
people react to the implicit evaluations conveyed by
the salaries they receive. In one study examining selfesteem
and job turnover, among people with high selfesteem,
turnover was greatest among those who failed
to receive raises; for people with low self-esteem,
turnover was greatest among people who did receive
raises. Apparently, people gravitate toward relationships
and settings that provide them with evaluations
that confirm their self-views.
Bringing Others to See
Them as They See Themselves
Even if people wind up with partners who do not
see them in a self-verifying manner, they may correct
the situation by changing their partners’ minds. One
way they may do this is by judiciously displaying
identity cues. The most effective identity cues are
readily controlled and reliably evoke self-verifying
responses from others. Physical appearances represent
a particularly salient class of identity cues. The
clothes one wears, for instance, can advertise numerous
self-views, including those associated with everything
from political leanings to income level and
religious convictions. Similarly, people routinely display
company or school logos, buttons, and bumper
stickers, and wear uniforms to evoke reactions that
verify their self-views. Consistent with this, one set of
researchers discovered that dress, style, and fabric
revealed a great deal about individuals’ jobs, roles,
and self-concepts. Even body posture and demeanor
communicate identities to others. Take, for example,
the CEO who projects importance in his bearing or the
new employee who exudes naïveté. Such identity cues
announce their bearer’s self-views to all who are
paying attention. Moreover, self-verification theory
predicts that people should display identity cues to
communicate socially valued and devalued identities.
Some highly visible examples include skinheads and
members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Even if people fail to gain self-verifying reactions
through their choice of environments or through the
display of identity cues, they may still acquire such
evaluations by the way they act toward other people.
One group of researchers, for example, found that college
students who were mildly depressed as compared
with nondepressed were more likely to solicit negative
evaluations from their roommates. Moreover,
students’ efforts to acquire negative feedback appear
to have borne fruit in the form of interpersonal rejection:
The more unfavorable feedback they solicited in
the middle of the semester, the more apt their roommates
were to derogate them and plan to find another
roommate at the semester’s end.
If people are motivated to bring others to verify
their self-conceptions, they should intensify their
efforts to elicit self-confirmatory reactions when they
suspect that others might be misconstruing them.
Researchers tested this idea by informing participants
who perceived themselves as either likable or dislikable
that they would be interacting with people who
probably found them likable or dislikable. Participants
tended to elicit reactions that confirmed their
self-views, especially if they suspected that evaluators’appraisals
might disconfirm their self-conceptions.
Therefore, participants intensified their efforts to
obtain self-verification when they suspected that evaluators’
appraisals challenged their self-views.
People will even go so far as to cease working on
tasks that they have been assigned if they sense that
continuing to do so will bring them nonverifying
feedback. One researcher recruited participants with

positive or negative self-views to work on a proofreading
task. He then informed some participants
that they would be receiving more money than they
deserved (i.e., positive expectancies) or exactly what
they deserved (i.e., neutral expectancies). Selfverification
theory predicts that people’s self-views
will influence how they respond to positive compared
with neutral feedback. This is precisely what happened.
Whereas participants with positive self-views
worked the most when they had positive expectancies,
participants with negative self-views worked the least
when they had positive expectancies. Apparently,
people with negative self-views withdrew effort when
expecting positive outcomes because, unlike those
with positive self-views, they felt undeserving.
Seeing More Self-Confirming
Evidence Than Actually Exists
The research literature provides abundant evidence
that expectancies (including self-conceptions) channel
information processing. This suggests that selfconceptions
may systematically channel people’s
perceptions of their experiences to make their experiences
seem more self-verifying than they actually are.
Self-views may guide at least three distinct aspects
of information processing. One research team focused
on selective attention. Their results showed that
participants with positive self-views spent longer
scrutinizing evaluations when they anticipated that the
evaluations would be positive, and people with negative
self-views spent longer scrutinizing evaluations
when they anticipated that the evaluations would be
negative.
In a second study, the researchers examined biases
in what people remembered about an evaluation that
they had received. They found that participants who
perceived themselves positively remembered more
positive than negative statements. In contrast, those
who perceived themselves negatively remembered
more negative than positive statements.
Finally, numerous investigators have shown that
people tend to interpret information in ways that reinforce
their self-views. For example, one investigator
found that people endorsed the perceptiveness of an
evaluator who confirmed their self-conceptions but
derogated the perceptiveness of an evaluator who
disconfirmed their self-views. Similarly, another
researcher reported that just as people with high selfesteem
remembered feedback as being more favorable
Self-Verification Theory———851
than it actually was, people with low self-esteem
remembered the feedback as being more negative than
it actually was.
In summary, evidence suggests that people may
strive to verify their self-views by gravitating toward
self-confirming partners, by systematically eliciting
self-confirming reactions from others, and by processing
information in ways that exaggerate the extent
to which it appears that others perceive them in a
self-confirming manner. Although these forms of selfverification
may be implemented more or less simultaneously,
people may often deploy them sequentially
(although probably not consciously). For example,
people may first strive to locate partners who verify
one or more self-views. If this fails, they may redouble
their efforts to elicit verification for the self-views in
question or strive to elicit verification for a different
self-view. Failing this, they may strive to see more selfverification
than actually exists. And, failing this, they
may withdraw from the relationship, either psychologically
or in actuality. Through the creative use of
such strategies, people may dramatically increase their
chances of attaining self-verification.
Self-Verification and Related Processes
Self-Verification and Desire for Novelty
Too much predictability can be oppressive. No
matter how much we like something at first—a
scrumptious meal, a beautiful ballad, or a lovely sunset—eventually
it may become too familiar. In fact,
researchers have shown that people dislike highly predictable
phenomena almost as much as they dislike
highly unpredictable ones. People seem to prefer
modest levels of novelty; they want phenomena that
are new enough to be interesting, but not so new as to
be frightening.
This does not mean that people like their relationship
partners to treat them in a novel (i.e., nonverifying)
manner, however. Evidence that people desire novelty
comes primarily from studies of people’s reactions to
art objects and the like. If novel art objects become
overly stimulating, people can simply shift their attention
elsewhere. This is not a viable option should their
spouse suddenly begin treating them as if they were
someone else, for such treatment would pose serious
questions about the integrity of their belief systems.
In the final analysis, people probably finesse their
competing desires for predictability and novelty by
indulging their desire for novelty within contexts in

852———Self-Verification Theory
which surprises are not threatening (e.g., leisure activities),
while seeking coherence and predictability where
it really counts—within their enduring relationships.
Self-Verification and Self-Enhancement
People’s self-verification strivings are apt to be
most influential when the relevant identities and
behaviors matter to them. Thus, for example, the selfview
should be firmly held, the relationship should be
enduring, and the behavior itself should be consequential.
When these conditions are not met, identity
issues will be of little concern and people will selfenhance,
that is, prefer and seek positive evaluations.
That self-verification strivings trump selfenhancement
strivings when people have firmly held
negative self-views does not mean that people with
negative self-views are masochistic or have no desire
to be loved. Even people with very low self-esteem
want to be loved. What sets people with negative selfviews
apart is their ambivalence about praise and
acceptance; although positive evaluations initially
foster joy and warmth, these feelings are later chilled
by incredulity. Tragically, people with negative selfviews
are also ambivalent about negative evaluations;
although such evaluations may reassure them that they
know themselves, their feelings of reassurance are
tempered by sadness that the truth is not kinder.
Happily, people with negative self-views are the
exception rather than the rule. That is, on the balance,
most people tend to view themselves positively.
Although this is beneficial for people themselves, it
presents a challenge to the researchers who study
them. That is, for theorists interested in determining
whether behavior is driven by self-verification or
self-enhancement, participants with positive selfviews
will reveal nothing because both motives
encourage them to seek positive evaluations.
Self-Verification and Self-Concept Change
Although self-verification strivings tend to stabilize
people’s self-views, change may still occur. Perhaps
the most common source of change is set in motion
when the community recognizes a significant change
in a person’s age (e.g., when adolescents become
adults), status (e.g., when students become teachers),
or social role (e.g., when singles get married). The
community may abruptly change the way that it treats
the person. Eventually, the target of such differential
treatment will bring the person’s self-view into accord
with the treatment he or she receives.
Alternatively, people may themselves initiate a
change in a self-view when they conclude that the
self-view is blocking an important goal. Consider, for
example, a person who decides that his or her negative
self-views have led the person to tolerate neglectful
and irresponsible relationship partners. When he or
she realizes that such partners are unlikely to facilitate
the goal of raising a family, the person seeks therapy.
In the hands of a skilled therapist, the person may
develop more favorable self-views, which, in turn,
steer him or her toward relationship partners who
support those goals.
Implications
Self-verification strivings bring stability to people’s
lives, making their experiences more coherent,
orderly, and comprehensible than they would be
otherwise. These processes are adaptive for most
people because most people have positive self-views
and self-verification processes enable them to preserve
these positive self-views. Because self-verification
processes facilitate social interaction, it is not surprising
that they seem to be particularly beneficial to
members of groups. Research indicates that when
members of small groups receive self-verification
from other group members, their commitment to the
group increases and their performance improves.
Self-verification processes seem to be especially useful
in small groups composed of people from diverse
backgrounds because it tends to make people feel
understood, which encourages them to open up to
their coworkers. Opening up, in turn, fosters superior
performance.
Yet, for people with negative self-views, selfverification
strivings may have undesirable consequences.
Such strivings may, for example, cause them to
gravitate toward partners who undermine their feelings
of self-worth, break their hearts, or even abuse them.
And if people with negative self-views seek therapy,
returning home to a self-verifying partner may undo the
progress that was made there. Finally, in the workplace,
the feelings of worthlessness that plague people with
low self-esteem may foster feelings of ambivalence
about receiving raises or even being treated fairly, feelings
that may undercut their propensity to insist that
they get what they deserve from their employers.
William B. Swann, Jr.

See also Expectations; Self; Self-Concept; Self-
Enhancement; Self-Esteem; Symbolic Interactionism
Further Readings
Swann, W. B., Jr. (1983). Self-verification: Bringing social
reality into harmony with the self. In J. Suls &
A. G. Greenwald (Eds.), Social psychological
perspectives on the self (Vol. 2, pp. 33–66). Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Swann, W. B., Jr. (1987). Identity negotiation: Where two
roads meet. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
53, 1038–1051.
Swann, W. B., Jr. (1996). Self-traps: The elusive quest for
higher self-esteem. Freeman: New York.
Swann, W. B., Jr., De La Ronde, C., & Hixon, J. G. (1994).
Authenticity and positivity strivings in marriage and
courtship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
66, 857–869.
Swann, W. B., Jr., Rentfrow, P. J., & Guinn, J. (2002). Selfverification:
The search for coherence. In M. Leary &
J. Tagney, Handbook of self and identity (pp. 367–383).
New York: Guilford Press.
SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL
Definition
The semantic differential is a method of measurement
that uses subjective ratings of a concept or an object
by means of scaling opposite adjectives to study
connotative meaning of the concept or object. For
example, the first level meaning of a car is that of a
transportation device; the second level meaning of
a car can also be its value as a status symbol. The
semantic differential is designed to measure these second
levels—in other words, connotative meanings of
an object. The semantic differential is mostly used for
measuring attitudes toward social and nonsocial
objects, but also to assess quality and type of interactions
between people. The method was developed by
Charles Osgood in the 1950s and has been broadly
used in and outside of psychology.
The semantic differential usually consists of 20 to
30 bipolar rating scales (i.e., the scale is anchored by
an adjective on each side, for example warm–cold) on
which the target object or concept is judged. Basis for
the judgment is not so much the denotative or objective
relation of the object and the adjective anchors of
Semantic Differential———853
the bipolar scales (because it may not be given at first
glance given our car example earlier and the rugged
warm–cold adjective pair) but, rather, the metaphoric
or connotative closeness of the object and the anchors
of the bipolar scales. For example, on a metaphorical
or connotative level, a family car might be judged as
warm, whereas a delivery truck might be judged as
more cold. The denotative meaning, that is, firsthand
meaning, might be quite similar, in terms of being an
adequate transportation device in both cases.
Background
Social psychologists, but also market researchers or
public pollsters, are often interested in the subjective
(i.e., somewhat hidden and varying between individuals)
definition of meaning that an object or concept
has beyond its mere brute facts, as well as in the attitude
of a certain group of people concerning a certain
object or concept.
Meaning can be divided into four different dimensions:
structural (a possible higher-level similarity to
other objects, e.g., a sports car and a truck are different,
but structurally similar because they are both
means of transportation), contextual (depending on
the current context, e.g., a truck serves as a transportation
device, but can also be an vintage car later on),
denotative (objective, brute facts of the car, such as
horsepower), and connotative (more metaphoric, second-level
associations). Osgood was particularly
interested in this fourth dimension of meaning. His
scaling method was meant to measure individual
differences in the connotation of a word describing an
object or a concept.
Construction and Use of
Semantic Differentials
The actual questionnaire consists of a set of bipolar
scales with contrasting adjectives at each end. The
positions on the scale in between can be numbered or
labeled. Note that the neutral middle position is usually
marked by zero and the other positions by numbers
increasing equally in both directions. Thus, each
scale measures the directionality of a reaction (e.g.,
good vs. bad) and its intensity (from neutral via slight
to extreme). In most cases, the universal adjective
pairs are used because translations in many languages
are available. Besides universal semantic differentials,
object- or concept-specific sets of adjective pairs can

854———Semantic Differential
be used. For the latter, great care while constructing
the respective semantic differentials is necessary to
avoid problems (outlined in the next section). For the
universal semantic differential, cross-cultural comparisons
revealed that three basic dimensions of response
account for most of the covariation. These three
dimensions have been labeled “evaluation, potency,
and activity” (EPA) and constitute the semantic space
(i.e., the set of descriptive attributes) of the target to be
judged. Some of the adjective pairs are direct measures
of the dimensions (e.g., good–bad for evaluation,
powerful–powerless for potency, and fast–slow
for activity); others rather indirectly relate to the single
dimensions of the EPA structure. Given the
research conducted, for each new case meaning of the
scales should not just be inferred from previous
results. Dimensionality should be checked so that
scales that do not represent a unidimensional factor
are not summed up.
Analysis of Data
At first glance, analysis of semantic differential data
seems easy, but actually, it is a rather complex procedure.
It is not sufficient to simply average scale ratings
for each individual and to use mean differences on a
judged object or concept. In fact, the underlying factor
structure must be determined and correlations of
similarity between the profiles must be computed.
Data from semantic differentials contain three levels
or modes: the target objects or concepts, the scales
themselves, and the responding individuals. Thus,
before factor analysis, these three-mode data need to
be collapsed into a two-mode structure. This can be
done either by summing over targets for each individual
and scale or by averaging over individuals for
each scale-concept combination. Also, one can deal
with target objects separately, likewise with individuals.
Finally, each individual target object–concept
response can be transferred in a new matrix and interscale
correlations can be computed. Note that different
methods of collapsing modes can produce rather
different correlation patterns.
The original semantic differential is currently
rarely used in social psychology (but widely outside
this field). Yet, a lot of related measurement methods
in social psychology have been influenced by it.
Almost every stereotype rating using, for example,
competence or warmth as its basic dimensions follows
the idea of the original concept. The use of the original
concept is not without pitfalls and problems. This
is especially crucial because many researchers outside
of social psychology are not aware of these issues.
First, the method is partly self-contradictory: For
some words (in this case, the concepts to be measured),
people’s connotations are assumed to differ,
but for other words (in this case the adjectives used as
endpoints of the single scales), this assumption should
not hold. Second, scales may be relevant to the target
objects or concepts to a different degree. These concept-scale
interactions are to be treated carefully by
determining the structure of the dimensions by using
a factor analysis instead of the blind adoption of the
EPA structure. Third, a number of problems arise during
the administration itself. For some individuals,
judging objects on the given scales is hard because the
adjective pairs seem unrelated to the target object. In
addition, respondents may give socially desirable
answers, or can develop a so-called response set,
meaning that they would consistently give moderate
or very extreme answers. Some of these problems can
be overcome by anonymity of the respondents, inclusion
of irrelevant target words to disguise the true purpose
of the semantic differential, or by checking for
response sets. Finally, some problems with the semantic
differential arise from a thoughtless use, administration
of the method, and analysis of its data. Not
every set of bipolar scales and given adjective pairs
constitute a semantic differential. The underlying
dimensions and possible overlap of the adjective pairs
are not assessed in many cases and consequences
resulting from it are ignored.
The semantic differential can be an informative and
economic measure for the connotation of objects or
concepts. However, the user should be fully aware of
the complexity of the method and reflect its value
carefully.
Kai J. Jonas
See also Attitudes; Research Methods; Social Desirability
Bias
Further Readings
Heise, D. R. (1970). The semantic differential and attitude
research. In G. F. Summers (Ed.), Attitude measurement
(pp. 235–253). Chicago: Rand McNally.

Osgood, C. E., Suci, G. J., & Tannenbaum, P. H. (1957). The
measurement of meaning. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
SENSATION SEEKING
Definition
Sensation seeking is a personality trait defined by the
degree to which an individual seeks novel and highly
stimulating activities and experiences. People who are
high in sensation seeking are attracted to the unknown
and as a result consistently seek the new, varied, and
unpredictable. Examples of such behaviors are varied,
but sensation seekers may be attracted to extreme
sports, frequent travel, diverse foods and music, new
sexual partners and experiences, and challenging
existing viewpoints. Often, sensation seekers are
likely to be impulsive and engage in behaviors that
others would find too risky. The risks may be physical
(e.g., skydiving), social (e.g., risking embarrassment
by dressing unusually), financial (e.g., gambling), or
legal (e.g., vandalism). Because sensation seekers are
easily bored, they actively avoid situations and activities
likely to be overly repetitive and predictable.
Theory
Marvin Zuckerman originally developed the concept
of sensation seeking and has contributed the most
important research and relevant theory. Zuckerman’s
work is especially noteworthy because of his firm and
long-standing emphasis on the biological and evolutionary
bases of sensation seeking (and personality
more generally). Specifically, Zuckerman’s basic
proposition is that sensation seeking is based on individual
differences in the optimal level of sensation
caused by biological nervous-system differences.
People who are high in sensation seeking are individuals
who have relatively low-level nervous system
activation and therefore seek arousal from their external
environment by looking for novel stimuli and
engaging in varied experiences. In contrast, individuals
who are low in sensation seeking have a naturally
higher level of internal activation and thus do not tend
to seek sensation from external sources. Zuckerman
posits that sensation seeking is genetically influenced
because it is evolutionary adaptive. Across the animal
Sensation Seeking———855
kingdom, engaging in a certain degree of risky behaviors
will increase the likelihood of survival and reproductive
success (e.g., seeking new territories for food
and new potential mates).
Measurement
Zuckerman first created the Sensation Seeking Scale
in 1964 to measure an individual’s overall level of
susceptibility to excitement or boredom in the context
of sensory deprivation experiments. Current versions
of the self-report measure include four subscales:
(1) Thrill and Adventure Seeking—the extent to
which individuals engage in or are interested in participating
in risky activities such as parachuting or
skiing; (2) Experience Seeking—the degree to which
one seeks excitement through the mind, such as from
music, art, and travel; (3) Disinhibition—seeking sensations
through social stimulation and disinhibitory
behaviors such as drinking and sex; and (4) Boredom
Susceptibility—avoiding monotonous, repetitive, and
boring situations, people, and activities.
Research Findings
Zuckerman has generated an impressive amount of
research on sensation seeking, and his biologically
based approach to understanding personality and
social behavior likely influences the current emphasis
on behavioral genetics and neuroscience in social psychology.
Research supports Zuckerman’s biologically
based theory and has revealed that sensation seeking
plays an important role in many social behaviors.
High sensation seekers have a stronger orienting
response to new stimuli, and their physiological
response is indicative of sensation seeking rather than
avoidance (e.g., decreasing heart rate and increasing
brain activity in the visual cortex). In addition, sensation
seeking has been found to be related to levels of
important brain neurotransmitters (e.g., monoamine
oxidase, norepinephrine, and dopamine), which in
turn have been found to be genetically influenced.
Furthermore, studies of identical and fraternal twins
have found sensation seeking to be one of the personality
traits most likely to be genetically influenced,
with a high degree of heritability (nearly 60%) for the
trait. Evidence also indicates that men tend to score
higher than women in sensation seeking, which is
likely related to the finding that sensation seeking is

856———Sequential Choice
positively correlated with testosterone levels. In addition,
sensation seeking appears to peak during late
adolescence and then decrease with age.
Sensation seeking has been found to be related to a
wide range of overt social behaviors, some of which
are likely caused by the tendency for sensation seekers
to perceive less risk in a given situation than do
low sensation seekers. For example, sensation seekers
more frequently engage in adventure sports (e.g.,
scuba diving); are more likely to work in dangerous
occupations (e.g., firefighter); and have a preference
for rock music, entertainment that portrays humor,
and “warm” paintings with red, orange, and yellow
colors over “cold” paintings with green and blue colors.
Sensation seeking has been suggested as a diseaseprone
personality because many of the behaviors
associated with sensation seeking are potentially
harmful to health whereas others concern social problems.
For example, sensation seeking has been found
predictive of reckless driving, sexual activity, adolescent
delinquency, aggression, hostility, anger, personality
disorders, criminal behavior, alcohol abuse, and
illicit drug use. Not all studies, however, have found
sensation seeking to be a strong predictor of such
behaviors, likely because research also indicates that
the environment and experiences play important roles
in the expression of behaviors such as aggression.
Michael J. Tagler
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Genetic Influences on
Social Behavior; Individual Differences; Personality and
Social Behavior; Risk Taking; Social Neuroscience;
Traits; Twin Studies
Further Readings
Stelmack, R. M. (Ed.). (2004). On the psychobiology of
personality: Essays in honor of Marvin Zuckerman. San
Diego, CA: Elsevier.
Zuckerman, M. (1994). Behavioral expressions and biosocial
bases of sensation seeking. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
SEQUENTIAL CHOICE
Definition
The term sequential choice is mostly used in contrast to
simultaneous choice. Both terms refer to the selection
of a series of items for subsequent consumption, for
example, when selecting a set of snacks to be
consumed one per day during the next week. Sequential
choice refers to choosing a single product at a time and
consuming this product before selecting the next one
(e.g., selecting one of the snacks on the day of its consumption).
In contrast, simultaneous choice is the selection
of several items all at once for consumption one
after another over time (e.g., selecting all snacks simultaneously
before or on the first day of its consumption).
Explanation and Details
The concepts of sequential and simultaneous choice
are used primarily in consumer psychology. Research
shows that the two strategies lead to different decision
outcomes. A person who is choosing products sequentially
makes less diverse decisions than does a person
who is choosing products simultaneously. For example,
a person making a sequential choice often chooses
identical products (e.g., the same chocolate bar) rather
than different ones, whereas a person making choices
simultaneously often chooses a greater variety of
products (e.g., chocolate bars of different tastes).
Explanations for this difference have been studied
experimentally: When making a simultaneous choice,
a person has to think simultaneously about various
consumption situations in the future; that is, in one situation
a person has to select several products that will
be consumed later in several different occasions. This
process requires a lot of time and effort. People also
overestimate the possibility that their preference for a
product will change in the future. Consequently,
people choose a greater variety of products to simplify
their decision. These aspects have no or only little
influence when making choices sequentially.
Compared with a simultaneous choice, sequential
choice is the easier task: A person only has to select the
most preferred product out of several products.
Consequently, experiments show that people making
decisions sequentially feel more confident about their
decisions than making decisions simultaneously.
Which strategy yields a better outcome depends on
the situation: Studies show that especially in situations
when independent products have to be selected (e.g.,
music CDs, snacks), the chosen product is liked more
when choices are made sequentially instead of simultaneously.
The reason is that people who make sequential
choices focus on their needs in a given situation
disregarding any irrelevant information (e.g., product
preferences in the future). Instead, in situations when
interdependent items have to be selected (e.g., furniture

for an apartment), the outcomes of simultaneous choices
are favored over those of sequential choices because the
products will be used together.
Examples of products that have been used to investigate
sequential and simultaneous choices are food
(e.g., snacks, yogurt, meals), drinks (e.g., soft drinks,
juices), music songs, and gambles.
Ursula Szillis
Anke Görzig
See also Consumer Behavior; Decision Making; Satisficing;
Simultaneous Choice
Further Readings
Simonson, I. (1990). The effect of purchase quantity and
timing on variety-seeking behavior. Journal of Marketing
Research, 27, 150–162.
SEX DRIVE
Definition
Sex drive represents a basic motivation to pursue and
initiate sexual activity and gratification and is tightly
regulated by sex hormones—testosterone in men and
both testosterone and estrogen in women. In other
words, sex drive can be thought of as a person’s general
urge to have sex.
History and Modern Usage
Sex drive is thought to have evolved to ensure the survival
of the species by motivating sexual behavior and
hence reproduction. This is consistent with the fact
that children who have not yet reached puberty, who
have low levels of sex hormones and are incapable of
reproduction, do not typically report strong urges for
sex (although they are capable of sexual arousal). The
importance of sex hormones (such as testosterone) to
sex drive has been demonstrated by studies showing
that individuals with abnormally low levels of these
hormones report very weak sexual urges and that
these urges can be increased by administering corrective
doses of such hormones.
Much research has focused on gender differences
in sex drive, specifically the fact that women typically
report weaker motivations for sexual activity than do
men and fewer spontaneous sexual urges and fantasies.
Considerable debate exists about whether such
gender differences reflect cultural repression of
female sexuality or biological differences between
men and women. Both factors likely play a role, but
it is not clear whether one factor is uniformly more
important than the other. Some researchers have
argued that instead of viewing women as having
weaker sex drives, it is more appropriate to view the
female sex drive as more periodic than men’s—that is,
showing notable peaks and valleys over time—because
of fluctuations in women’s hormone levels across the
menstrual cycle. Whereas men have fairly high and
constant levels of testosterone, women’s estrogen
levels peak around the time of ovulation (when
pregnancy is most likely to occur), and this surge corresponds
to an increase in sexual motivation. When
estrogen levels subsequently fall, so does sexual motivation.
This may be an evolved mechanism ensuring
that women are most likely to pursue sexual activity
when such activity is most likely to produce offspring.
Although sex drive is regulated by sex hormones,
it can also be influenced by social, psychological,
and cultural factors. Psychological stress, for example,
is commonly associated with decreased sex drive.
Finally, it is important to distinguish between sex
drive and sexual orientation. Although there have
long been stereotypes that individuals with lesbian,
gay, or bisexual orientations are more sexual in general
than are heterosexuals, and thus have stronger
sex drives, there is no evidence that this is the case.
Rather, the strength of one’s overall sexual motivation
appears to be independent of the object of one’s
sexual motivation.
Lisa M. Diamond
See also Erotic Plasticity; Sexual Desire; Testosterone
Further Readings
Sex Drive———857
Baumeister, R. F., Catanese, K. R., & Vohs, K. D. (2001).
Is there a gender difference in strength of sex drive?
Theoretical views, conceptual distinctions, and a review
of relevant evidence. Personality and Social Psychology
Review, 5, 242–273.
Baumeister, R. F., & Twenge, J. M. (2002). Cultural
suppression of female sexuality. Review of General
Psychology, 6, 166–203.
Fisher, H. E. (1998). Lust, attraction, and attachment
in mammalian reproduction. Human Nature,
9, 23–52.

858———Sexism
Tolman, D. L., & Diamond, L. M. (2001). Desegregating
sexuality research: Combining cultural and biological
perspectives on gender and desire. Annual Review of Sex
Research, 12, 33–74.
Wallen, K. (2001). Risky business: Social context and
hormonal modulation of primate sexual desire. In
W. Everaerd & E. Laan (Eds.), Sexual appetite, desire and
motivation: Energetics of the sexual system (pp. 33–62).
Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van
Wetenschappen.
SEXISM
Definition
Sexism refers to prejudice or bias toward people based
on their gender; it encompasses beliefs (e.g., in different
roles for men and women), emotions (e.g., disliking
powerful women), and behavior (e.g., sexual
harassment) that support gender inequality. Although
originally conceived as antipathy toward women,
sexism includes subjectively positive but patronizing
beliefs (e.g., that men ought to provide for women).
There can also be sexism against men, insofar as
people believe women are superior to men.
History and Current Usage
Research on sexism developed rapidly in the 1970s.
Initially, researchers assumed that sexism, like other
prejudices, represents an antipathy (dislike or hatred)
toward an oppressed group (specifically women,
who have historically had less power than men). The
Attitudes toward Women Scale, which measured
whether respondents thought that women ought to
remain in traditional gender roles (e.g., raising children
rather than working outside the home), became the
most prominent measure of sexist attitudes.
Sexist attitudes, however, inherently involve comparisons
between the sexes. In the late 1980s, Alice H.
Eagly and Antonio Mladinic contrasted attitudes
toward each sex, finding the women are wonderful
effect: As a group, women are rated more favorably
than men (by both women and men). This effect challenged
the idea of sexism as antipathy toward women
because subjectively positive views of women can
nevertheless support gender inequality.
Specifically, women are viewed favorably because
they are perceived as more communal (nice, nurturing,
empathetic), whereas men are viewed as more agentic
(competent, competitive, ambitious). Although women
are likeable, their assigned traits suit them to domestic,
lower status roles (which require nurturing others),
whereas men’s stereotypical traits suit them for high
status, leadership roles. In short, women are better liked
but less well respected than men. Recent research
measuring implicit attitudes (what people automatically
and nonconsciously think) supports this conclusion.
In the 1990s, Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske coined
the term benevolent sexism to refer to subjectively
favorable but patronizing attitudes toward women
(e.g., that women, though wonderful, are weak and
need men’s help). Sexists tend to endorse both benevolent
sexism and hostile sexism (negative attitudes
toward women who seek equality or powerful roles in
society). Benevolent sexism rewards women for staying
in traditional (e.g., domestic) roles, whereas hostile
sexism punishes women who attempt to break out
of those roles. The two forms of sexism work together
to maintain gender inequality. Cross-cultural comparisons
reveal that nations in which people most
strongly endorse benevolent sexism also exhibit the
most hostile sexism and the least gender equality (e.g.,
lower living standards for women relative to men).
Peter Glick
See also Benevolent Sexism; Prejudice, Racism; Stereotypes
and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Eagly, A. H., & Mladinic, A. (1989). Gender stereotypes and
attitudes toward women and men. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 15, 543–558.
Glick, P., & Fiske, S. T. (2001). An ambivalent alliance:
Hostile and sexism as complementary justifications of
gender inequality. American Psychologist, 56, 109–118.
Rudman, L. A. (2005). Rejection of women? Beyond
prejudice as antipathy. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, &
L. A. Rudman (Eds.), On the nature of prejudice: Fifty
years after Allport. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
SEX ROLES
Definition
Sex roles, or gender roles, consist of the social expectations
about the typical and appropriate behavior of

men and women. Generally, the female gender role
includes the expectation that women and girls exhibit
communal traits and behaviors, which focus on interpersonal
skill, expressivity, and emotional sensitivity.
In contrast, the male gender role includes the expectation
that men and boys exhibit agentic traits and
behaviors, which focus on self-orientation, independence,
and assertiveness. In addition, gender roles
include expectations about other elements, such as
cognitive skills, hobbies and interests, and occupational
choice. Because gender roles transcend many
different situations, they can exert considerable influence,
and thus studying them is critical to understanding
the psychology of men and women.
Gender roles include both descriptive norms,
which describe the behavior that is typically observed
in men and women, and injunctive or prescriptive
norms, which mandate the behavior that is socially
approved for men and women. These beliefs are often
consensually held: Studies of gender stereotypes, or
beliefs about men and women, across a wide range of
cultures have found that although some variability
exists, people of different cultures generally agree
about what men and women are like. In general,
people believe that women tend to be more communal
than men, and men tend to be more agentic than
women. Regardless of the accuracy of such beliefs,
this widespread consensus lends them considerable
power. Moreover, gender roles tend to be socially
approved; not only do people agree that men and
women differ, but they also agree that such differences
are good.
Writers and philosophers have long considered the
impact of different expectations for men and women
(for example, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of
the Rights of Woman, published in 1792). The scientific
study of sex roles began in earnest during the
second wave of feminism in the 1970s, when psychologists
began to document and explain sex differences
in behavior and cognitive skills. Explanations of sexrelated
differences include a wide range of social and
biological causes. Although the general convention is
to use the term gender to describe the social and cultural
systems (e.g., socialization) and sex to describe
the biological groupings of men and women, growing
consensus suggests that these causes may not be easily
separated. For instance, biological differences
(e.g., pregnancy) can assume greater or lesser meaning
in cultures with different social or economic
demands.
Roots of Gender Roles
Gender roles are closely intertwined with the social
roles of men and women. In the traditional division of
labor, men occupy high status or leadership roles
more than women do, and women occupy caretaking
and domestic roles more than men do. When a group
of people occupies a particular type of social role,
observers infer that the group possesses the internal
qualities suited to such roles, thereby failing to
account for the power of the role to affect behavior. In
the case of the gender groups, the observation that
men occupy leadership roles and women occupy caretaking
roles leads to the assumption that each group
possesses role-congruent personality traits. Initial evidence
supporting this inferential process came from a
series of experiments in which respondents read
brief scenarios about individuals who were described
as (a) male, female, or sex-unspecified, and (b) an
employee, homemaker, or occupation-unspecified.
When no occupation was specified, inferences followed
traditional gender stereotypes (i.e., that women
were more communal and that men were more agentic).
However, when the target individual was
described as a homemaker, the respondents inferred
that the individual was highly communal and not very
agentic—whether the target individual was male or
female. Conversely, when the target individual was
described as an employee, the respondents inferred
that the individual was highly agentic and not very
communal—again, regardless of the sex of the target
individual. Thus, gender stereotypes stem from the
assumption that men and women occupy different
types of social roles. The expectation that men and
women possess gender-stereotypic traits is then elaborated
into broader gender roles, including beliefs that
men and women are especially suited for their social
roles and approval for gender-stereotypic traits.
Effects of Gender Roles
Sex Roles———859
Because of the consensual and widely approved nature
of gender roles, they have considerable impact on
behavior. Expectations related to gender may begin to
exert an influence extremely early in life. Indeed,
within 24 hours of birth, parents have been found to
describe male and female infants in gender-stereotypic
terms, although the infants did not differ on any objective
measures. Such expectations elicit confirming
behavior, as demonstrated in several experiments

860———Sex Roles
studying the self-fulfilling prophecy. In a classic
experiment, each participant was asked to complete a
set of male- and female-stereotypic tasks along with a
partner, whom they did not meet. The experimenters
varied whether participants believed they were interacting
with a male or female partner. Task assignments
followed gender-stereotypic lines: When participants
believed they were interacting with a partner of the
other sex, they negotiated a more traditional division of
labor. Importantly, this gender-stereotypic division of
labor occurred regardless of the actual sex of the partner.
The simple belief that someone is a man or a
woman—even if incorrect—can elicit behavior that
conforms to gender role expectations.
The power of expectations to elicit confirming
behavior within one specific situation is compelling,
but even more so is the consideration of the power of
expectations culminated over a lifetime. A wide variety
of sources, including parents, teachers, peers, and
the media, convey these expectations, which can have
considerable impact on life choices. For example, the
Eccles model of achievement choices has explicated
how parent and teacher expectations about gender
differences in ability lead to boys’ greater tendency
to excel in achievement-related domains. Moreover,
repeated experience in certain activities may lead to
the development of congruent personality characteristics,
which then may guide behaviors across different
situations.
An important element of the power of gender roles
is that people are rewarded for compliance and punished
for transgressions. Those who violate genderstereotypic
expectations, whether because of sexual
preference, occupational choice, or personality characteristics,
often meet with derogation in their social
environment. Such negativity has been documented in
experimental findings that women who adopt dominant
or self-promoting speech and behavior are penalized
compared with similar men. This derogation can
include sexism, heterosexism, and discrimination.
Sex-role expectations also contribute to differences
in men and women’s behavior. For example, the tendency
for men to aggress more than women is exacerbated
for male-stereotypic behaviors, such as physical
aggression, compared with psychological or verbal
aggression. In contrast, the sex difference decreases or
reverses for relational aggression, in which elements
of relationships are used to harm others. Similarly,
men’s greater tendency to help others especially
appears in unfamiliar or potentially dangerous situations.
Analyses of heroic behavior suggest that women
tend to help in contexts that require long-term commitment
(e.g., kidney donation), whereas men tend to
help in physically demanding or immediate-response
contexts. These patterns of behavior cohere with gender
role expectations that emphasize women’s close
relationships and men’s physicality.
Implications
Despite widespread persistence, gender roles have
also shown malleability. Since the mid-20th century,
these expectations have changed a great deal in the
United States and many other cultures. Women’s
entry into the paid labor force, and especially into
formerly male-dominated professions, has resulted
in the relaxation of many restrictions placed on
women’s behavior. People generally believe that
women have adopted many male-stereotypic qualities
from the past to present, and they expect women
to continue to adopt these qualities in the future.
Men’s roles also reveal some signs of change,
although less so than women’s roles. Time-use data
suggest that men have increased their time spent caring
for children since the 1960s, and expectations of
more involved fatherhood continue to grow. Even so,
men or women who transcend the boundaries of their
gender roles still meet with resistance in many
domains. Nonetheless, the belief that gender roles
are changing may ultimately provide more men and
women with the opportunity to follow their individual
preferences and desires, rather than be bound by
societal expectations.
Amanda B. Diekman
See also Gender Differences; Norms, Prescriptive and
Descriptive; Roles and Role Theory; Sexism
Further Readings
Diekman, A. B., & Eagly, A. H. (2000). Stereotypes as
dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present,
and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
26, 1171–1188.
Eagly, A. H., Beall, A. E., & Sternberg, R. J. (Eds.). (2004).
The psychology of gender (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford
Press.
Eagly, A. H., Wood, W., & Diekman, A. B. (2000). Social
role theory of sex differences and similarities: A current
appraisal. In T. Eckes & H. M. Trautner (Eds.), The
developmental social psychology of gender (pp. 123–174).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Eccles, J. S. (1994). Understanding women’s educational and
occupational choices: Applying the Eccles et al. model of
achievement-related choices. Psychology of Women
Quarterly, 18, 585–609.
Prentice, D. A., & Carranza, E. (2002). What women should
be, shouldn’t be, are allowed to be, and don’t have to be:
The contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes.
Psychology of Women Quarterly, 26, 269–281.
Skrypnek, B. J., & Snyder, M. (1982). On the selfperpetuating
nature of stereotypes about women and men.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 277–291.
SEXUAL DESIRE
Definition
Sexual desire is typically viewed as an interest in
sexual objects or activities. More precisely, it is the
subjective feeling of wanting to engage in sex. Sexual
desire is sometimes, but not always, accompanied by
genital arousal (such as penile erection in men and
vaginal lubrication in women). Sexual desire can be
triggered by a large variety of cues and situations,
including private thoughts, feelings, and fantasies;
erotic materials (such as books, movies, photographs);
and a variety of erotic environments, situations, or
social interactions.
Background and History
Sexual desire is often confused with sex drive, but
these are fundamentally different constructs. Sex
drive represents a basic, biologically mediated motivation
to seek sexual activity or sexual gratification.
In contrast, sexual desire represents a more complex
psychological experience that is not dependent on
hormonal factors. One useful way to think about the
distinction between sex drive and sexual desire comes
from research on nonhuman primates. This research
distinguishes between proceptivity and receptivity.
Proceptivity refers to a basic urge to seek and initiate
sexual activity and is regulated by hormones (for
example, testosterone in men and estrogen in women).
Receptivity, sometimes called arousability, represents
the capacity to become sexually interested or aroused
upon exposure to certain stimuli. Unlike proceptivity,
arousability is not hormone-dependent; in fact, even
individuals with no circulating gonadal hormones
show arousability to erotic stimuli, although they are
not typically motivated to seek sexual gratification.
Proceptive desire and arousability are probably experienced
differently (for example, proceptive desire
feeling more like a strong, motivating craving or
hunger for sex), although no research has directly
addressed this question.
Evidence Regarding
Hormonal and Physiological Aspects
Although the capacity to experience sexual desire is
not hormone-dependent, developmental research
suggests that it might be facilitated or intensified by
hormones. For example, children typically report their
first awareness of sexual desires and attractions as
early as 9 years of age, and some researchers have
linked this transition to the development of the adrenal
gland and the corresponding secretion of adrenal hormones
(which are considered weaker than gonadal
hormones). Notably, however, these experiences do
not typically involve a motivation to seek sexual gratification
or activity. Such a motivation does not typically
develop until after age 12, when the maturational
changes of puberty produce notable surges in levels of
gonadal hormones.
Sexual desire is often accompanied by physiological
sexual arousal, most notably increased blood flow
to the genitals. Yet, this is not always the case. Some
individuals report feeling sexual desire even when
their genitals show no signs of arousal, whereas others
show genital arousal in the absence of psychological
feelings of desire. Thus, physiological arousal
is not a necessary element of sexual desire and
should not be considered a more valid marker of sexual
desire than individuals’ own self-reported feelings.
Researchers do not yet understand why some individuals,
in some situations, show differences between
their psychological and physiological experiences of
sexual desire. These differences are likely influenced
by the large variety of psychological, emotional, cultural,
social, and political factors that can affect individuals’
experiences of sexual desire. In particular, an
individual’s immediate social and interpersonal context
can have a profound affect on how he or she experiences
and interprets moments of desire.
Evidence Regarding
Gender Differences
Sexual Desire———861
Cultural, social, and political factors are also thought
to influence the notable gender differences that have
been documented regarding sexual desire. One of the

862———Sexual Desire
most consistent gender differences is that women tend
to place greater emphasis on interpersonal relationships
as a context for the experience of sexual desire.
This may be because women have been historically
socialized to restrict their sexual feelings and behaviors
to intimate emotional relationships, ideally marital
relationships, whereas males have enjoyed more
social freedom regarding casual sexual behavior.
Another consistent gender difference is that women
typically report less frequent and less intense sexual
desires than do men. In fact, among adult women, the
most common form of sexual disorder is low or absent
sexual desire, which is reported by nearly one third of
American women. Some adolescent and adult women
have difficulty even identifying their own experiences
of desire or find that sexual desires are always accompanied
by feelings of anxiety, shame, fear, or guilt.
This may reflect the fact that women’s sexuality has
historically faced stricter social regulation and repression
than has been the case for men, and that women
have always faced greater danger of sexual violence
and violation than have men. In addition, however,
some researchers have attributed gender differences in
sexual desire to the different evolutionary pressures
that have faced women and men over the course of
human evolution. Specifically, these researchers have
argued that the different strategies associated with
maximum male versus female reproductive success—
respectively, multiple matings with different females
versus selective mating with a few, carefully chosen
males—may have favored the evolution of stronger
sexual desires in men than in women.
Broader Implications
and Importance
There has been much interest in sexual desire as an
index of sexual orientation, typically defined as an
individual’s general sexual disposition toward partners
of the same sex, the opposite sex, or both sexes.
Historically, researchers have considered same-sex
sexual desires to be the most important indicator of a
same-sex (i.e., gay, lesbian, or bisexual) orientation. In
recent years, however, scientific understanding of
same-sex desire and sexual orientation has become
more complicated. It used to be thought that gay, lesbian,
and bisexual individuals were the only people
who ever experienced same-sex sexual desires. We now
know that many individuals who are otherwise completely
heterosexual periodically experience same-sex
sexual desires, even if they have little motivation to act
on those desires. These periodic same-sex desires might
occur at any stage of the life course and can be triggered
by a variety of different stimuli, situations, or
relationships. Having such an experience does not
appear to indicate that an individual will eventually
want to pursue same-sex sexual behavior or will eventually
consider himself or herself lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
Thus, researchers now generally believe that
lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are characterized
by persistent and intense experiences of same-sex
desire that are stable over time.
Some individuals’ desires appear to be more plastic,
meaning flexible, changeable, and sensitive to
external influence than are other individuals’ desires.
In particular, research increasingly suggests that
women’s desires are more plastic than men’s. This is
reflected in the fact that women are more likely than
men to report patterns of bisexual desire (i.e., desires
for partners of both sexes) and more likely to report
desires that run contrary to their general sexual orientation
(i.e., periodic same-sex attractions among
heterosexuals and periodic opposite-sex attractions
among lesbians). For example, recent research has
found that gay men report strong feelings of sexual
desire, accompanied by genital arousal, when shown
sexual depictions of men, but not of women.
Correspondingly, heterosexual men report strong feelings
of sexual desire, accompanied by genital arousal,
when shown sexual depictions of women but not of
men. Very different patterns, however, were found
among women. Specifically, both lesbian and heterosexual
women reported some degree of sexual desire
and genital sexual arousal to both men and women.
Women’s sexual desires also appear to be more sensitive
than do men’s to experiences of emotional bonding.
Some heterosexual women, for example, report
having experienced periodic same-sex desires for
close female friends with whom they share an intense
emotional attachment.
Researchers do not fully understand why this
occurs, nor do they understand how feelings of romantic
affection are linked to, although distinct from, sexual
desire. This is one of the most interesting directions
for future research on sexual desire. Other promising
areas for future research include how the experiential
quality of sexual desire develops and changes over the
entire life course, from childhood to late life, and how
various biological and cultural factors interact to shape
individuals’ experiences of desire.
Lisa M. Diamond

See also Erotic Plasticity; Hormones and Behavior;
Pornography; Sex Drive
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic
plasticity: The female sex drive as socially flexible and
responsive. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 347–374.
Diamond, L. M. (2003). What does sexual orientation orient?
A biobehavioral model distinguishing romantic love and
sexual desire. Psychological Review, 110, 173–192.
Heiman, J. (2001). Sexual desire in human relationships. In
W. Everaerd, E. Laan, & S. Both (Eds.), Sexual appetite,
desire and motivation: Energetics of the sexual system
(pp. 117–134). Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
Regan, P. C., & Berscheid, E. (1996). Beliefs about the state,
goals, and objects of sexual desire. Journal of Sex &
Marital Therapy, 22, 110–120.
Wallen, K. (1995). The evolution of female sexual desire. In
P. R. Abramson & S. D. Pinkerton (Eds.), Sexual
nature/sexual culture (pp. 57–79). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
SEXUAL ECONOMICS THEORY
Definition
Sexual economics theory is an idea about how men
and women think, feel, respond, and behave in a sexual
context. More specifically, this theory says that
men’s and women’s sexual thoughts, feelings, preferences,
and behavior follow fundamental economic
principles.
The basic premise is that sex is something that
women have and men want. Sex is therefore a female
resource that is precious, and hence, women hold on
to it until they are given enough incentive to give it up.
Men’s role is to offer resources that will entice women
into sex. The resources that men give women include
commitment, affection, attention, time, respect, and
money. Note that in this theory, the term sex is used
rather broadly, to refer to not only intercourse but
also touching, kissing, fondling, talking about sex,
and other aspects of sexual behavior.
Sex as a Female Resource
Sexual economics theory uses as a starting point
social exchange theory, which is an idea about how
Sexual Economics Theory———863
each person in a dyad gives up something that he or
she holds to get something of greater benefit in return.
For instance, if a person owns a puppy and a family
wants to buy it, then the family has to want the puppy
more than the money it will give to the person and the
person has to want the money more than the puppy he
or she will give up. If both parties want what the other
has more than what they themselves hold, then the
exchange takes place.
Sometimes one party wants the exchange to take
place more than does the other. This situation gives
rise to an imbalance in power: The party who wants
the exchange less has more control over the relationship
because he or she can hold out until a highly
tantalizing offer is made. In the context of sexual
exchange, men are eager to get sex whereas women
are less interested. Women have more power when
men want sex, and therefore women should be able to
get something valuable in return for giving up sex.
Do men really want sex more than women? The
answer is a definite yes. When researchers have
reviewed all the findings on men’s and women’s sexual
responses, they have observed a strong and consistent
difference, with men (as a group) uniformly
liking and wanting sex more than women do. This gap
means that men have a stronger motivation to obtain
sex than do women, and therefore, they must attempt
to persuade potential sexual partners. According to
sexual economics theory, men give women resources
so that women will allow sex to take place.
This trade of resources in the context of sex has
happened consistently enough through eras and cultures
that societies recognize that female sexuality has
value, whereas male sexuality has no value. Ample
evidence supports the idea that female sexuality is
perceived as having value. For instance, men’s and
women’s feelings about their own virginity are vastly
different, and in line with sexual economic theory. Far
more women than men think of their virginity as a
precious gift to be given only at the most ideal time.
Men, in contrast, far more than women see their
virginity as a shameful condition from which they
want to escape. Society places positive value on
female virginity but not on male virginity.
Another piece of evidence comes from violent relationships.
A woman with a violent partner apparently
would offer sex to distract or soothe her partner if he
seemed to be heading for abuse. In this way, women
traded sex with their partners to lower their risk for
being beaten. Men with violent partners cannot
usually escape victimization by offering sex.

864———Sexual Economics Theory
In one international study of the reasons why
marriages are allowed to dissolve, wives’ adultery
was punished far more severely than was husbands’
adultery. In fact, in many places wives’ adultery was a
viable reason for husbands to be granted a divorce,
whereas husbands’ adultery did not justify divorce.
These findings fit the idea that sex is a female
resource that, in this case, is traded in exchange for
being married. When a woman has sex outside her
marriage, she is in effect giving away something that
the husband considers his.
In one graphic illustration, women prisoners in
Australia who had to endure public floggings could
have the amount of punishment cut in half if they
agreed to be whipped naked to please the male
onlookers. Male prisoners were not given any sexrelated
options as trade for a reduced punishment.
Last, and more germane to the current analysis,
recent research reveals that being around sexual cues
prompts men to give up monetary resources. When
men saw photos of scantily clad women (versus landscape
scenes) or they felt bras (versus T-shirts), they
were willing to part with monetary resources.
Hence, psychological experiments and historical
records show that men trade resources to convince
women to be sexual. These patterns spring from men’s
stronger motivation to obtain sex than women’s,
which leads men to offer women resources in the hope
that they will respond favorably and offer sex.
At What Price?
Women, in general, want to obtain many, high-quality
resources in exchange for providing sex. Men, on the
other hand, want to get sex without having to give up
much. So, in other language, women want to set a
high price, but men only want to pay a low price. The
actual price, the going rate, is influenced by what others
in a given community are doing. For instance, if
women in a given community wait until they receive
an engagement ring before they have any sexual interactions
with their partners, then a specific woman has
a good chance of getting her partner to give her a ring
before she agrees to sex. However, if the women in the
area collectively give sex away cheaply, then any one
woman who wants to receive a marriage proposal and
ring before having sex will likely be unable to ask
such a high price. Seen this way, women are sellers,
and according to basic economic principles, sellers
compete with each other. The more competition
among women, the lower the prices for the men.
However, to curb this downward trend in prices,
women exert pressure on each other to keep the price
of sex high. Women do this mainly through social
punishment (via rumors, interpersonal exclusion, etc.)
of women who offer cheap sex.
Men want the opposite of what women want: They
want low-cost sex. Men would prefer to get sex without
giving up money, commitment, affection, or
time—or at least, to give up these resources when they
want to, not only when they want sex. Just like bidders
in an online auction, men as buyers at times compete
with other men to get sex from a specific woman. In
an opposite fashion to what happens with female competition,
male competition results in the woman being
able to command a higher price.
How do people know what others in the local market
are doing and for what price? Often, they do not
know, although gossip about the sex acts of one’s
neighbors and friends are key determinants of what
people think is going on. Because people often do not
have direct knowledge of the going rate for sex in their
community, perceptions of norms become important.
Men attempt to convince women that sex occurs quite
frequently and at a low price, and women claim that
sex happens much less frequently and only after
appropriate resources have been exchanged. This
amounts to each partner portraying sexual norms in
line with a price level they prefer.
In sum, sexual economics theory is a way of
explaining heterosexual sexual interactions. Women
sell sex (so to speak) and men buy sex, and in doing
so they are exchanging valuable resources. Women
give sexual access to men after men have given them
money, commitment, affection, respect, or time. It
seems crude to think about sexual relations in this
way, but sexual economics theory demonstrates that
basic economic tenets can explain men’s and women’s
negotiations about whether to have sex.
Kathleen D. Vohs
See also Sex Drive; Sexual Desire; Social Exchange Theory
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2004). Sexual economics:
Sex as female resource for social exchange in
heterosexual interactions. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 8, 339–363.

SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Definition
The term sexual harassment came into use in the U.S.
federal courts in the 1970s to describe a form of
gender-based discrimination in the workplace. There
are two legally recognized forms of workplace sexual
harassment: quid pro quo and hostile environment sexual
harassment. In quid pro quo, unwanted sex or genderrelated
behavior constitutes a term or condition of
employment or advancement at work. For example,
an employer might require employees to tolerate the
employer’s sexual advances to maintain employment
or gain promotions. In hostile environment, unwelcome
sex or gender-related behavior creates an intimidating,
hostile, or offensive work environment. For
example, employees might be offended by their
coworkers’ displays of pornography in the workplace.
U.S. law also recognizes sexual harassment as a form
of discrimination in academic settings and in obtaining
fair housing. Although U.S. law does not stipulate the
gender of either perpetrator or target of sexual harassment,
most perpetrators historically have been male
and most targets have been female. Central to the legal
definition of sexual harassment is the notion that sexual
harassment is unwelcome or unwanted behavior.
Whether a behavior is deemed unwelcome ultimately
depends on the interpretations made by the target of
the behavior. In discerning whether something constitutes
sexual harassment, U.S. courts consider whether
a reasonable person similar to the target would judge
such a behavior to be unwelcome under similar circumstances.
Internationally, there are variations in
both the legal and lay understanding of sexual harassment
across countries. However, since the term was
first coined in the United States, the meaning of sexual
harassment in other countries has generally been influenced
by its roots in the U.S. legal system.
Research
Most of the early studies of sexual harassment within
social science were primarily aimed at capturing the
sexually harassing experiences of women in the workplace.
Although different survey researchers have
devised different ways of operationally defining sexual
harassment, the most common experience of
sexually harassing behavior reported by women in
the workplace is generally called gender harassment.
Sexual Harassment———865
Gender harassment is essentially the overt sexist treatment
of women at work. It may include such things as
being told that women are incapable of performing a
job because they are women, having to endure a litany
of offensive and sexist epithets from coworkers or
supervisors, or being inundated with offensive pornographic
images at work. The aim of gender harassment
is not to gain sexual access to the target; rather,
it is to express hostile attitudes based on a target’s
gender. The next most common experience reported
by working women in surveys is called unwanted sexual
attention. This type of sexual harassment may
include verbal behavior such as persistent requests for
dates despite rejection and nonverbal behavior such as
unwelcome sexual touching, conspicuous leering, and
sexually suggestive gestures. The third and rarest type
of sexually harassing behavior documented from
surveys of female workers is called sexual coercion.
Sexual coercion is essentially synonymous with the
legal term quid pro quo sexual harassment. It is
attempting to use threats or bribes to gain sexual
access to a target. As research began to explore men as
well as women as the potential targets of sexually
harassing behavior, it became clear that even though
men were less often targeted, a significant portion of
men also experienced such behavior. In addition, a
form of gender harassment sometimes called gender
role enforcement or challenges to sexual identity was
identified as an experience for men. This form of sexually
harassing behavior includes ridiculing men who
do not conform to masculine stereotypes. More recent
studies have found that women may also experience
similar harassment and find it just as emotionally
upsetting as men do.
Social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention
to the study of factors that influence interpretations
of behaviors as sexual harassment. Although
women and men more often agree than disagree on
what should be considered sexual harassment, women
have been found to interpret a broader range of behaviors
as potentially sexual harassment. Women and
men are less likely to disagree when it comes to more
severe behaviors like sexual coercion and more likely
to show some disagreement when it comes to less
severe behaviors like unwanted sexual attention and
gender harassment. Labeling one’s experiences as
sexual harassment is related in part to their frequency
and the severity of the consequences of these experiences.
Many people who do not label their experiences
as sexual harassment nevertheless suffer from

866———Sexual Selection
negative psychological effects as the result of having
been subjected to sexually harassing behavior.
Experiencing sexually harassing behavior at work
may be considered a form of work-related stress
and has negative consequences on the personal and
professional lives of men and women.
Research has found that sexually harassing
behavior is more likely to occur in organizational settings
where such behavior is tolerated or condoned.
Traditionally masculine jobs where men dominate
in numbers are settings in which sexually harassing
behavior is also more likely to occur. As mentioned
earlier, most perpetrators are men, but researchers
have found that men vary widely in their proclivities
for sexually harassing behavior. Individual differences
in basic social cognition processes, such as associating
ideas about sexuality with ideas about social
power, seem to be correlated with male proclivities for
some forms of sexually harassing behavior.
Interventions
Research on interventions designed to reduce sexually
harassing behavior has produced mixed results.
Although participants in training and educational programs
conducted in organizational contexts generally
report that such experiences are useful, there is little
evidence that the mere experience or even the thoroughness
of training actually reduces sexual harassment
rates in organizations. In fact, some studies have
found increased reporting of sexual harassment following
training, perhaps attributable to enhancements
of awareness. One possible way that training in an
organization can have a positive effect is simply by
communicating to employees that management takes
the topic seriously and providing awareness of mechanisms
for targets to report complaints.
See also Bullying; Discrimination; Sexism
Further Readings
John B. Pryor
Amy Mast
Gutek, B. A., & Done, R. S. (2001). Sexual harassment. In
R. K. Unger (Ed), Handbook of the psychology of women
and gender (pp. 367–387). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Pryor, J. B., & Fitzgerald, L. F. (2003). Sexual harassment
research in the United States. In S. Einarsen, H. Hoel,
D. Zapf & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and emotional
abuse in the workplace: International perspectives in research
and practice (pp. 79–100). London: Taylor & Francis.
SEXUAL SELECTION
Definition
Evolution is driven not just by the survival of the fittest
(natural selection) but also by the reproduction of the
sexiest (sexual selection). If an animal finds food and
avoids predators but can’t find a mate, the animal is an
evolutionary dead end. Its genes will die out when it
dies. This is why sexual selection is so important: It is
the evolutionary gateway to genetic immortality. Every
one of your ancestors managed not just to survive to
adulthood but also to attract a willing sexual partner.
Every one of your 30,000 genes has passed through
thousands of generations of successful courtship, mating,
and parenting. Sexual selection is another term for
reproductive competition, competition to attract more
high-quality mates than one’s sexual rivals, to have
more high-quality offspring.
History and Background
Charles Darwin discovered sexual selection and published
a massive book about it in 1871, but sexual
selection was usually ignored in biology until the
1970s and in psychology until the 1990s. Since then,
biologists have realized that many traits in animals
have been shaped by sexual selection, either as sexual
ornaments to attract mates (e.g., the peacock’s tail, the
nightingale’s song, the female baboon’s bright red
bottom) or as weapons for sexual competition against
rivals (e.g., deer antlers, gorilla muscles, big male
baboon teeth). Since about 1990, evolutionary psychologists
have also realized that many human traits
have been shaped by sexual selection. These sexually
selected traits include (a) socially salient physical
traits such as female breasts and buttocks, and male
beards, upper-body muscles, and penises; (b) personperception
abilities to judge the attractiveness of
potential mates, including their beauty, kindness,
intelligence, and status; (c) self-presentation abilities
(ways of showing off in courtship) such as language,
art, music, and humor; and (d) social emotions such as
lust, love, jealousy, anger, and ambition.

Importance
Sex differences in bodies and brains are usually the
result of sexual selection. Male mammals can produce
offspring just by having sex for a few minutes if they
find a willing female, whereas female mammals can
only produce offspring if they get pregnant for a long
time and produce milk for their offspring. Thus, males
can potentially have a lot more offspring than females
can. This makes fertile females a much more precious,
limited resource than fertile males are. For these
reasons, male mammals typically compete much
more intensely to attract mates than females do, and
females are typically much more choosy about their
mates than males are. This leads to many human sex
differences that appear across all known cultures,
including stronger male motivations to seek status,
kill rivals, seduce multiple partners, and take conspicuously
heroic risks for the public good.
Yet, sexual selection is not restricted to explaining
sex differences. Sexual selection can also explain
mating-related traits that are shared by both sexes,
including many uniquely human physical traits (e.g.,
long head hair, everted lips, smooth hairless skin) and
mental traits (e.g., creativity, language, social intelligence,
moral virtues). Humans can feel lust for other
people’s bodies, but humans typically fall in love with
other people for their impressive minds, great personalities,
and social virtues. Or, humans fall out of love
with other people because they realize the other people
are stupid, boring, selfish, or violent. Thus, human
mate choice (choice of sexual partners) depends a lot
on the social psychology shared by both sexes, the way
people perceive what others are thinking and feeling.
Sexual selection can also explain sexual maturation,
the changes from puberty through adolescence
and young adulthood, as male and female bodies and
brains get ready to enter the mating market. Sexual
selection may also be important in explaining individual
differences in personality (such as the Big Five
personality traits: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness,
Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism),
which can be understood as different mating
strategies that have different strengths and weaknesses.
Finally, sexual selection is important in understanding
many social psychology topics related to
sexual competition, such as aggression, status, selfpresentation,
prejudice, and prosocial behavior.
Sexual selection is especially good at explaining
weird social behavior. If someone is doing something
that seems irrational, foolish, bizarre, or risky, it’s
probably because that person is producing some sort
of courtship display to attract a mate, by trying to
attain higher sexual status in some subculture that you
don’t understand. Just as different animal species
have very different sexual ornaments, different human
cultures develop different ways to compete for sexual
status, to attract mates, and to derogate rivals. But
underneath this cultural variability, a few key traits are
always displayed and considered attractive: physical
health and fertility, mental health, intelligence, kindness,
charisma, social popularity, and social status.
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Evolutionary
Psychology; Sexual Economics Theory
Further Readings
Sexual Strategies Theory———867
Geoffrey Miller
Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of
human mating (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Cronin, H. (1993). The ant and the peacock: Altruism and
sexual selection from Darwin to today. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Judson, O. (2003). Dr. Tatiana’s sex advice to all creation.
New York: Owl Books.
Miller, G. F. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice
shaped the evolution of human nature. New York:
Doubleday.
Ridley, M. (2003). The red queen: Sex and the evolution of
human nature. New York: HarperPerennial.
SEXUAL STRATEGIES THEORY
Definition
Strategies are the means people use to achieve goals. If
the goal is to obtain food, for example, one strategy
might be to hunt, another strategy to gather, and a third
strategy to scavenge. Sexual strategies are the means
people use to achieve sexual or mating goals. Humans
have evolved a menu of sexual strategies that includes,
at a minimum, short-term and long-term mating. The
sexes differ sharply in the adaptive problems they must
solve to carry out each strategy successfully and so
have evolved profoundly different sexual psychologies.
Nonetheless, they share a universal emotion of
love, which unites their reproductive interests in mutually
produced children and reveals a feature of human
sexual strategies that they profoundly share.

868———Sexual Strategies Theory
Critical Variables
The sexual strategies theory begins with two critical
variables that heavily influence sexual or mating
behavior. The first is the temporal variable (time
span), which ranges from short-term at one end to
long-term mating at the other. Short-term mating has
been given many names: one-night stands, hooking
up, brief affairs, temporary liaisons. Long-term mating
typically involves a prolonged commitment to one
mate during a period of years, decades, or a lifetime.
The ends of this temporal dimension are anchored
using the descriptively neutral terms short-term mating
and long-term mating. Matings of intermediate
duration, such as dating, going steady, brief marriages,
and intermediate-length affairs, fall between
these points. Before the advent of sexual strategies
theory in 1993, theories designed to explain human
mating focused nearly exclusively on long-term mating
and neglected the fact that short-term mating is a
common sexual strategy across most cultures.
The second critical variable that forms the foundation
of sexual strategies theory is biological sex—
whether one is male or female. Biological sex
becomes critical to human mating because men and
women have recurrently faced profoundly different
adaptive mating problems. These recurrently different
problems stem from sexual asymmetries in human
reproductive biology. Fertilization occurs internally
within women, not within men; this has created an
adaptive problem for men that no woman has ever
faced—the problem of paternity uncertainty. Men
never know if they are the biological fathers of
their children. Women always know that they are the
biological mothers.
Internal female fertilization also creates a critical
adaptive problem for women: the selection of which
male will fertilize her eggs. Women, not men, bear the
metabolic costs of pregnancy and breast-feeding. This
has rendered women, the high-investing sex, an extraordinarily
valuable reproductive resource for men, the
lower investing sex.
As a rule, across thousands of species, the higher
investing sex (often, but not always the female) tends
to be choosy or discriminating about its choice of a
mate. The reasons center on the costs of making a
poor mate choice and the benefits of making a wise
mate choice. The higher investing sex suffers greater
costs of making a poor mate choice. A woman who
makes a poor mate choice, for example, risks becoming
pregnant with a man who will not stay around to help
her and invest in her child. She also risks passing on
genes to her children that are inferior (e.g., genes for
poor health) to those that would occur if she were to
make a wiser choice (e.g., genes for good health). The
lower-investing sex, in contrast, suffers fewer costs of
making a poor mate choice—he can go on to reproduce
with other partners, an option the higher investing
sex is less free to do.
Another general rule of mating is that the lower
investing sex tends to be more competitive with members
of its own sex for sexual access to members of the
valuable members of the high-investing sex. In summary,
considering only the obligatory investment, one
could predict that women would be generally more
choosy and discriminating than men in their mate
choices, whereas men more than women would be
more competitive with their own sex for sexual access.
Adaptive Problems and Evidence
According to sexual strategies theory, however, both
men and women have evolved to pursue both shortterm
(sometimes purely sexual) and long-term mating
strategies. Sexual strategies theory provides a theory
of the different adaptive problems men and women
confront when pursuing short-term and long-term
mating strategies. This entry describes a few of these
adaptive problems and a few pieces of evidence supporting
hypotheses about how they evolved to solve
those problems.
Short-Term Mating
Consider first the adaptive problems men must
solve when pursuing a short-term mating strategy.
One is identifying women who are potentially sexually
accessible. A second is identifying women who
are fertile. A third adaptive problem is providing the
motivational impetus for pursuing a variety of different
sexual partners. A fourth is deploying successful
strategies of seduction. A fifth is minimizing the time
that elapses before seeking sexual intercourse. A sixth
is avoiding becoming encumbered in high-investment,
high-commitment relationships that would interfere
with the successful pursuit of short-term mating.
Empirical studies support several hypothesized
evolved solutions to these problems. Men pursuing a
short-term mating strategy, for example, avoid women
who are prudish and are not deterred by women who

show signs of promiscuity (sexual accessibility problem).
Men typically express a desire for a variety of
different sex partners, have frequent sexual fantasies
involving different women, and let less time elapse
before seeking sexual intercourse (compared with
women). Men are more likely than women to lie about
the depth of their emotional commitment to seduce a
woman. Men who pursue short-term mating experience
a psychological shift, such that they find their sex
partners less attractive immediately after intercourse—
a possible adaptation to motivate these men to seek a
hasty postcopulatory departure. The success of shortterm
mating requires not becoming entangled in a
relationship with heavy commitment. In short, men
show many psychological, emotional, and behavioral
characteristics that suggest that short-term mating has
evolved as one strategy within their mating menu.
Women confront a somewhat different suite of
adaptive problems when pursuing a short-term mating
strategy. For men, the adaptive function of short-term
mating is straightforward, a direct increase in reproductive
success as a consequence of successfully
inseminating a variety of women. Women, in contrast,
cannot increase their offspring production directly
through short-term mating. Adding an additional sex
partner does not directly translate into additional
offspring, given their heavy metabolic investment to
produce a single child (a 9-month pregnancy).
Instead, women can potentially benefit, in the currency
of reproductive success, by obtaining at least
three potential benefits from short-term mating: (1)
obtaining superior genes from a man who is high in
desirability; (2) obtaining additional resources for herself
or her children, which could be critical in lean
times, food shortages, or other evolutionary bottlenecks;
and (3) using short-term mating as a mateswitching
strategy, either to provide a means for
exiting one relationship or as a means of trading up to
a better mating relationship.
Empirical studies support the hypothesis that
women pursue short-term matings to obtain each of
these benefits. For example, women pursuing shortterm
mating place a greater premium on physically
symmetrical, masculine-looking, and physically attractive
men, markers of good genes. They also state that
obtaining economic and material resources are one of
the reliable benefits they obtain from short-term mating.
And women dissatisfied with their existing longterm
relationship are more likely than are satisfied
women to have short-term sexual affairs, using them as
a means of exiting an existing relationship or exploring
whether they can locate better mates.
Long-Term Mating
Sexual Strategies Theory———869
Short-term mating, of course, is not the only strategy
in the menu of human mating strategies. Both
sexes also pursue long-term mating: forming an emotional
bond with one partner and committing sexual,
psychological, and economic resources to that partner
over the long term. When pursuing a long-term mating
strategy, however, women and men still differ in several
important respects. The sexes differ in their mate
selection criteria, what they want in a long-term mate.
Men seeking a long-term mate historically have
had to solve the problem of identifying a fertile
woman. Men mating with infertile women failed to
become ancestors. All modern humans are descendants
of men who mated with fertile women. As their
descendants, modern men carry with them the psychological
desires that led to the success of their
ancestors.
How did men solve the problem of selecting a fertile
woman? They focused on two important classes of
cues known to be linked to fertility: cues to youth and
cues to health. Physical appearance provides a wealth
of information about youth and health status, and
hence fertility status. A study of 10,047 individuals
from six continents and five islands discovered that
men in all cultures on average place a greater premium
on physical attractiveness when seeking a longterm
mate, compared with women. Men universally
also desire women who are young, and typically
younger than they are; in contrast, women desire men
who are a bit older than they are. In summary, men’s
desires in long-term mating center heavily on cues to
youth and health, and hence fertility.
Ancestral women faced a different adaptive problem:
securing resources for herself and her offspring
to increase the odds that she would survive through
pregnancy and breast-feeding, and that her children
would survive and thrive. Ancestral women who were
indifferent to a man’s ability and willingness to commit
resources to her and her children suffered in survival
and reproductive success. Modern women have
inherited the mate preferences of their successful
ancestral mothers. In the 37-culture study, women
indeed placed a greater value on a man’s financial status,
social status, and cues known to lead to resources:
ambition, hard work, and intelligence.

870———Shame
Love
Although there are universal sex differences in what
women and men want in a long-term mate, both sexes
universally want love. Love is a powerful evolved
emotion that helped men and women remain committed
to each other through thick and thin. Love helped
bond ancestral men and women together, unite their
reproductive interests in mutually produced offspring,
and is powerfully linked to long-term mating.
David M. Buss
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Love; Romantic Love;
Sexual Selection
Further Readings
Bleske-Rechek, A., & Buss, D. M. (2006). Sexual strategies
pursued and mate attraction tactics deployed. Personality
and Individual Differences, 40, 1299–1311.
Buss, D. M. (2000). The dangerous passion: Why jealousy is
as necessary as love and sex. New York: Free Press.
Buss, D. M. (2003). The evolution of desire: Strategies of
human mating (Rev. ed.). New York: Basic Books.
Buss, D. M. (2003). Sexual strategies: A journey into
controversy. Psychological Inquiry, 14, 217–224.
Buss, D. M. (2005). True love. In J. Brockman (Ed.), What
we believe but cannot prove: Today’s leading thinkers on
science in the age of uncertainty (pp. 55–56). New York:
Free Press.
Haselton, M., Buss, D. M., Oubaid, V., & Angleitner, A.
(2005). Sex, lies, and strategic interference: The
psychology of deception between the sexes. Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin, 31, 3–23.
SHAME
Definition
Shame is one of the most overlooked emotions, at
least among individuals residing in Western cultures.
Feelings of shame can have a profound effect on one’s
level of psychological adjustment and one’s relationships
with others, but these feelings nonetheless often
go undetected. People rarely speak of their shame
experiences. Denial and a desire for concealment are
part of the phenomenology of shame itself. People
shrink from their own feelings of shame, just as they
recoil from others in the midst of a shame experience.
To further complicate matters, shame can masquerade
as other emotions, hiding behind guilt, lurking behind
anger, fueling despair and depression.
People’s tendency to confuse shame with guilt has
helped relegate shame to a footnote in psychology’s first
century. In professional writings and in everyday conversation,
shame and guilt are mentioned in the same
breath as emotion synonyms, or (perhaps more often)
guilt is used as a catchall term for elements of both emotions.
Even the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund
Freud, rarely distinguished between shame and guilt.
Difference Between Shame and Guilt
Numerous psychologists and anthropologists have
attempted to differentiate between these moral emotions.
Accounts of the difference between shame and
guilt fall into three categories: (1) a distinction based
on the types of events that give rise to the emotions,
(2) a distinction based on the public versus private
nature of the transgression, and (3) a distinction based
on the degree to which the person views the emotioneliciting
event as a failure of self or behavior.
Theorists who focus on types of events assume that
certain kinds of situations lead to shame, whereas
other kinds of situations lead to guilt. For example,
behaviors that cause harm to others elicit guilt,
whereas behaviors that violate social conventions (e.g.,
burping in public, poor table manners, unusual sexual
behavior) elicit shame. Social psychological research,
however, indicates that the type of event has surprisingly
little to do with the distinction between shame
and guilt. When people are asked to describe personal
shame and personal guilt experiences, most types of
events (e.g., lying, cheating, stealing, sex, failing to
help another, disobeying parents) are cited by some
people in connection with feelings of shame and by
other people in connection with guilt. Some evidence
indicates that shame is evoked by a broader range of
situations including both moral and nonmoral failures
and transgressions (e.g., harming others and violating
social conventions) whereas guilt is more specifically
linked to transgressions in the moral realm, as traditionally
defined. But on balance, the types of situations
that cause shame and guilt are remarkably similar.
Another frequently cited distinction between shame
and guilt is the long-standing notion that shame is a
more public emotion than guilt is, arising from public
exposure and disapproval, whereas guilt is a more private
experience arising from self-generated pangs of
conscience. As it turns out, research has not supported
this public–private distinction in terms of the actual

characteristics of the emotion-eliciting situation. For
example, when researchers analyze people’s descriptions
of personal shame and guilt experiences, others
are no more likely to be aware of shame-inducing
behaviors than of guilt-inducing behaviors.
Where does this notion that shame is a more public
emotion come from? Although shame- and guiltinducing
situations are equally public (in the likelihood
that others are present and aware of the failure or transgression),
people pay attention to different things when
they feel shame compared with when they feel guilt.
Specifically, when feeling guilt, people are apt to be
aware of their effects on others (e.g., how much a careless
remark hurt a friend or how much they disappointed
their parents). In contrast, when feeling shame, people
are more inclined to worry about how others might evaluate
them (e.g., whether a friend might think he or she
is a jerk, or whether the parents might regard him or her
as a failure). In short, when feeling shame people often
focus on others’ evaluations, but actual public exposure
isn’t any more likely than in the case of guilt.
A third basis for distinguishing between shame and
guilt centers on the object of one’s negative evaluation,
and this is the distinction most strongly supported
by social psychological research. When people
feel guilt, they feel badly about a specific behavior.
When people feel shame, they feel badly about themselves.
Although this differential emphasis on self (“I
did that horrible thing”) versus behavior (“I did that
horrible thing”) may seem minor, it sets the stage for
very different emotional experiences and very different
patterns of motivation and subsequent behavior.
Shame is an especially painful emotion because
one’s core self, not simply one’s behavior, is the issue.
Shame involves a painful scrutiny of the entire self, a
feeling that “I am an unworthy, incompetent, or bad
person.” People in the midst of a shame experience
often report a sense of shrinking, of being small. They
feel worthless and powerless. And they feel exposed.
Although shame does not necessarily involve an
actual observing audience present to witness one’s
shortcomings, there is often the imagery of how one’s
defective self would appear to others—as unworthy
and reprehensible.
Motivations and Behaviors
Associated With Shame
Phenomenological studies indicate that shame often
motivates avoidance, defensiveness, and denial.
People feeling shame often report a desire to flee from
the shame-inducing situation, to “sink into the floor
and disappear.” Denial of responsibility (or of the
behavior itself) is not uncommon. Shamed individuals
are motivated to hide their misdeeds and their very
selves from others, in an effort to escape the pain of
shame. In addition to motivating avoidant behavior,
research indicates that shame often prompts externalization
blame and anger. During a shame experience,
hostility is initially directed inward, toward the self
(“I’m such a loser”). But because this entails such a
global negative self-assessment, the person in the
midst of a shame episode is apt to feel trapped and
overwhelmed. As a consequence, shamed people are
inclined to become defensive. One way to protect the
self, and to regain a sense of control, is to redirect that
hostility and blame outward. Rather than accepting
responsibility for having hurt a friend’s feelings, for
example, a shamed individual is apt to come up with
excuses, deny that he or she said anything offensive,
and even blame the friend for overreacting or misinterpreting.
Not all anger is based in shame, especially
irrational rage and anger, seemingly erupting out of
the blue, has its roots in underlying feelings of shame.
In the extreme, shame can lead to aggression and
violence, with tragic consequences. Clinicians and
researchers identify shame as a common element in
situations involving domestic violence. During the
months leading up to the Columbine killings and other
school shootings, the shooters appear to have experienced
deep feelings of shame. Collective shame and
humiliation has even been cited by historians and
political observers in analyses of the causes of ethnic
strife, genocide, and international conflict.
Shame and Psychological
Symptoms
Shame———871
Researchers consistently report a relationship between
shame and whole host of psychological symptoms,
including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress
disorder, substance abuse, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction,
and suicidal ideation. People who frequently
experience shame are at greater risk to develop psychological
symptoms, compared with their nonshameprone
peers.
Is Shame Really a Moral Emotion?
Shame is often cited as a moral emotion, caused by
violations of important moral or social standards. A
widely held assumption is that painful feelings of

872———Shifting Standards
shame help people avoid doing wrong, decreasing
the likelihood of transgression and impropriety. As it
turns out, there is surprisingly little evidence of this
inhibitory function of shame. Shame is not as effective
as guilt in guiding one down a moral path. For example,
adults’ self-reported moral behaviors are substantially
positively correlated with proneness to guilt but
unrelated to proneness to shame. Similarly, children
with a well-developed capacity to feel guilt are less
likely to be arrested and incarcerated in their teens.
Shame-prone children are not so advantaged. Among
incarcerated offenders, guilt but not shame is associated
with lowers levels of “criminal thinking.”
Together with research linking shame to impaired
empathy, denial of responsibility, and destructive
expressions of anger, there is good reason to question
the moral self-regulatory function of shame.
Adaptive Functions of Shame
The theory and research reviewed thus far has emphasized
the dark side of shame, underscoring its negative
consequences for psychological adjustment and for
interpersonal behavior. Why, then, do people have the
capacity to experience this emotion? What adaptive
purpose might it serve?”
Psychologists taking a sociobiological approach
have focused on the appeasement functions of shame.
In the social hierarchy of apes, shame serves as an
important signal to dominant apes that lower ranked
animals recognize their place. Submissive, shame-like
reactions (hunched posture, downcast eyes) reaffirm
the social hierarchy and seem to diffuse aggressive
interactions. Dominant apes are much less likely to
attack subordinate apes when subordinates signal submission
in this way. At earlier stages of human evolution,
shame likely served similar functions. It has also
been suggested that the motivation to withdraw, so
often a component of the shame experience, may be
useful in interrupting potentially threatening social
interactions until the shamed individual has a chance
to regroup. Overall, the weight of scientific evidence
indicates that guilt is the more moral, adaptive
response to sins and transgressions in a contemporary
human society that is more egalitarian than hierarchical
in structure.
June Price Tangney
See also Approach–Avoidance Conflict; Guilt; Moral
Emotions; Self; Sociobiology
Further Readings
Tangney, J. P. (1990). Assessing individual differences in
proneness to shame and guilt: Development of the Self-
Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 102–111.
Tangney, J. P., Miller, R. S., Flicker, L., & Barlow, D. H.
(1996). Are shame, guilt, and embarrassment distinct
emotions? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
70, 1256–1269.
SHIFTING STANDARDS
Definition
Much of people’s conversation about others includes
descriptions such as “he’s very tall” or “she’s smart”
or “he’s really aggressive!” The concept of shifting
standards refers to the idea that these descriptions are
made with reference to some standard of judgment,
and that this standard may shift depending on the
person or object being described. How tall is tall?
Presumably, standards of tallness—what qualifies as
tall versus short—differ depending on whether a man
or a woman (or a child) is being described. Similarly,
standards for judging intelligence, aggressiveness, or
any other attribute may shift or vary for different
categories of people. Research on shifting standards
has suggested that stereotypes about groups, such as
beliefs that men are more aggressive than women or
that African Americans are better athletes than White
Americans, may lead to the use of different (shifting)
standards to judge individual members of these
groups. The result is that the same description or
adjective label may mean something substantially different
depending on whom it describes. For example,
because standards for height and aggression are lower
for women than men, a woman might be labeled
“tall” if she were 5'9" whereas a 5'9" man would not;
“interrupting a conversation” might warrant a label of
“assertive” in a woman more so than in a man.
Background
Many psychologists have been interested in how judgments
are made—whether they involve objects (such as
estimating the brightness of lights or the heaviness of
weights), other people, or the self. Every type of judgment
must be made with reference to some standard,

and usually that standard is based on the immediately
preceding context, or on what a person has come to
expect. As psychologist Harry Helson noted in his theory
of adaptation level, a normally lighted room will
seem bright if you’ve been adapted to the dark, but
will seem dark if you’ve previously been exposed to
bright sunlight. With regard to judgments of people, a
1986 experiment by Paul Herr demonstrated that an
individual may seem hostile if you’ve recently been
thinking about nonhostile people such as Santa Claus
or the Pope, but rather nonhostile if you’ve previously
been thinking about hostile people such as Adolf
Hitler and Charles Manson. The previous exposure
provides the context in which the new target stimulus
or person is judged.
Monica Biernat and her colleagues first argued in
a 1991 paper that stereotypes about groups function
in the same way as other context effects. Stereotypes
provide people with expectations about what other
people will be like, and therefore serve as standards
against which we judge them. If one expects that men
have lesser verbal skills than women do, or that
African Americans are more athletic than Whites are,
the standards will shift depending on whether one is
judging men or women, African Americans or Whites.
The result could be, paradoxically, that a man is
judged even more verbally skilled than a comparably
performing woman, or that a White actor is judged
more athletic than a Black actor (because standards
are lower in each case). But this doesn’t mean that no
stereotyping has occurred, or even that reverse stereotyping
has occurred. Instead, the stereotype gives rise
to different standards, which leads people to judge
individual members of groups in comparison with
expectations for their groups as a whole.
Evidence
To demonstrate that stereotypes lead to the use of
shifting standards, a line of research has compared the
kinds of subjective judgments people make of others
with more objective judgments. For example, when
asked to judge the heights of individual men and
women (depicted in photographs), estimates in inches
provide an objective indicator, but estimates in short
versus tall descriptors are subjective (i.e., their meaning
is not fixed). A typical finding in research comparing
these judgments is that objective judgments reveal
that people perceive the pictured men as taller than the
pictured women. But when asked to estimate how
Shifting Standards———873
short versus tall these same individuals are, perceivers
generally judge the men and women as equally tall.
Presumably this occurs because the standard has
shifted: Even though the men are seen as objectively
taller, they are not so subjectively tall because standards
for tallness are higher.
In another demonstration of shifting standards,
judges were asked to view photographs of men and
women and estimate either how much money they
made (in dollars earned per year) or to estimate how
financially successful they were (a subjective judgment).
The men were judged to earn more money than
the women, but the women were judged more financially
successful than the men. Again, because standards
for financial success are higher for men than
women, a woman could earn $9,000 less than a man
and still be considered more financially successful.
Across a wide variety of domains—including estimates
of athletic ability and verbal skill in the case of
racial groups; estimates of writing quality and leadership
competence in the case of gender groups—
similar patterns have emerged. Indeed, the signature
evidence that standards have shifted is that objective
judgments reveal straightforward stereotyping effects
(e.g., men are judged objectively better leaders than
women), but subjective judgments show reductions or
reversals of this pattern.
Evidence also indicates that this pattern extends to
how individuals actually behave toward members of
stereotyped groups. For example, in one study focusing
on gender and athleticism, role-playing managers
of a coed softball team favored male over female players
in many decisions: Managers were more likely to
choose men for the team and assign them to valued
positions. At the same time, however, female players
were praised more than were male players when they
successfully hit a single while at bat. Because expectations
for women were low, judges were more
impressed by a hit from a woman than from a man.
Implications
Judging others is a big part of social life, and in some
settings, such as school or the workplace, the judgments
people form may have real implications for
their life outcomes. That stereotypes may tarnish these
judgments has always been a cause for concern, but
research on shifting standards has highlighted that
the effects of stereotypes on judgments may be quite
complex. Imagine the female softball player who

874———Shyness
finds herself benched, but patted on the back when she
does get the chance to occasionally catch a ball. Or
think of the African American employee who finds
that he is lavishly praised for completing the simplest
of tasks, but is nonetheless passed over for a promotion.
This pattern of conflicting feedback must be disconcerting
at best. It may also allow judges (the team
manager, the employer) to deny the fact that bias is
operating. More generally, the fact that standards shift
means that the language we use to describe others is
often slippery and imprecise. How tall is tall? How
smart is smart? That depends on the standard at hand.
Monica Biernat
See also Reference Group; Self-Reports; Stereotypes and
Stereotyping
Further Readings
Biernat, M. (2003). Toward a broader view of social
stereotyping. American Psychologist, 58, 1019–1027.
Biernat, M., Manis, M., & Nelson, T. E. (1991). Stereotypes
and standards of judgment. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 60, 485–499.
SHYNESS
Definition
Shyness is the ordinary language term most often used
to label the emotional state of feeling anxious and
inhibited in social situations. As would be expected
from a social psychological perspective, situations
differ in their power to elicit reactions of social anxiety.
Ratings of shyness-eliciting events reveal that
interactions with strangers, especially those of the
opposite sex or in positions of authority; encounters
requiring assertive behavior; and explicitly evaluative
settings such as job interviews provoke the strongest
feelings of social anxiety. Quietness, gaze aversion,
and awkward body language are the most common
behavioral signs of shyness.
Emotional State and Personality Trait
Viewed as an emotional state, shyness is an almost universal
experience, with less than 10% of respondents to
cross-cultural surveys reporting that they had never felt
shy. The ubiquity of shyness raises the question of its
possible adaptive value. Contemporary psychologists
who take an evolutionary perspective on emotional
development point out that a moderate amount of wariness
regarding strangers and unfamiliar or unpredictable
situations may have considerable adaptive
value. Social anxiety is functional when it motivates
preparation and rehearsal for important interpersonal
events, and shyness helps facilitate cooperative group
living by inhibiting individual behavior that is socially
unacceptable. Moreover, the complete absence of susceptibility
to feeling shy has been recognized as an
antisocial characteristic since at least the time of the
ancient Greeks. Situational shyness as a transitory emotional
state thus appears to be a normal and functional
aspect of human development and everyday adult life.
For some people, however, shyness is more than a
temporary situational response; it occurs with sufficient
frequency and intensity to be considered a personality
trait. About 30% to 40% of adults in the
United States label themselves as dispositionally shy
persons. Three quarters of the shy respondents said
that they did not like being so shy, and two thirds of
them considered their shyness to be a personal problem.
Although shyness does have some positive
connotations, such as modesty or gentleness, it is generally
rated as an undesirable characteristic, especially
for men. Recent research supports this negative image
of the trait by documenting how shyness can be a barrier
to personal well-being, social adjustment, and
occupational fulfillment.
Some people prefer to spend time alone rather than
with others but also feel comfortable when they are in
social settings. Such people are nonanxious introverts,
who may be unsociable but are not shy. The opposite
of shyness is social self-confidence, not extraversion.
The problem for truly shy people is that their anxiety
prevents them from participating in social life when
they want to or need to.
Individual Differences
One way to approach the distinction between shy
people and those who are not shy is simply quantitative:
Dispositionally shy people experience physical
tension, worry, and behavioral inhibition more frequently,
more intensely, and in a wider range of situations
than do people who do not label themselves as
being shy. There are also qualitative differences in
psychological processes. For example, shy people
perceive various situations as being inherently less
intimate and more evaluative, and they perceive the

same interpersonal feedback as being more evaluatively
negative, compared with those who are not shy.
When they encounter social difficulties, shy people
also tend to make more self-blaming causal attributions
and to remember more negative details than do
people who are not shy.
Research studies of identical and fraternal twins
indicate that the temperamental predisposition for
shyness has a substantial genetic component. Infants
with this highly reactive temperament in the first year
of life are more likely to be wary or fearful of strangers
at the end of the second year, and they are also more
likely to be described as shy by their kindergarten
teachers than are children with an opposite, behaviorally
uninhibited temperament. Temperamental inhibition
in infancy does not lead invariably to childhood
shyness. Parents who are sensitive to the nature of
their inhibited child’s temperament, who take an
active role in helping the child to develop relationships
with playmates, and who facilitate involvement
in school activities appear to ameliorate the impact of
shyness on the child’s subsequent social adjustment.
Childhood shyness is a joint product of temperament
and socialization experiences within and outside the
family. Retrospective reports indicate that 75% of
young adults who say they were shy in early childhood
continue to identify themselves as shy persons.
Equally significant, however, is that about half
of shy adults report that they did not become troubled
by shyness until they were between the ages of
8 and 14.
Most of the children who first become shy in later
childhood and early adolescence do not have the temperamental
predisposition for shyness. Instead, latedeveloping
shyness is usually caused by adjustment
problems in adolescent social development. The bodily
changes of puberty, the newly acquired cognitive ability
to think abstractly about the self and the environment,
and the new demands and opportunities resulting
from changing social roles combine to make adolescents
feel intensely self-conscious and socially awkward.
Adolescent self-consciousness gradually declines
after age 14, and less than 50% of individuals who first
became shy during later childhood and early adolescence
still consider themselves to be shy by age 21.
Cultural Differences
Sex role socialization puts different pressures on adolescent
girls and boys. In the United States, teenage
girls experience more symptoms of self-conscious
shyness, such as doubts about their attractiveness and
worries about what others think of them, whereas
teenage boys tend to be more troubled by behavioral
symptoms of shyness because the traditional male
role requires initiative and assertiveness in social life.
Cultural differences in the prevalence of shyness also
may reflect the impact of socialization practices. In
Israel, children tend to be praised for being selfconfident
and often are included in adult conversations,
two factors that may account for the low level of
shyness reported by Israelis. In Japan, on the other
hand, the incidence of shyness is much higher than in
the United States. Japanese culture values harmony
and tends to encourage dependency and quiet loyalty
to one’s superiors. Talkative or assertive individuals
risk being considered immature or insincere, and there
is a high level of concern about avoiding the shame of
failure. All these values may promote shyness yet also
make it a somewhat less socially undesirable personality
trait. In contrast, American cultural values that
emphasize competition, individual achievement, and
material success appear to create an environment in
which it is particularly difficult for the shy person to
feel secure and worthwhile.
Jonathan M. Cheek
See also Anxiety; Cultural Differences; Embarrassment;
Gender Differences; Genetic Influences on Social
Relationships; Individual Differences; Introversion; Social
Anxiety; Traits
Further Readings
Similarity-Attraction Effect———875
Cheek, J. M., & Krasnoperova, E. N. (1999). Varieties of
shyness in adolescence and adulthood. In L. A. Schmidt
& J. Schulkin (Eds.), Extreme fear, shyness, and social
phobia: Origins, biological mechanisms, and clinical
outcomes (pp. 224–250). New York: Oxford University
Press.
Crozier, W. R. (Ed.). (2001). Shyness: Development,
consolidation, and change. London: Routledge.
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1995). Social anxiety.
New York: Guilford Press.
SIMILARITY-ATTRACTION EFFECT
Definition
The similarity-attraction effect refers to the widespread
tendency of people to be attracted to others

876———Simulation Heuristic
who are similar to themselves in important respects.
Attraction means not strictly physical attraction but,
rather, liking for or wanting to be around the person.
Many different dimensions of similarity have been
studied, in both friendship and romantic contexts.
Similarity effects tend to be strongest and most consistent
for attitudes, values, activity preferences, and
attractiveness. Personality similarity has shown
weaker, but still important, effects on attraction.
Background and Modern Usage
Similarity-attraction research embodies the popular
adage, “birds of a feather flock together.” This effect
has been studied extensively, usually in one of two
ways. First, in laboratory experiments, participants
are given descriptions of a person they are about to
meet. These descriptions are manipulated to vary in
their degree of similarity, from very similar to very
dissimilar, to the participant’s own standing on whatever
dimensions the investigator wishes to study. The
second method entails correlational studies, which
assess the properties of interest in relationship partners,
often by questionnaire. The degree of correspondence
between partners is then compared with that of
random pairs of people, people with a tepid attraction
to each other or, more commonly, chance. Years of
research have produced such robust evidence that
one researcher referred to the effects of similarity
on attraction as a “law.” In striking contrast, many
attempts to find support for a sister principle, known
as the complementarity principle (“opposites attract”)
have failed to find more than a highly selective effect
in limited contexts.
Why does similarity attract? At least four explanations
have received consistent empirical support. First,
because similar others are more likely than are dissimilar
others to possess opinions and worldviews that
validate one’s own, interaction with similar others is
a likely source of social reinforcement. Second, all
other things being equal, people more readily expect
rejection by dissimilar others than by similar others.
As other research has shown, anticipated rejection
usually diminishes attraction. Third, interaction with
similar others may be more enjoyable than interaction
with dissimilar others, inasmuch as similar others tend
to share one’s own interests, values, and activity preferences.
Finally, fortune or chance also seems to play
a part. Because attitudes and values direct much of
a person’s behavior (for example, people who love
baseball attend more baseball games than people who
don’t), he or she is simply more likely to encounter
others who have similar attitudes and values than others
with dissimilar preferences. Obviously, attraction
cannot develop between persons who have not
encountered each other. Overall, all four of these
explanations likely contribute to the effect of similarity
on attraction.
People sometimes question evidence about the
similarity-attraction link for subjective reasons. After
all, when a person reflects on his or her own friendships,
he or she often notices the differences more
than the similarities. This is probably a healthy part of
the process of expressing and accepting one’s individuality.
However, similarity is relative. When asked to
consider the degree of similarity between the self and
a close friend, compared with the self and a random
inhabitant of planet Earth, or, for that matter, a random
person living elsewhere in the same country,
state, or neighborhood, the relevance of similarity for
friendship usually becomes quickly apparent.
Harry T. Reis
See also Attraction; Complementarity, of Relationship
Partners; Rejection
Further Readings
Berscheid, E., & Reis, H. T. (1998). Interpersonal attraction
and close relationships. In S. Fiske, D. Gilbert,
G. Lindzey, & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social
psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 193–281). New York: Random
House.
Newcomb, T. M. (1961). The acquaintance process.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
SIMULATION HEURISTIC
Definition
The simulation heuristic focuses on what occurs after
a person has experienced an event in his or her life.
According to the simulation heuristic, a person imagines
possible simulations or alternative outcomes to
events that he or she encounters. The imagined alternatives,
in turn, affect how a person feels about the
event in question.

Implications
When faced with questions about events that occur in
life, a person may react in many ways. Sometimes a
person may choose to put off dealing with the event
until later or perhaps even ignore it altogether.
However, usually a person eventually comes to confront
life events. How a person deals with these situations
has great importance for how he or she comes
to think about, perceive, and eventually react to the
event.
According to the simulation heuristic, one way that
a person confronts a life event is to construct alternatives
or simulations to the event in question. This
means that when a person encounters some events he
or she mentally creates other possible scenarios for
how the event could have turned out differently. The
simulation heuristic also addresses the emotional
impact that imagining the possible outcomes can have
for a person. Specifically, imagining better alternative
outcomes can make a person feel worse about the
event that he or she has experienced. Originally, these
mental simulations were compared with computerbased
programming models.
In the computer analogy, the simulation model can
be constrained so that only predetermined contingencies
can occur, or it may be limited to a particular outcome.
The output of the simulation is the ease with
which the person can generate the simulations. The
computer analogy is helpful as an example, but it is
lacking in many respects. Consequently, it has been
replaced by a more elaborate cognitive processing
model of event construction that includes an emotional
presence.
Although the simulation heuristic may have influence
in many situations such as prediction and probability
assessment, its influence is most evident in
the study of counterfactual influences. Counterfactuals
deal with other possible outcomes to an event. For
example, imagine a situation in which two people had
missed the school shuttle that only runs on the hour.
And because they missed the shuttle, they did not
make it to a test in a class in which the professor does
not allow makeup exams. One person learns that the
shuttle had run on time. The other person learns that
the shuttle was running late and left just before they
got there. Who would be more upset? Most people
would agree that the person who missed the shuttle by
only moments would be more upset. The reason for
this, according to the simulation heuristic, is that it is
easier to generate simulations to the event when the
shuttle was missed by only moments. And this construction
of mental simulations of the event or counterfactual
production is what leads people to feel
more regret about events that they encounter.
Research investigating the simulation heuristic has
found that people can create simulations to an event in
many different ways, and these simulations can have
distinct differences in how people perceive the event.
For example, a person could create a simulation that is
better or a simulation that is worse than the actual
event, which, in turn, may have profoundly different
effects on how the person perceives the event.
Differences such as these have proven important for
understanding many areas of research including planning,
decision making, and emotional response.
See also Counterfactual Thinking; Decision Making;
Emotion
Further Readings
Todd McElroy
Kahneman, D., & Miller, D. T. (1986). Norm theory:
Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological
Review, 93, 136–153.
Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The simulation
heuristic. In D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, & A. Tversky
(Eds.), Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases
(pp. 201–208). New York: Cambridge University Press.
SIMULTANEOUS CHOICE
Simultaneous Choice———877
Definition
The term simultaneous choice is mostly used in
contrast to sequential choice. Both terms refer to the
selection of a series of items for subsequent consumption,
for example, when selecting a set of three soft
drinks to be consumed one per day during the next
three days. Simultaneous choice is the choice of several
items ahead of time (e.g., selecting all three soft
drinks before or on the first day of consumption)
whereas sequential choice refers to single decisions,
where each item is chosen at the time of its employment
(e.g., selecting each of the three soft drinks on
the day of its consumption).

878———Sleeper Effect
Explanation and Details
Simultaneous and sequential choice derive from the
area of consumer research. Decision outcomes from
simultaneous choice and sequential choice tend to
differ because of different decision strategies. People
choose a greater variety of things when making simultaneous
choices rather than sequential choices. For
example, a person who is consuming one yogurt daily
is more likely to select a greater variety of flavors
when buying yogurts for the next week within one
shopping trip than when going shopping daily and
buying only one yogurt for immediate consumption
each day.
Several reasons for this seeking of greater variety
in simultaneous choice have been discussed and
experimentally tested. When making a simultaneous
choice a person tends to overpredict satiation with one
item (e.g., a particular yogurt flavor) because of an
underestimation of the time interval from one consumption
period to the other. The result is the selection
of a greater variety of items. In addition, simultaneous
choice requires the prediction of future preferences,
which are prone to be uncertain. For example, a person’s
taste might change over time. It seems less
likely that a person’s taste will change for each variation,
so selecting a variety of items is less risky than
choosing the same item for all consumption periods.
Selecting a series of items during simultaneous choice
also requires more time and effort than selecting one
item at a time. Determining the best item for each of
the consumption occasions within a simultaneous
choice is a time consuming and cognitively demanding
task. Consequently, selecting a greater variety of
items can be a means of simplifying the decision
task.
Research examining whether simultaneous or
sequential choice is better for the consumer in liking
and objective value of items yields no definite results.
A simultaneous choice is possibly a better strategy for
a simultaneous experience (e.g., choosing a set of
interdependent items such as furniture for an apartment)
whereas a sequential choice seems to be best
for sequential experience (e.g., choosing a set of independent
items such as different music compact discs).
Some items that have been used in simultaneous
choice experiments include compact disk tracks,
gambles, groceries, movies, and snacks.
Anke Görzig
Ursula Szillis
See also Consumer Behavior; Decision Making; Satisficing;
Sequential Choice
Further Readings
Simonson, I. (1990). The effect of purchase quantity and
timing on variety-seeking behavior. Journal of Marketing
Research, 27, 150–162.
SLEEPER EFFECT
Definition
A sleeper effect in persuasion is a delayed increase in
the impact of a persuasive message. In other words, a
sleeper effect occurs when a communication shows no
immediate persuasive effects, but, after some time, the
recipient of the communication becomes more favorable
toward the position advocated by the message. As
a pattern of data, the sleeper effect is opposite to the
typical finding that induced opinion change dissipates
over time.
Discovery and Original Interpretation
The term sleeper effect was first used by Carl Hovland
and his research associates to describe opinion change
produced by the U.S. Army’s Why We Fight films used
to improve the morale of the troops during World War
II. Specifically, Hovland found that the film The
Battle of Britain increased U.S. Army recruits’ confidence
in their British allies when the effect of this film
was assessed 9 weeks after it was shown (compared
with an earlier assessment).
After the war, Hovland returned to his professorship
at Yale University and conducted experiments on
the sleeper effect to determine its underlying causes.
According to Hovland, a sleeper effect occurs as a
result of what he called the dissociation discounting
cue hypothesis—in other words, a sleeper effect
occurs when a persuasive message is presented with a
discounting cue (such as a low-credible source or a
counterargument). Just after receiving the message,
the recipient recalls both message and discounting
cue, resulting in little or no opinion change. After a
delay, as the association between message and discounting
cue weakens, the recipient may remember
what was said without thinking about who said it.

History of Research
The Hovland research gave the sleeper effect scientific
status as a replicable phenomenon and the dissociation
discounting cue hypothesis credibility as the
explanation for this phenomenon. As a result, the
sleeper effect was discussed in almost every social
psychology textbook of the 1950s and 1960s, appeared
in related literatures (such as marketing, communications,
public opinion, and sociology), and even
obtained some popular notoriety as a lay idiom.
However, as the sleeper effect gained in notoriety,
researchers found that it was difficult if not impossible
to obtain and replicate the original Hovland findings.
For example, Paulette Gillig and Tony Greenwald
published a series of seven experiments that paired a
persuasive message with a discounting cue. They were
unable to find a sleeper effect. They were not the only
ones unable to find a sleeper effect, prompting the
question “Is it time to lay the sleeper effect to rest?”
The Differential Decay Hypothesis
Two sets of researchers working independently of each
other were able to find reliable empirical conditions for
producing a sleeper effect. In two sets of experiments
conducted by Charles Gruder, Thomas Cook, and their
colleagues and by Anthony Pratkanis, Greenwald, and
their colleagues, reliable sleeper effects were obtained
when (a) message recipients were induced to pay attention
to message content by noting the important arguments
in the message, (b) the discounting cue came
after the message, and (c) message recipients rated the
credibility of the message source immediately after
receiving the message and cue. For example, in one
experiment, participants underlined the important arguments
as they read a persuasive message. After reading
the message, subjects received a discounting cue stating
that the message was false and then rated the trustworthiness
of the message source. This set of procedures
resulted in a sleeper effect.
The procedures developed by these researchers are
sufficiently different from those of earlier studies to
warrant a new interpretation of the sleeper effect. As a
replacement for the dissociation hypothesis, a differential
decay interpretation was proposed that hypothesized
a sleeper effect occurs when (a) the impact
of the message decays more slowly than the impact
of the discounting cue and (b) the information from
the message and from the discounting cue is not
immediately integrated to form an attitude (and thus
the discounting cue is already dissociated from message
content).
The procedures associated with a reliable sleeper
effect and the differential decay hypothesis do not
often occur in the real world. However, one case in
which these conditions are met is when an advertisement
makes a claim that is subsequently qualified or
modified in a disclaimer (often given in small print
and after the original message). In such cases, the disclaimer
may not be well integrated with the original
claim and thus its impact will decay quickly, resulting
in the potential for a sleeper effect.
Other Sleeper Effects
Although much of the research on the sleeper effect
has focused on the discounting cue manipulation,
researchers have developed other procedures for producing
sleeper effects including (a) delayed reaction
to a fear-arousing message, (b) delayed insight into
the implications of a message, (c) leveling and sharpening
of a persuasive message over time, (d) dissipation
of the effects of forewarning of persuasive intent,
(e) group discussion of a message after a delay, (f) the
dissipation of reactance induced by a message,
(g) delayed internalization of the values of a message,
(h) wearing-off of initial annoyance with a negative or
tedious message, (i) delayed acceptance of an egoattacking
message, and (j) delayed impact of minority
influence. Although these other procedures for obtaining
a sleeper effect have been less well researched,
they may indeed be more common in everyday life
than are sleeper effects based on the differential decay
hypothesis.
See also Persuasion; Resisting Persuasion
Further Readings
Sleeper Effect———879
Anthony R. Pratkanis
Gillig, P. M., & Greenwald, A. G. (1974). Is it time to lay the
sleeper effect to rest? Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 29, 132–139.
Gruder, C. L., Cook, T. D., Hennigan, K. M., Flay, B. R.,
Alessis, C., & Halamaj, J. (1978). Empirical tests of the
absolute sleeper effect predicted from the discounting cue
hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
36, 1061–1074.

880———Social Anxiety
Hovland, C. I., Janis, I. L., & Kelley, H. H. (1953).
Communication and persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Pratkanis, A. R., Greenwald, A. G., Leippe, M. R., &
Baumgardner, M. H. (1988). In search of reliable
persuasion effects: III. The sleeper effect is dead. Long
live the sleeper effect. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 54, 203–218.
SOCIAL ANXIETY
Definition
Social anxiety, as the term implies, refers to anxiety
(a feeling of emotional distress akin to fear or panic)
experienced in interpersonal situations, such as job
interviews, dates, public presentations, or casual
social gatherings. Because of the variety of situations
in which people experience social anxiety, several
specific types of social anxiety have been investigated
in the literature, including public speaking anxiety,
audience anxiety, stage fright, sport performance
anxiety, and physique anxiety, to name a few.
Regardless of the specific situation in which social
anxiety occurs, the physical and psychological feelings
that accompany social anxiety are common to all:
butterflies in the stomach, increased heart rate, lightheadedness,
sweaty palms, and fear.
Background and History
Although everyone experiences social anxiety from
time to time, some people experience debilitating levels
of social anxiety, so much so that they avoid social
situations altogether. The pervasiveness of social anxiety
might lead one to believe that extensive theoretical
and empirical attention has been devoted to the
topic. On the contrary, however, empirical research on
social anxiety is relatively recent, with an explosion of
research on the topic within the past decade.
Charles Darwin addressed the topic of social anxiety
in his book The Expression of the Emotions in
Man and Animals. In a comparison of shyness and
fear, Darwin noted that shyness, although similar to
fear is still distinct from it. A person who is shy may
not enjoy being around other people, but does not fear
those others. Shortly after the turn of the century, the
Japanese philosopher Yoritomo-Tashi, in his book
entitled Timidity: How to Overcome It, examined the
topic of social anxiety, as well as ways to combat it.
Darwin’s and Yoritomo-Tashi’s contributions to
our knowledge of social anxiety were largely conceptual.
Empirical attention to the topic of social anxiety
began when feelings of distress in social situations
emerged during the 1940s and 1950s as one of the
core dimensions of personality. Still, another 15 to
20 years passed before focused research attention
was devoted to social anxiety, fueled largely by the
creation of two trait measures of social anxiety: The
Social Avoidance and Distress Scale and the Personal
Report of Communication Apprehension. With scales
to measure subjective and behavioral indices of social
anxiety, a flurry of research on the topic began.
Not surprisingly, these initial studies focused
primarily on individual differences in social anxiety.
With time, however, three other directions for
research on social anxiety took root. Some researchers
turned their attention to situational determinants of
social anxiety. Others focused more on developmental
issues related to social anxiety, examining specifically
the reasons why some people are more socially anxious
than others. A third area of research examined the
treatment of social anxiety.
From these studies, several theories developed to
account for why people experience social anxiety. The
most recent and compelling of these models is the
self-presentational theory of social anxiety developed
by Barry Schlenker and Mark Leary. According to this
model, people experience social anxiety when two
conditions are met: They are motivated to make an
impression on other people, and they doubt their ability
to do so. Imagine, for example, a person applying
for a very desirable job. This individual is motivated
to make a favorable impression on the interviewer. If
he or she is certain that the desired impression will be
made, then social anxiety is not experienced. If, on the
other hand, he or she doubts that the desired impression
will be made, then social anxiety creeps in.
Should the person fail to make the desired impression
and actually make an undesired impression, a selfpresentational
predicament is created and he or she
experiences embarrassment.
Importance and
Consequences of Social Anxiety
The universality of the experience of social anxiety
and the array of situations that precipitate it suggest
that it plays an important role in interpersonal behavior.
Indeed, social anxiety may help keep people from
behaving in ways that damage their social images and

undermine their acceptance by other people. A person
who never felt socially anxious would not care about
the impressions he or she makes or would be overconfident
regarding his or her success at making desired
impressions. The experience of social anxiety may
interrupt social behavior and alert people that their
behavior may not be making the desired impression.
Viewed in this way, the experience of social
anxiety provides people with a warning to change
the course that their behavior is taking.
Even so, when social anxiety is experienced too
frequently, too intensely, or in situations in which concerns
with others’ impressions are misplaced, it can
become maladaptive. Excessive social anxiety can
disrupt people’s life goals, such as being a competitive
athlete or effective salesperson, and impair the development
or maintenance of social relationships. For
some people, the experience of social anxiety is so
debilitating that they simply avoid the social situations
that precipitate the anxiety. For example, people may
avoid medical examinations, such as pelvic exams,
because of the potential for anxiety and embarrassment.
Similarly, they may fail to reveal embarrassing
medical conditions because of the anxiety surrounding
such disclosures.
Individual Differences
Whereas some people experience social anxiety
only rarely, others experience chronic social anxiety.
Furthermore, for some people social anxiety is only
mildly uncomfortable, whereas for others (at least
2% of the population), it is debilitating enough to be
labeled “social phobia” according to psychiatric diagnostic
criteria. Several scales have been developed to
measure individual differences in social anxiety. Some
of these scales, such as the Social Avoidance and
Distress Scale, measure both the subjective and behavioral
manifestations of social anxiety. However, many
people feel very anxious in social situations yet come
across to others as if they were not nervous at all.
Therefore, some other scales were created, such as the
Interaction Anxiousness Scale, that focus exclusively
on the subjective feeling of social anxiety, independently
of how a socially anxious person might behave.
Robin M. Kowalski
See also Anxiety; Embarrassment; Individual Differences;
Shyness; Spotlight Effect; Traits
Further Readings
Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1995). Social anxiety. New
York: Guilford Press.
Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and
self-presentation: A conceptualization and model.
Psychological Bulletin, 92, 641–669.
SOCIAL CATEGORIZATION
Social Categorization———881
Definition
Social categorization refers to the way a person’s
mind clusters together individuals who share important
characteristics. A person mentally groups people
on the basis of their demographic features (e.g., sex,
age, ethnicity, or religion), personality and interests
(e.g., extraverts, nerds), and occupation, to name some
of the most common types of social categories. This
process has several important functions. It provides a
person with a way to organize and structure his or her
understanding of the social world. For each meaningful
social category, a person is likely to have some
preconceptions about what members of the category
are like. Rather than having to start from scratch in
figuring other people out, a person often identifies the
groups they belong to and then makes some starting
assumptions about their characteristics, given these
group memberships. If you learn that your new nextdoor
neighbor is a lawyer, for example, you can start
to form an impression just on the basis of this category
membership.
Sometimes a person is provided with categories (as
when someone tells a person his or her occupation),
and sometimes a person must infer another person’s
category membership based on observable evidence
(e.g., one can often—but not always—easily infer
someone’s sex or approximate age on the basis of
physical appearance). Membership in some categories
is based on very clear criteria (e.g., the category “college
students” is defined by attending a college), but
some categories are much fuzzier. There is no strict
criterion for being a nerd, for example. However, a set
of characteristics seems typical of nerds, resulting in a
mental image, or prototype, of the category. In such a
case, putting someone into the category is based more
on how much the person resembles one’s mental
image of that category, rather than on meeting a clear
set of rules about category membership. Even in the
case in which there are clear criteria, resemblance to a

882———Social Categorization
mental image of the category may still be important.
A divorced homemaker in her 50s who returns to
school to get her bachelor’s degree may technically
be a member of the category “college students,” but
perceivers may not think of her as a member of the
category because she does not match the common
prototype of the category.
Context and Importance
Whether discussing people, objects, or events, categories
are essential for mental functioning. Without
them, people would not be able to make sense of
the complex, multifaceted environment around them.
By grouping similar items into categories, the world
acquires structure and meaningfulness. This process
of organizing and structuring the world into categories
involves two related processes. First, when thinking
about people who belong in a particular category, one
mentally emphasizes their shared characteristics
while minimizing their differences or unique individual
characteristics. When one thinks of the category
“nerds,” one thinks about the characteristics that are
common to members of the category. Second, one
also accentuates, or emphasizes, differences between
different categories. When a person thinks of nerds, he
or she thinks of the ways nerds are different from
other comparable kinds of people (such as jocks or
artsy types).
By identifying category memberships, people can
make inferences about individual members when they
have incomplete information about them. For example,
a person might feel confident that the nerd would
be interested in going to the Star Wars film festival.
“Likes science fiction” may be a facet of his or her
image of what nerds are like, so once the person categorizes
the other person as a member of the “nerd”
category, he or she feels confident in making this
assumption. Applying typical features of the social
category to individual category members facilitates
the social judgments people make, but the benefit of
this increased facility comes at the cost of potential
inaccuracy. Some nerds actually don’t like science fiction,
some men don’t like sports, and some women
don’t love taking care of children. A major by-product
of social categorization is the process of stereotyping.
Generalizations will rarely if ever apply to all category
members, and in some cases, people might even
hold generalizations about social groups that do not
even apply to most category members. Social psychologists
have identified several ways that people
come to hold erroneous or greatly exaggerated stereotypes
about social groups.
Social categorization differs from other kinds of
categorization in that the person doing the categorization
is also potentially included into the relevant category.
Social categorization results in carving the
world into ingroups (the groups to which one belongs)
and outgroups (the groups to which one does not
belong). Because people have a strong tendency to
think favorably about themselves, they also tend to
evaluate their ingroups favorably. This tendency,
paired with the previously mentioned tendency to
accentuate the differences between groups, results in
another potentially toxic result of social categorization:
prejudice. If a person feels that his or her group
is superior to other groups, ingroup favoritism and
discrimination against outgroups may be common byproducts.
Given the widespread existence of prejudice
and intergroup conflict, from Northern Ireland to
South Africa and right around the globe, the potential
dangers of social categorization are evident. Social
psychologists have been keenly interested in understanding
whether social categorization, per se, is sufficient
to explain prejudice and ingroup favoritism or
whether other conditions must also be present.
Implications
Social categorization is inevitable, as people could
not function without some way of organizing and simplifying
the complex social world around them.
However, social categorization carries with it the risk
of stereotyping and prejudice and the injustices sometimes
associated with them. Fortunately, there is
flexibility in the way people categorize other people.
People need not always focus on race or sex or other
common bases for prejudice and conflict but can look
to shared categories that unite them with others (e.g.,
“members of our community” rather than ethnic subgroups).
And they can emphasize multiple category
memberships of others, rather than reducing them to
a single dimension (e.g., “intelligent Mexican female
actress” rather than just “Mexican”). When people
think in terms of multiple categories, they begin to
recapture the constellations of characteristics that
make each of them unique.
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Monika Bauer
See also Intergroup Relations; Minimal Group Paradigm;
Prejudice; Stereotypes and Stereotyping

Further Readings
Bodenhausen, G. V., Macrae, C. N., & Hugenberg, K. (2003).
Social cognition. In I. Weiner (Ed.), Handbook of
psychology (Vol. 5, pp. 257–282). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
SOCIAL COGNITION
For thousands of years there has been philosophical
debate about what it is that makes humans different
from other species of animals on Earth. Whether one
believes that humans are just another step in the evolutionary
process or descended from aliens, there is no
denying that humans are different from other animals.
Although many aspects of psychology, such as perception,
learning, and memory, can be generalized
across species, the field of social cognition deals
exclusively with thoughts and behaviors that are
(arguably) uniquely human. This is because social
cognition is concerned with the mental processes that
subserve people’s understanding of both self and other
individuals. By default, it takes a social agent to know
one. For this reason, a great deal of social cognition
research has focused on determining whether or not
the thoughts people have about other people are driven
by the same basic mental operations that regulate
humans’ understanding of tables, automobiles, and
seafood gumbo. For example, are there dedicated
systems that deal with information about the social
world and its diverse inhabitants?
Social cognition draws heavily on material within
cognitive psychology and social psychology to examine
the relationship between basic cognitive operations
and fundamental social problems. In this respect, work
in this domain has attempted to show that, during his
or her lifetime, an individual’s thoughts and behaviors
are influenced by his or her preceding social experiences,
but at the same time, these experiences are modified
by the individual’s current behaviors. This
dynamic relationship between cognition and social
experience means that social cognition affects almost
every area of human existence. To help explain the
importance of social cognition in everyday life, this
entry will explore what it would perhaps be like to try
to live without the capacity to understand self and others.
The examples that follow will therefore speculate
on what it would be like if you encountered an alien
(called Todf) who was human-like in every respect,
apart from the fact that Todf has no social-cognitive
Social Cognition———883
abilities. Would such a person be able to cope with
everyday social situations?
One of the central topics in social cognition is person
perception, the way in which people collect and
use information about other people to guide their
interactions with them. From infancy, humans have an
in-built preference for human beings (i.e., social
agents) over other objects, and the face is a stimulus
of particular interest. Even before humans can walk or
talk, they begin to learn the skills of nonverbal communication
that provide them with their first interactive
social experiences. Within only a few months of
birth, human infants can decode facial expressions
and begin to make sense of their social world and the
people around them. Imagine the problems that Todf
would experience if he were unable to produce and
decipher the meaning inherent in facial expressions;
successful social interaction would be beyond his
grasp. Humans constantly rely on very subtle facial
cues to determine what other people are intending
(e.g., I’m going to kiss you), thinking (e.g., You look
just like Pamela Anderson), and feeling (e.g., I love
you). People can usually determine from a face
whether someone is behaving threateningly toward
them, when a friend is entertained by an anecdote,
or when a partner is annoyed by one’s behavior.
Although it is possible to use language to convey the
contents of their inner mental lives, frequently people
rely on faces to do the talking. Without such a capacity,
Todf would be mind blind.
Social cognition allows people to read the faces of
other people and enables them to decode the contents
of their minds. Imagine the alien Todf in a classroom
with children ages 5 or 6 years old. If the teacher
pointed out of the window to an oak tree in the school
yard and asked the class, “What is that?” they would
probably all reply, “A tree.” Although answering this
question correctly may not seem like a tricky task,
without social cognition Todf would probably furnish
an incorrect response. He may even be confused as to
why tree was the appropriate response. Why not window,
bird, leaf, or trunk? The reason that children performed
the task with aplomb is because they were all
able to read the teacher’s mind, they knew exactly
what it was she was asking when she pointed her
index finger toward the window. This ability to work
out what other people are thinking is known as theory
of mind and is a core component of human social cognition
Arguably, the capacity sets humans apart from
other species and makes them different. Indeed, without
a theory of mind, people would find it impossible

884———Social Cognition
to empathize or sympathize with other people. They
would never be able to climb into the shoes of another
person and experience the world through their eyes.
Without such a capacity, successful social interaction
would be impossible.
The previous example highlights another important
core aspect of social cognition, the observation
that social agents continually strive to simplify and
structure their knowledge of the world. Children
probably possess extensive knowledge of trees and
could provide this material when requested. This is
because information about the world is stored in
extensive networks in memory, networks, or
schemas that can be accessed with rapidity and ease.
The simplest way of thinking about schemas is to
imagine that the brain contains many locked filing
cabinets, with numerous files stored within each
cabinet. These files contain information, varying in
specificity, with respect to the content of the file.
For example, when the category “tree” is probed,
the relevant cabinet (or schema) is unlocked and all
the information is made available. Storing related
information in this way enables us to access material
just when it is needed most. It also prevents irrelevant
knowledge from entering consciousness at the
wrong time. Although storing information in this
way is useful, it can have some interesting consequences
when the files contain information about
other people and the cabinets are organized in a
group-based manner (e.g., men, women, plumbers,
bodybuilders).
One consequence of schema-based organization of
information about people is that the tendency to neatly
arrange information in this way can lead to stereotyping
and prejudice. Stereotyping involves the generalization
of specific features, beliefs, or properties to
entire groups of people (e.g., if he’s a man, he must be
aggressive, ambitious, and unemotional). Prejudice
occurs when people act on these beliefs. This is one
area whereby the alien Todf may, on the surface,
appear to have a slight advantage over people. If he
did not have the ability to create stereotypes based on
his previous knowledge and experience of people,
then he would be free from any possible prejudices.
People would be treated as unique entities and social
interaction would be free from discrimination.
However, to form individual, accurate, well-informed
impressions of every person he encounters, Todf
would require enormous amounts of time and energy.
Suppose the alien and a human were both given the
task of selling 100 tickets for a nightclub. Armed with
their stereotypic knowledge (or not, as the case would
be) of the kinds of people most likely to enjoy dancing,
drinking, and falling over, the human may attempt
to sell the tickets to students on a university campus.
The alien on the other hand, completely clueless about
the vagaries of human social behavior, may consider
retirement homes as an ideal place to sell the tickets,
as there is a captive audience of potential buyers with
disposable income. Who do you think would sell
their tickets fastest? Although potentially troublesome,
generalized beliefs about groups of people can
be handy at times.
All of the previous examples have shown the
problems an alien without social cognition would
encounter when dealing with other people. Several
difficulties may arise from another core component of
social cognition, an understanding and appreciation of
self. The self is generally considered the conscious
insight a person has into his or her own existence. As
such, this construct gives human life meaning, order,
and purpose. People’s memories are based on their
own unique experience of events, their current activity
is construed in a personalized way, and their view of
the future is theirs and theirs alone. As the self and
consciousness are so intertwined, and because they
are at the very center of what is consider to be human,
it does not seem possible to imagine an alien that is
humanlike but that does not possess a self. Without a
self, the alien would merely be an automaton, a robot
capable of mimicking human actions but incapable of
understanding them. When it comes to being a person,
social cognition matters.
Douglas Martin
C. Neil Macrae
See also Attributions; Cultural Animal; Theory of Mind
Further Readings
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An essay on autism
and theory of mind. Boston: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Bless, H., Fiedler, K., & Strack, F. (Eds.). (2003). Social
cognition: How individuals construct social reality. Hove,
UK: Psychology Press.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (2005). Social
neuroscience. New York: Psychology Press.
Moskowitz, G. B. (2005). Social cognition: Understanding
self and others. New York: Guilford Press.
Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (Eds.). (1994). Handbook of
social cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

SOCIAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Definition
Social cognitive neuroscience is the study of the
processes in the human brain that allow people to
understand others, understand themselves, and navigate
the social world effectively. Social cognitive
neuroscience draws on theories and psychological
phenomena from across the social sciences, including
social cognition, political cognition, behavioral economics,
and anthropology. The tools used to study
these topics are also wide-ranging, including functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron
emission tomography, transcranial magnetic stimulation,
event-related potentials, single-cell recording,
and neuropsychological lesion techniques.
Background and History
The notion that social behavior and social cognition
have biological roots extends back thousands of years
to at least Galen in ancient Greece who suggested that
our social nature was influenced by the admixture of
four substances in our bodies called humors. These
four substances (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and
phlegm) were linked to personality and interpersonal
styles (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic).
Although the humors have long since fallen out of
favor in scientific attempts to understand the mind, the
notion that the material body, including the brain,
contributes directly to psychological processes has
become increasingly important in psychological
research during the past two centuries.
Of particular interest to social psychology is the
case of Phineas Gage in the 1860s. Gage was considered
a socially agreeable and savvy individual until an
explosion sent a tamping iron in one side of his brain
and out the other. Miraculously, Gage retained his
motor skills and cognitive abilities; however, socially
and emotionally, he was a changed man. During the
years after the accident, Gage made a series of illadvised
social decisions that left him unemployed,
penniless, and divorced. By all accounts, his social
and emotional makeup was quite different, largely
because of damage to the ventromedial prefrontal
cortex, a region of the brain located behind the eye
sockets. Other cases of neurological damage have
also shown neural contributions to social function.
Prosopagnosic patients cannot recognize faces as
Social Cognitive Neuroscience———885
faces even though they can recognize other objects.
Damage to a region of the parietal cortex can lead
individuals to feel as though other people are controlling
their bodily movements. Individuals who have
had their corpus callosum severed, cutting off communication
between the hemispheres of the brain, will
respond appropriately to cues shown exclusively to
the right hemisphere of the brain but then provide
strange rationalizations for this behavior using the left
hemisphere, which was unaware of the original cue. In
each of these cases, some social function that humans
take for granted is profoundly altered because of
localized brain damage.
These case studies have been extremely provocative;
however, such cases are rare and thus are not
sufficient to sustain a new area of research. Two developments
took place in the 1990s that laid the groundwork
for the explosion of research that is now taking
place in social cognitive neuroscience. First, social
psychologists such as John Cacioppo, Stanley Klein,
and John Kihlstrom began to apply much more
sophisticated experimental methods to brain-damaged
patients and healthy individuals using event-related
potentials, to test social psychological hypotheses.
These researchers used the brain to test questions
about what kinds of processes are involved in normal
social cognition, rather than focusing on describing
what is impaired in brain-damaged patients. Just as
other social psychologists use self-report measures
and reaction time measures to test their hypotheses,
these scientists used neural measures.
The second major development was the use of
fMRI to study social cognition. Although neuroscientists
used fMRI throughout the 1990s, social psychologists
only began to use this technique in the new
millennium (although several British scientists,
including Chris Frith, Uta Frith, and Raymond Dolan,
did use positron emission tomography in the 1990s to
conduct social cognitive neuroscience studies). Starting
in the year 2000, social cognitive neuroscience
research began to grow exponentially in the number of
studies, number of topics studied, and number of
researchers. Currently, active research programs are
examining the automatic and controlled aspects of
attitudes and prejudice, theory of mind, dispositional
attribution, empathy, social rejection, social connection,
interpersonal attraction, self-awareness, selfrecognition,
self-knowledge, cognitive dissonance
reduction, placebo effects, social factors in economic
decision making, moral reasoning, and emotion regulation.
Many of these topics are in their infancy with

886———Social Cognitive Neuroscience
no more than a handful of studies attempting to
identify the brain regions that are involved in the
process of interest. One might remark, “What good is
it to know that social psychological processes take
place in the brain? Of course they do, so what?”
Indeed, if social cognitive neuroscience began and
ended with showing which parts of the brain “light
up” when engaging in different social psychological
processes, it would be of little significance.
Fortunately, most social cognitive neuroscience does
not begin and end as an expensive game of
Lite-Brite.
The Importance of
Social Cognitive Neuroscience
In the best social cognitive neuroscience research, the
where (in the brain) question is merely a prelude to the
when, why, and how questions. Social cognitive neuroscience
has many of the same goals as social psychology
in general, but brings a different set of tools to bear
on those scientific goals. These new tools have several
advantages and disadvantages, and although a debate
about whether reaction time measurement or functional
neuroimaging is a better tool for hypothesis testing
may be a useful pedagogical exercise, it ultimately
makes about as much sense as asking whether hammers
or screwdrivers are better. They are both useful
tools for some jobs and less useful for others.
Before turning to what fMRI is useful for, it is
worth noting some of the limitations of this technique.
First, there can be no face-to-face interactions during
fMRI. When subjects have their brains scanned, they
lay on a narrow bed, which slides into a long narrow
tube, and there is no room for multiple people to be
scanned in the same scanner while interacting.
Second, because of the nature of the imaging procedure,
it is critical that subjects keep their heads
absolutely still. As a result, subjects cannot speak
while the images are being taken. Subjects typically
reply to computer tasks that are watched with video
goggles by pressing buttons on a small keypad.
Finally, because the signals detected in the brain are
noisy signals, many pictures must be taken and then
averaged together. This means that subjects must perform
the same task repeatedly before useful information
can be extracted from the scans. The problem
with this is that most social psychological research
depends on having a large number of subjects each
perform a task once. Many of these tasks will quickly
lose their psychological meaning if they are repeated
again and again. For all these reasons and more, many
social psychological questions cannot easily be
addressed with fMRI.
An fMRI can make important contributions to
social psychology in at least three ways: First, sometimes
two psychological processes experientially feel
similar and produce similar behavioral results but
actually rely on different underlying mechanisms. For
instance, the ability to remember social information
and nonsocial information does not feel all that different,
and for decades social psychologists debated
whether social and nonsocial information is encoded
and retrieved using the same mechanisms. Although
no strong conclusions were reached (and if anything
the standard tools of social cognition suggested that
there were no special mechanisms for social information
processing), recent fMRI research has definitively
changed the debate. Jason Mitchell and his
colleagues have shown in a series of fMRI studies that
the brain regions involved in encoding social and
nonsocial information are quite distinct. Encoding
nonsocial information in a way that could be later
remembered is related to activity in the hippocampus,
whereas encoding social information in a way that
could be later remembered is related to activity in
dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. Thus, two processes
that superficially seem quite similar and are difficult
to disentangle with behavioral methods were clearly
distinguished when examined with fMRI.
Conversely, sometimes one would not think that
processes rely on the same mechanisms, when in fact
they do. For instance, Naomi Eisenberger and her colleagues
have demonstrated that social pain, resulting
from being socially excluded, produces activity in a
similar network of brain regions as the experience
of physical pain. Although physical pain words are
typically used to describe feelings of social pain (“He
hurt my feelings”; “She broke my heart”), the relation
between physical and social pain was primarily
thought to be metaphorical. Physical pain seems real
because one can see physical injuries, whereas social
pain seems as though it’s all in one’s head.
Nevertheless, both seem to rely on similar mechanisms
in the brain. Perhaps this overlap evolved
because infants need to stay connected to a caregiver
to survive and thus feeling hurt in responses to social
separation is an effective mechanism for maintaining
this connection.
Finally, as more and more is learned about the precise
functions of different regions of the brain, it may
be possible to infer some of the mental processes that

an individual is engaged in just from looking at the
activity of his or her brain. The advantage of this
would be that researchers would not need to interrupt
subjects to find out an individual’s mental state.
For instance, if a region of the brain was primarily
invoked during the experience of sadness, one could
know whether a subject was experiencing sadness
based on the activity of this region rather than having
to ask the subject. This would be useful because subjects
may not always want to report the state that they
are in, subjects may not always accurately remember
what state they were in before the experimenter asked,
and because reporting on one’s current state may
change that state or contaminate how the subject will
perform in the rest of the experiment. This is one of
the loftier goals of social cognitive neuroscience and
is not something that can be done currently with precision;
however, this kind of analysis may be possible
in the future.
Matthew D. Lieberman
See also Biopsychosocial Model; Social Neuroscience;
Social Psychophysiology
Further Readings
Lieberman, M. D. (2007). Social cognitive neuroscience.
A review of core processes. Annual Review of Psychology,
58, 18.1–18.31.
SOCIAL COMPARISON
Definition
Social comparison involves thinking about information
about one or more other people in relation to
the self. People may compare themselves with other
people for a variety of reasons: to evaluate themselves
(e.g., How good at math am I?), to learn from others
(e.g., How much did that person study to ace that
exam?), and to feel better about their own situation
(e.g., I may not be great at algebra, but I’m better than
70% of my classmates), to name a few.
History and Background
Early research in social psychology on level of
aspiration and on reference groups contributed to
Social Comparison———887
Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, which he
proposed in 1954. Festinger argued that humans have
a drive to evaluate their opinions and abilities. When
objective standards for self-evaluation are unavailable,
he said, they compare themselves with other
people. According to Festinger’s similarity hypothesis,
people prefer to compare themselves with others
who are similar to themselves. He also noted that
people have a drive to improve themselves, which
often results in upward comparisons, comparisons
with others who are superior to themselves or more
advantaged in some way.
Social comparison theory has inspired a great deal
of research, but the history of the literature is uneven,
with spikes of activity in 1966 and 1977, and then a
more steady output since the early 1980s. The theory
has been applied beyond opinions and abilities to
emotions and to all kinds of personal attributes (e.g.,
personality traits). Although Festinger devoted much
of his theory to interpersonal processes—for example,
he proposed that the need for similar comparison
with others leads to pressures toward uniformity in
groups—social comparison researchers have focused
mostly on individuals and their selections of individual
comparison targets. During the 1990s, studies of
the individual’s reactions to social comparisons grew
more numerous as well.
Who Is a Relevant Comparison Target?
The most frequently asked question in the social
comparison literature has been, “With whom do people
choose to compare themselves?” Festinger’s similarity
hypothesis was ambiguous as to whether similarity
concerns the specific dimension under evaluation or
other dimensions. For example, guitarists may compare
their playing ability with those of others who are
similar in their guitar-playing ability, or with others
who are similar in more general ways, such as the
kind of guitar and music they play (acoustic or electric,
classical or folk) or gender. The most informative,
meaningful comparisons may occur with others
who are similar in attributes related to the dimension
under evaluation. For example, guitarists can best
evaluate their playing ability if they compare themselves
with other guitarists who play similar instruments
and who have been playing about the same
amount of time.
Considerable evidence has attested to the importance
of such related attributes. It is perplexing, however,
that the dimensions of similarity need not always

888———Social Comparison
be related to the dimension under evaluation to be
relevant. For example, people often compare themselves
with same-sex others, even if the dimension of
comparison has little to do with gender. Similarly, the
effects of comparisons are especially strong when they
are with others who are similar, even if the dimension
of similarity seems to bear no relation to the dimension
of comparison (e.g., comparisons with friends are
more potent than comparisons with strangers).
Recent efforts to resolve such puzzles have focused
on the question that the individual is seeking an
answer to, such as, “What kind of person am I?” or
“Can I accomplish this task?”
Goals and the
Selection of Comparison Targets
A great deal of research has focused on how goals
guide the selection of comparison targets. In the
1980s, researchers increasingly viewed the individual
not as an unbiased self-evaluator but as a person with
needs to feel good about himself or herself. Thomas
Wills’s downward comparison theory argued that
people who are unhappy seek to feel better by comparing
themselves with others who are less fortunate
or who are inferior to themselves.
This theory inspired a resurgence of interest in
social comparison that has not abated. The 1980s
also saw a shift toward field research, and considerable
evidence of downward comparisons has emerged
from diverse samples of people under psychological
threat. Women with breast cancer and people with
eating disorders, for example, have been shown to
compare themselves with others who are less fortunate
than themselves.
More generally, the traditional view that selfevaluative
motives lead to comparisons with similar
others, self-improvement motives lead to upward comparisons,
and self-enhancement motives lead to downward
comparisons, is giving way to the view that
multiple targets can serve one’s goal, depending on the
comparison context. Individuals also may use comparison
strategies that do not involve target selection, such
as avoiding comparisons altogether or carefully selecting
one’s comparison dimensions. For example, breast
cancer patients who are disadvantaged on one dimension
(e.g., prognosis) may focus on a dimension on
which they are relatively advantaged (e.g., “At least I’m
married; it must be difficult for single women”).
Some researchers have even argued that people
may create imaginary comparison targets to serve
their goals. This view turns the original theory on its
head; whereas Festinger viewed the individual as
seeking comparisons to establish reality, this view
holds that the individual fabricates reality to serve his
or her goals. However, this view is by no means
universally accepted.
Another relatively new view that is more widely
shared is that people frequently make comparisons
without deliberately selecting comparison targets.
This view holds that people make comparisons by
relatively automatically comparing themselves with
the others they come across in their daily lives.
Effects of Social Comparisons
The traditional assumption has been that upward comparisons
make people feel worse about themselves
and that downward comparisons make them feel better,
but research has revealed that both types of comparisons
can be either inspiring or dispiriting. What
determines the impact of comparisons? One important
variable is whether the comparison involves a dimension
that is central to one’s self-definition. For example,
a musician may take pride in her brother’s
superior cooking ability but be demoralized by his
superior musical ability.
Additional factors that may determine the impact
of comparisons include one’s beliefs about one’s control
over the dimension of comparison and whether
one will improve or worsen on that dimension. An
upward comparison with a superior other may be
inspiring, rather than demoralizing, if one thinks that
one will improve and can attain the level of the
upward target. In contrast, a downward comparison
with an inferior other may be frightening rather than
self-enhancing if one fears one will worsen, for example,
that one’s illness prognosis is unfavorable.
Measurement Issues
Social comparison has been operationalized in many
ways, including the choice of another person’s score
to see, the desire to affiliate, self-reports of past
comparisons, the effects of comparisons on mood
and self-evaluation, and ratings of self versus others.
These operationalizations have yielded results that do
not always converge, perhaps partly because they
capture different meanings or facets of social comparison.
The possibility that comparisons may be
made automatically, perhaps even outside of awareness,
also threaten the validity of such measures as

self-reported comparisons. Social desirability concerns
also may inhibit respondents’ self-reports; people do
not want to appear to be competitive, dependent on
others, or, in the case of downward comparisons, as
taking pleasure in others’ misfortune. Increasingly,
researchers have used methods that are more naturalistic
(e.g., diaries of social comparisons in daily life) or
that offer richer information to research participants
than did earlier methods.
Importance of Social Comparison
Comparisons with other people are widely believed
to be a ubiquitous (ever-present) aspect of social life.
Social comparison is also believed to have powerful
effects on such outcomes as people’s well-being, their
motivation to succeed, their satisfaction with their economic
circumstances, and their very identities. Yet,
when people are asked how they evaluate themselves
and their lives, they mention social comparison infrequently.
Although social comparisons might occur less
frequently than social psychologists initially thought,
it seems equally possible that respondents’ self-reports
are inhibited by a lack of awareness that they make
comparisons and by social desirability concerns.
Indeed, social comparisons may sometimes be
more important than objective information. Contrary
to Festinger’s belief that people rely on social comparisons
only when objective standards are unavailable,
research has indicated that individuals often want to
know their rank relative to others in addition to, or
even in preference to, objective standards. For example,
a runner who already knows that he or she ran 100
meters in 15 seconds may still want to know that his
or her time was the second fastest. And people do not
usually regard themselves as smart, attractive, or
wealthy unless they see themselves as ranking higher
on these dimensions than the other people in their
nearby surroundings.
Joanne V. Wood
Karen Choi
Danielle Gaucher
See also Downward Social Comparison; Self-Evaluation
Maintenance
Further Readings
Suls, J., & Wheeler, L. (Eds.). (2000). Handbook of social
comparison: Theory and research. New York: Plenum.
Suls, J., & Wills, T. A. (Eds.). (1991). Social comparison:
Contemporary theory and research. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Wood, J. V. (1989). Theory and research concerning social
comparisons of personal attributes. Psychological
Bulletin, 106, 231–248.
SOCIAL COMPENSATION
Social Compensation———889
Definition
Social compensation refers to the phenomenon that
individuals increase their effort on a collective task
(compared with how hard they try when working individually)
to compensate for the anticipated poor performance
of other group members. People are more likely
to compensate when they think their coworkers are not
going to perform well and when the outcomes of the
group performance are perceived to be important.
Background and History
Many of life’s most important tasks can be accomplished
only in groups, and many group tasks require
the pooling of individual members’ inputs. Government
task forces, sports teams, organizational committees,
juries, and quality control teams are good examples of
groups that combine individual efforts to form a single
product. Social psychologists have always been
interested in whether individual motivation, effort,
and productivity are influenced by working in groups.
Indeed, the first experiments in social psychology
dealt with these very issues, including Norman
Triplett’s work showing motivation gains when performing
alongside other performing individuals, and
Max Ringelmann’s demonstration of motivation
losses when men collectively pulled on a rope.
Research in the late 1960s and early 1970s consistently
found that individuals tried harder on tasks
when they were in the presence of others (who could
be either coworkers or audience members), and this
effect was referred to as social facilitation. Trying
harder meant doing better on easy, well-learned tasks,
but doing worse on novel or difficult tasks. Research
in the 1970s and 1980s tended to find robust motivation
losses, a phenomenon known as social loafing.
The major difference between social facilitation
and social loafing was that with social facilitation,
individuals were working in the evaluative presence of

890———Social Compensation
others, but in social loafing, they were working on
tasks in which they shared contributions with the others.
As a result, the presence of others implied less
evaluation. Still to be demonstrated, however, were
conditions in which individuals would work harder
when working collectively than when they worked
individually. Lay theories focus on esprit de corps, in
which individuals working in collective groups are
infused with team spirit and work harder than they do
individually; however, there is little evidence that this
occurs. At best, highly cohesive teams were simply
less likely to loaf.
But consider a classroom situation in which a
teacher divides a class into small groups in which
each group works on a project for which they share a
grade. Social loafing occurs in this type of situation,
but under what conditions would a student feel especially
obligated to compensate for others?
When People Compensate
For social compensation to occur, two criteria must
be satisfied. The first is that individuals must, for
some reason, distrust their fellow coworkers to put
forth an acceptable contribution to the group task.
This can happen several ways. Some individuals are
chronically distrustful of others, feeling they cannot
rely on others to do their part. Research has shown
that those low in interpersonal trust are more likely to
compensate on a collective task. Ironically, hightrusting
individuals seem most likely to take advantage
of a collective task and let others do most of the
work. Distrust can also develop when individuals suspect
that their coworkers do not intend to exert much
effort on the collective task. Social compensation is
likely to occur when coworkers indicate their lack of
intended effort. Finally, individuals are more likely to
socially compensate when they are led to believe
their coworkers lack the ability to do well on the collective
task.
The second criterion is that the task must be sufficiently
important to the individual before he or she will
feel compelled to exert greater amounts of effort. If the
task is relatively meaningless or unimportant, then
regardless of one’s trust level or perceptions of coworker
effort or ability, individuals will be most likely to
socially loaf. Only if the task is perceived to be important
to the individual, and expectations of coworker contributions
are low, will social compensation occur.
Limitations and Boundary Conditions
Several factors could affect the likelihood of social
compensation as well. The existing research has only
examined collective effort in a short-term task (usually
less than an hour), in which there is no possibility
for exiting the group. Whether individuals will
socially compensate for their coworkers if the individual
has other options, such as working alone or with a
new group, is unknown. Also, even when someone
does compensate for coworkers, he or she probably
will not do this forever. At the beginning, individuals
may be more likely to compensate for others’ poor
performance, but if their coworkers keep performing
poorly for a long period, resentment is likely to build,
and individuals may be no longer inclined to compensate.
Finally, social compensation is less likely as
group size increases. If the group is large, and the outcome
of the group depends on each individual’s contribution,
then it becomes impossible in some cases to
compensate for the poor performance of coworkers,
and individuals are likely to be unwilling to carry the
burden of many poorly performing coworkers.
Implications
The factors that lead to social compensation could
conceivably aid in understanding and managing group
performance, although not without caution. One possible
way to reduce social loafing and promote social
compensation is to encourage individuals to value the
outcomes of the group performance and to simultaneously
suggest that their coworkers may engage in
social loafing. This strategy, of course, may work initially
but, over time, may backfire and lead to resentment
or early exit. As yet, little research has addressed
the persistence of social compensation over time.
More important, perhaps, is the unfortunate conclusion
that esprit de corps is still not readily observed,
and that to achieve high individual contributions to
collective tasks, the opposite must occur: a general
lack of regard for one’s fellow coworkers’ willingness
or ability to contribute adequately.
Kipling D. Williams
Zhansheng Chen
Eric D. Wesselmann
See also Group Dynamics; Ringelmann Effect; Social
Facilitation; Social Loafing

Further Readings
Kerr, N. L. (2001). Motivational gains in performance
groups: Aspects and prospects. In J. Forgas, K. Williams,
& L. Wheeler (Eds.), The social mind: Cognitive and
motivational aspects of interpersonal behavior
(pp. 350–370). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Williams, K. D., Harkins, S. G., & Karau, S. J. (2003). Social
performance. In M. A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.),
Handbook of social psychology (pp. 328–346). London:
Sage.
Williams, K. D., & Karau, S. J. (1991). Social loafing and
social compensation: The effects of expectations of
coworker performance. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 61, 570–581.
SOCIAL DESIRABILITY BIAS
In the context of participating in a psychology study,
social desirability bias refers to the tendency to present
one’s self in a favorable way rather than to give
accurate answers. In other words, participants have a
tendency to answer in ways that make them look good
in the eyes of others, regardless of the accuracy of
their answers. For example, most people would deny
that they drive after drinking alcohol because it
reflects poorly on them and others would most likely
disapprove.
Psychologists have long been interested in people’s
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and have often relied
on self-reports to gather information. For example, a
person may be asked to indicate which items in a
list of characteristics describe him or her. The underlying
assumption in the use of self-reports to collect
information is that people are experts in knowing
themselves. However, researchers recognize that individuals
can distort their responses to self-reports in
ways that are inaccurate and misleading. Distortion of
responses may be to the result of an individual’s disposition
(i.e., their personality) or caused by aspects
of the situation (e.g., the way a statement is phrased).
Social desirability bias is one way of distorting
responses that has received a large amount of empirical
investigation.
In general, social desirability bias can take one of
two forms. One involves self-deception, whereby a
person provides inaccurate information but believes
that it is accurate. For example, reporting that one is
better than average on any given attribute could
suggest a distorted response that is a subjectively honest
response. A second form of social desirability is
impression management whereby people intentionally
distort responses to appear better than what they are.
A good example of impression management occurs in
the context of job interviews where applicants present
themselves in ways to make themselves appear best
suited for the job.
The literature shows that self reports are especially
vulnerable to inaccurate responses caused by social
desirability. As a result, some researchers suggest
alternative ways to collect information such as
through direct observation or having others report
information about the respondents. However, because
self-reports remain an economical way to gather
information, one focus in the research on social desirability
concerns how best to deal with this bias. For
example, evidence suggests that this bias may be
reduced through careful wording of questions and the
assurance of anonymity. Some researchers take the
approach of measuring for social desirability bias and
statistically controlling for its influence.
Louise Wasylkiw
See also Impression Management; Self-Deception; Self-
Enhancement; Self-Presentation; Self-Reports
Further Readings
Paulhus, D. L. (1991). Measurement and control of response
bias. In J. P. Robinson, P. R. Shaver, & L. S. Wrightsman
(Eds.), Measures of personality and social psychological
attitudes (pp. 17–59). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Paulhus, D. L., & Reid, D. B. (1991). Enhancement and
denial in socially desirable responding. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 307–317.
SOCIAL DILEMMAS
Social Dilemmas———891
Definition
A social dilemma is a situation in which a group of
people must work together to achieve some goal that
no one person could easily meet alone. However, if
the goal is met, all group members, even those who
did not help toward the goal, can enjoy its benefits.

892———Social Dilemmas
This feature introduces a temptation to let others do
the work and then enjoy the fruits of their labors after
the goal is met. However, this same temptation exists
for all other group members, and if everyone succumbs
to it, then no one will be working toward the
goal: The goal will not be met, and everyone will be
worse off than if everyone had contributed effort.
Thus the dilemma: Should you do what’s best for
yourself and hope that others work hard, or do what’s
best for the group and hope that others don’t take
advantage of your efforts? Social dilemmas are generally
separated into two types: commons dilemmas
(also called resource dilemmas or social traps), under
which a short-term gain may lead to a long-term loss,
and public goods (or social fences), under which a
short-term loss may lead to a long-term gain.
Commons Dilemmas
The commons dilemma has its roots in a famous 1968
article in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons” by
Garrett Hardin. Imagine that all houses in a neighborhood
have access to a water table. Economically, the
ideal strategy for each household is to use as much
water as the family desires; all of their needs will be
met. However, if all households do this, the water
will deplete more quickly than rain and snowmelt can
replenish it, and eventually the table will go dry. At
that point, the neighbors will have to begin purchasing
all their water, which will be a considerable expense.
Thus, the people realized an immediate benefit but
suffered a long-term loss. If all households had
instead forgone some luxuries and curbed their water
use, the table could have replenished at an adequate
rate and would have lasted much longer, perhaps
indefinitely. However, if everyone else is indeed conserving,
the temptation will be strong to not do one’s
part and revert to maximum-use behavior—how much
damage can one abuser cause? Unfortunately, this
temptation usually proves to be so strong that most
people eventually succumb to it, and the resource
eventually dies; hence, the tragedy.
Research on Commons Dilemmas
Research clearly shows that people are not good at
maintaining a resource over a long period. Psychologists
have tried to identify factors that encourage people
to be better resource managers. Some of these factors
are internal to the person, and some are external. Much
work on internal characteristics has centered on social
value orientation, and this remains a popular topic.
There is also quite a bit of research on situational perceptions.
Many have been studied, and a good number
seem to be important in the odd situation, but far fewer
have broad impact. The best evidence shows that
people are generally likely to be conserving if they feel
the need to offset overuse by others, perceive conformity
pressure to conserve, believe that the resource
is inadequately sized, have previously caused (rather
than merely experienced) resource failure, and socially
identify with the group.
Regarding external factors, research has concentrated
on the effectiveness of leader-based (rather than
free-choice) systems of resource sampling, under
which a single person determines how much of the
resource each person receives. Though the leader system
is typically more effective at resource maintenance
than free choice, group members generally dislike it, so
much so that they will abandon it at first opportunity, all
the while acknowledging its effectiveness. Emerging
evidence indicates that the leader can develop a sense
of entitlement and start to claim a disproportionate
amount of the resource for himself or herself.
An emerging issue is the amount of information
group members have, and how specific that information
is, regarding the commons. In real commons dilemmas,
group members almost always lack some information
about the commons, their fellow group members, or
both, and researchers are trying to understand the
impact of this uncertainty. A general finding is that
people become more consuming as the specificity of
commons information gets less, and this is magnified if
some people get to sample the commons before others.
Early samplers will be especially abusive (and interestingly,
people seem to expect this will happen).
Public Goods
A public good is an entity that exists only after a sufficient
number of group members contribute toward its
provision; hence, the social fence: You must give up
something now to experience the benefit later.
However, once the good is provided to all members,
contributors and noncontributors alike can share in it.
Thus, the dominant motive is to let others work to
provide the good, and then take advantage once they
succeed. This is termed free riding. But if everyone
responds to this motive, then no effort will be put forth,
and everyone will be denied the good. Public television
is a well-known example. Stations solicit funds
during pledge drives, but everyone can access its

shows, so there is no obvious incentive to give money.
However, low donation levels will force the station
to forgo expensive programs, and as expensive shows
are usually the most popular, it follows that everyone
will be denied the opportunity to watch their favorite
programs. Researchers distinguish between a discrete
good, which is provided only after a minimum total
contribution has been reached, and a continuous good,
which is provided in proportion to the total amount
given. Small amounts of the good are available when
contributions are few, and large amounts are available
when contributions are plentiful.
Research on Public Good Dilemmas
Public goods have been studied by economists since
at least the 1930s, and their work has largely focused
on external influences. Psychologists began systematically
investigating internal factors in the 1970s. Of
these, strong support exists for self-efficacy, and especially
criticality, as a key factor. People who believe
that their efforts will make a difference in determining
whether the good is provided are much more likely to
help than are people who do not. The best-case scenario
is when people believe provision will fail without
their involvement. All else being equal, efficacy
goes down as group size increases, so this is a very
real problem in large groups. Evidence shows that
discussion of the dilemma among group members
enhances contributions, though it is not clear why;
group identity, promise making, coordination of
actions, and normative influence have all been suggested
as explanations. Research also supports the
value of a sanctioning system for increasing contribution.
Under such a system, group members socially
punish noncontributing others, usually by criticizing
or stigmatizing them. People are also influenced by
the knowledge of how many others have already
declined to contribute. As that number increases,
people become more likely to give, possibly because
they feel they do not have a choice, possibly because
their sense of efficacy increases.
Other factors have also been shown to influence
public goods behavior, but the nature of the influence
is not yet understood. For example, a person’s wealth
is predictive of whether he or she will contribute, but
some studies show wealthy people to be more likely to
give than poor people (because the wealthy can more
easily afford a contribution), whereas others show the
reverse (the public good may be the poor person’s
only means of realizing the benefit associated with the
good, whereas the wealthy person may have many
alternatives; hence, the poor person has greater incentive
to see the good provided). Also, greed is definitely
a motivator of noncontribution, though whether
it is the dominant motive or secondary to a fear of
being exploited by free riders is not clear.
An interesting relationship exists between willingness
to accept a leader-based solution and dilemma
type. At the start, people in a public goods problem
are even less supportive of a leader than are those in a
commons problem because the leader will be taking
some of their personal property. In the commons problem,
the leader simply restricts access to the commons.
However, in the wake of a failed public goods
problem, people are more supportive of a leader
system than are those experiencing failed commons
management. This is because a failed public good
produces a net loss for contributors: Something was
given up, but nothing was received in return. By contrast,
a failed commons still produces a net gain; the
dilemma is simply that the gain is not as large as it
could have been. The specific experience of loss
seems to be crucial for gaining support for a leaderbased
system.
Craig D. Parks
See also Cooperation; Interdependence Theory; Prisoner’s
Dilemma; Social Value Orientation; Trust
Further Readings
Social Dominance Orientation———893
Kelley, H. H., Holmes, J. G., Kerr, N. L., Reis,
H. T., Rusbult, C. E., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2003).
An atlas of interpersonal situations. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Komorita, S. S., & Parks, C. D. (1996). Social dilemmas.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Van Vugt, M., Snyder, M., Tyler, T. R., & Biel, A. (2000).
Cooperation in modern society. New York: Routledge.
SOCIAL DOMINANCE ORIENTATION
Definition
Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a measure of
an individual’s support for group-based hierarchies. It
reflects a person’s attitudes toward hierarchies in general,
as well as beliefs about whether one’s own group
should dominate other groups. People with high SDO

894———Social Dominance Orientation
believe that society should be structured in terms of
inequality, with some groups at the top (i.e., possessing
more power and resources) and others at the bottom.
People with low SDO, in contrast, believe that
society should be structured in terms of equality, with
no single group dominating others.
Background and Importance
Social dominance orientation is based on social dominance
theory, which was developed by Jim Sidanius
and Felicia Pratto. According to social dominance theory,
all societies are composed of group-based hierarchies.
Group-based hierarchy refers to the notion
that some people dominate others by virtue of their
membership in powerful groups, independent of their
individual-level characteristics such as charisma and
intelligence. These groups can be organized by gender,
race, ethnicity, social class, religion, sports teams, or any
other social category relevant to the context at hand.
Social dominance theory postulates that groupbased
hierarchies are reinforced by legitimizing myths,
or belief systems that indicate how power and status
should be distributed among groups of people.
Legitimizing myths can take one of two forms. First,
they can be hierarchy-enhancing, meaning that they
promote social inequality. Examples include racism,
sexism, nationalism, and social Darwinism. Second,
they can be hierarchy-attenuating, meaning that they
promote social equality. Examples include multiculturalism,
beliefs in the universal rights of humankind,
and socialism.
Hierarchy-enhancing myths justify group-based
domination. For instance, a central idea of social
Darwinism is that certain groups are at the top of the
hierarchy because they are more fit and capable than
are those at the bottom. Hierarchy-attenuating myths,
in contrast, counteract these belief systems to regulate
the degree of inequality in society. Individuals with
high SDO tend to support hierarchy-enhancing myths,
whereas individuals with low SDO tend to support
hierarchy-attenuating myths.
Social dominance orientation is an important measure
because it shows that people’s general feelings
toward social inequality can predict their beliefs about
whether their own group should dominate other
groups (e.g., nationalism), their endorsement of specific
social policies (e.g., capital punishment), and
even their choice of occupation or college major. In
turn, these beliefs, attitudes, and choices can influence
individuals’ levels of SDO because they perpetuate
the idea that certain groups should be at the top of
the hierarchy, whereas other groups should stay at the
bottom. Thus, SDO is both a cause and a consequence
of hierarchy-enhancing myths and practices.
Antecedents
SDO stems from at least three sources, one of which
is group status or power. Members of high-status
groups generally have higher SDO than do members
of low-status groups. For example, men have higher
SDO than women, White Americans have higher SDO
than non-Whites, and heterosexuals have higher
SDO than gays. A possible reason for such patterns of
SDO endorsement is that groups at the top of the hierarchy
would like to maintain their dominant position,
whereas groups at the bottom of the hierarchy would
like to change their subordinate position. As a result,
the former support social inequality and the latter
oppose it.
Another source of SDO involves socialization and
background. In general, individuals who were raised
in unaffectionate families have higher SDO than do
those who were raised in affectionate families, most
likely because unaffectionate families promote fewer
ideas of equality. Furthermore, people who consider
themselves religious typically have lower SDO than
do their nonreligious counterparts because religious
faith predicts endorsement of many hierarchy-attenuating
legitimizing myths.
A third source of SDO is personality or temperament.
People who are tough-minded tend to have high
SDO because they are concerned with group-based
competition and domination. In contrast, people who
are empathetic and concerned about others tend to
have low SDO because they care about cooperation
and the reduction of group-based inequality.
Consequences
As noted previously, high SDO is associated with
the promotion of hierarchy-enhancing myths, and low
SDO is associated with the promotion of hierarchyattenuating
myths. Endorsing these myths in turn
leads people to support social policies that either
heighten or attenuate social inequality. For instance,
hierarchy-enhancing myths trigger favorable attitudes
toward war, the military, and capital punishment.
Hierarchy-attenuating myths, on the other hand,
induce favorable attitudes toward affirmative action,
women’s rights, and gay rights.

In addition to predicting endorsement of legitimizing
myths and social policies, SDO predicts selection
into particular organizational roles. To illustrate,
police recruits and law students have higher SDO
than do public defenders and psychology students.
Presumably, the reason for this is that the former two
roles are hierarchy-enhancing and attract people with
high SDO, whereas the latter two roles are hierarchyattenuating
and attract people with low SDO.
Importantly, hierarchy-enhancing roles can
heighten the SDO of individuals who enact them. In
one study, the magnitude of the difference between
law and psychology students’ levels of SDO increased
with the amount of time that these students spent in
college. This finding suggests that hierarchy-enhancing
roles, such as being a law student, can breed
positive feelings toward social inequality. In contrast,
hierarchy-attenuating roles, such as being a psychology
student, can trigger negative feelings toward
social inequality.
Kimberly Rios Morrison
Oscar Ybarra
See also Attitudes; Beliefs; Equity Theory; Ideology;
Intergroup Relations
Further Readings
Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F.
(1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality
variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741–763.
Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social dominance: An
intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
SOCIAL EXCHANGE THEORY
Definition
Social exchange theory is a broad social psychological
perspective that attempts to explain how human social
relationships are formed, maintained, and terminated.
The basic premise of this theory is that how people feel
about a given interaction or relationship depends fundamentally
on the outcomes that they perceive to be
associated with it. More specifically, the perceived
costs and benefits that accompany a person’s interactions
determine how he or she evaluates them. To the
Social Exchange Theory———895
extent that rewards are seen as high and costs are seen
as low, a person tends to feel good about a relationship
and will stay in it. If perceived costs increase or perceived
benefits decrease, however, satisfaction with the
relationship will decline and the person is more likely
to end it.
Because social exchange theory is very general in
nature, it can be readily applied to understanding a
variety of different social relationships and situations.
For instance, social exchange principles can provide
insight into people’s business relationships, friendships,
and romantic partnerships, among other types
of social involvements. In addition, these principles
can be applied to understanding relationships involving
individual people or social groups.
Theoretical Background and Principles
Social exchange theory is based on the idea that
people seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs
in any given social relationship. Rewards can consist
of anything tangible or intangible that an individual
considers valuable. For instance, business relationships
may provide several concrete benefits, such as
income or material goods, in addition to several more
abstract benefits, such as prestige and a sense of security.
Costs include anything that an individual considers
to be unrewarding or sees as requiring a significant
amount of time or effort. For example, romantic relationships
may involve costs such as shared housework
and spending vacations with one’s in-laws (which,
for some people, can be extremely unpleasant). Of
course, the evaluation of rewards and costs is highly
subjective because that which is rewarding for one
individual might not be quite as rewarding for another
person. Similarly, that which is considered rewarding
in one relationship might not be perceived as rewarding
in a different social involvement.
People’s evaluations of perceived rewards and
costs influence how satisfied they are with their relationships
and the relative stability of those relationships.
Satisfaction with a relationship is determined
by considering one’s outcome comparison level (i.e.,
the standard by which one judges his or her current
relationship’s outcomes). For instance, a person may
compare his or her current outcomes with those he or
she has received in a past relationship of a similar
type. So, you might compare how things are going
now with your current boyfriend or girlfriend with
how things went with past romantic partners. To the
extent that a person’s current outcomes exceed his or

896———Social Exclusion
her previous outcomes, the person is satisfied with a
relationship and desires it to continue. However, if a
person’s current outcomes don’t compare favorably to
his or her previous outcomes, the person becomes dissatisfied
and is less likely to work at furthering the
relationship. People compare their current outcomes
not only to past outcomes but also to those that they
could be receiving now in other potential relationships
(referred to as the comparison level for alternatives).
To the extent that the outcomes people perceive as
possible within an alternative relationship are better
than those that they are receiving in their current relationship,
they are less likely to continue in the current
relationship.
Reward-to-cost ratios and comparison levels are
subject to change over time, as individuals continually
take stock of what they have gained and lost in their
relationships. This implies that relationships that a
person found satisfying at one point in time may
become dissatisfying later because of changes in perceived
rewards and costs. This may occur because certain
factors may become less rewarding or more costly
over time. For instance, sex may be extremely rewarding
for members of a newly married couple but may
become less so as passion and spontaneity decrease
over the years.
Finally, people’s perceptions of their relationships
also depend on whether the exchanges that occur are
viewed as equitable. Equitable or fair exchanges are
necessary to avoid conflict between relationship
partners. For instance, assume that there is favorable
exchange for all parties involved in an ongoing relationship,
but one party is receiving substantially greater
benefits than the other. Such a scenario may be perceived
as unfair because distributive justice is not
present (i.e., outcomes are being distributed unequally).
In this case, individuals with worse outcomes may feel
exploited and have negative feelings about their
exchange partner, which may ultimately affect how
committed they are to continuing the relationship.
Example
A recent college graduate accepts his or her first job
with a large corporation because it has an excellent
reputation and pays well. At first, the graduate loves
the new job. Eventually, however, he or she comes to
realize that his or her supervisor does not treat the
graduate with respect, and he or she is so overworked
that there is little time to enjoy the large salary. The
graduate considers leaving the current job and starting
his or her own company. This is seen as desirable
because it would allow the graduate to be his or her
own boss and set his or her own hours. Then the graduate
receives a promotion at work. No longer having
to work as many hours and free from the previous
supervisor, the graduate decides to renew the contract
with the corporation.
Limitations
Social exchange theory is limited in some ways. For
example, the theory does not address the role of altruism
in determining relationship outcomes. That is,
people do not always act in self-interested ways
(i.e., maximizing rewards and minimizing costs). For
instance, in intimate relationships, people act communally,
working for the benefit of their partner or relationship,
sometimes even at great cost to oneself.
Although evidence for this has been found for romantic
relationships, this may not hold for other types
of involvements, such as business relationships.
Therefore, although social exchange principles have
implications for a variety of different types of social
relationships, they may explain some types of relationships
better than others.
Christopher R. Agnew
Justin J. Lehmiller
See also Distributive Justice; Equity Theory; Interdependence
Theory; Reciprocity Norm
Further Readings
Blau, P. M. (1964). Exchange and power in social life.
New York: Wiley.
Cook, K. S., & Rice, E. (2003). Social exchange theory.
In J. Delamater (Ed.), Handbook of social psychology
(pp. 53–76). New York: Kluwer.
Homans, G. C. (1961). Social behavior and its elementary
forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.
Thibaut, J. W., & Kelley, H. H. (1959). The social psychology
of groups. New York: Wiley.
SOCIAL EXCLUSION
Definition
Social exclusion refers to keeping an individual or
group out of social situations. It typically occurs in

the context that the individual or group is believed to
possess undesirable characteristics or characteristics
deemed unworthy of attention. Acts of social exclusion
are observed in humans and other social animals.
Researchers agree that social exclusion serves a specific
function for those who employ it, and that it is
unpleasant and painful for those who are denied
inclusion.
Context, Importance, and Evidence
Researchers suggest four main functions for social
exclusion. The first function is as a way of enforcing
social rules. Societies operate on rules that apply to
various situations, and if members violate these
rules, they are often excluded from social activities.
Individuals who break criminal laws are often
excluded from society. Children who perpetually
ignore the rules of a game are subsequently excluded
from future games.
The second function is for the distribution of
resources to group members. Most resources are in
limited supply; thus, the group must decide which
members receive these resources. If members are
judged by the majority to be unfit for social exchange,
then the majority may decide to exclude those members
from social interactions and deny them resources.
This often occurs in children, for example, when
smaller or less coordinated children are excluded from
athletic games. It also occurs on a societal level when
laws are enacted that hinder fringe groups from benefiting
from governmental programs.
The third function involves group identity, often
resulting in justification for discrimination. The need
for belonging is an important basic human need; group
identity is often a way of fulfilling this need. Group
identity categories are formed on biological factors
(e.g., race, sex), socially constructed factors (e.g.,
social class), or personal beliefs and opinions (e.g.,
religion, politics). These divisions often lead to an “Us
versus Them” mentality, serving as a way of solidifying
group identity, and keeping dissimilar groups on
society’s fringes. Young children tend to socially avoid
members of the opposite sex, but play with same-sex
members. Exclusion can be the first step toward discrimination,
which can lead to large-scale segregation
and aggression.
The fourth function is to increase the strength or
cohesiveness of the excluding group. Social exclusion
is used to reduce vulnerability or weakness in the
group. In social animals, the member who is weak or
puts the group at risk is excluded, thus strengthening
the group. The act of excluding can strengthen the
perceived cohesiveness and power of the group. Acts
of exclusion provide an immediate sense of power,
control, and cohesiveness.
Implications
Social exclusion (and related phenomena such as
rejection and ostracism) is a powerful and universal
social tool. Those who employ it receive some immediate
benefits. For those on which it is used, it
can sometimes lead them to correct their behaviors so
that they can be re-included, but often, it is painful and
can lead to depression and, in some cases, aggression.
Researchers are actively investigating under what
conditions each of these paths are taken, and when
social exclusion becomes harmful to the larger group,
as well.
See also Need to Belong; Ostracism; Rejection
Further Readings
Kipling D. Williams
Eric D. Wesselmann
Zhansheng Chen
Williams, K. D., Forgas, J. P., & von Hippel, W. (Eds.).
(2005). The social outcast: Ostracism, social exclusion,
rejection, and bullying. New York: Psychology Press.
SOCIAL FACILITATION
Social Facilitation———897
Definition
Social facilitation refers to the general phenomenon
that physical and cognitive performance is improved
when other people are present (and possibly watching
the performer). Psychologists use the term social
facilitation/inhibition to indicate that performance is
sometimes facilitated while being observed, and other
times inhibited in the presence of others. The critical
factor for determining whether performance is facilitated
or inhibited is whether the task that the individual
is performing is well learned (simple) or novel
(difficult). Research has shown that well-learned tasks
are facilitated under observation, whereas novel tasks
are inhibited under observation.

898———Social Facilitation
History and Background
One of the first documented studies in social psychology
appeared in Norman Triplett’s 1898 article
“The Dynamogenic Factors in Pacemaking and
Competition,” which described observational data
from competitive cyclists and an experimental study
on the speed at which children could spin a fishing
reel. Triplett demonstrated that competitive cyclists
paired with other cyclists yielded faster racing times
than did cyclists racing against the clock. In the experimental
section of the article, children were instructed
to spin a fishing reel as quickly as possible to move a
figure along a racecourse, either with other children
(coaction) or alone. Children in the coaction setting
were more likely to spin the reel faster than were those
performing the task alone. These findings led to the
conclusion that the presence of others, particularly
coacting others, improved performance.
By the mid-20th century, social facilitation research
had waned. A cursory examination of the literature
revealed inconsistent findings regarding how the presence
of others affected performance. Though it
appeared that performance improved when in the presence
of others, not all the data supported this conclusion.
Even in Triplett’s research, only 50% of the
children performed faster when coacting, and among
the remaining children 25% performed the same and
25% performed worse when paired with others.
In the mid-1960s, Robert Zajonc published an
influential article on social facilitation that brought
order to these inconsistent findings. Zajonc argued
that the presence of others could bring about facilitated
or impaired performance depending on the type
of task being performed. When the task at hand was
well learned, observers or coactors could facilitate
performance, but when the task was novel, the presence
of others could inhibit performance. Zajonc
argued that the underlying reason for these differences
was an arousal or drive component. According to the
drive theory, the presence of others evoked an undifferentiated
arousal or drive that increased the likelihood
of a dominant response. (The dominant response
is whatever response is most likely in that exact situation.)
In well-learned or easy tasks, the dominant
response would be the correct answer. In novel or
complex tasks, however, the dominant response is
likely to be the incorrect answer. Zajonc’s distinction
explained the inconsistencies in social facilitation
studies and why tasks that involved well-established
and fluid responses were improved by the presence of
an audience or coactors, but tasks that required problem-solving
skills were impaired.
Zajonc demonstrated support for this theory in one
of the classic social psychology studies. Instead of
studying task performances of college sophomores,
Zajonc enlisted 72 female cockroaches (Blattis orientalis,
to be exact) to run an easy or a difficult maze. In
addition to the difficulty of the maze, Zajonc manipulated
whether the cockroach ran the maze with an
audience of other cockroaches (the cockroaches were
in clear boxes adjacent to the maze) or without a cockroach
audience. The final critical factor was whether
cockroaches ran the maze alone or paired with another
cockroach. Zajonc found that the presence of conspecifics
(i.e., members of the same species) as either
coactors or as observers (the audience) increased running
time in the easy maze, but decreased running
time in the difficult maze relative to running times in
the alone condition. These findings were interpreted
as support for the drive hypothesis of social facilitation,
specifically that the presence of conspecifics
increased general arousal states and that arousal facilitated
dominant responses and impaired nondominant
responses.
Zajonc’s provocative theory and empirical data
renewed interest in social facilitation research and a
flurry of empirical investigations followed. As a way
to make sense of the many studies, researchers in
the 1980s examined all the studies simultaneously (a
process called meta-analysis) to extract generalizable
constructs and gauge the reliability of the phenomenon.
After reviewing 241 studies comprising more
than 24,000 subjects, the authors concluded that the
presence of others did indeed inhibit complex performance
accuracy and decreased speed of responding.
Also consistent with the theory, the meta-analysis
showed that the presence of others facilitated simple
performance speed, but there was less evidence that
accuracy of performance increased in the presence
of others. This finding could be caused by ceiling
effects; performance is already so close to perfect in
simple tasks that the additive benefit derived from the
presence of others may be difficult to detect.
Why Is Performance
Improved or Impaired?
The meta-analysis strongly supported social psychologists’
claims that these effects were robust. However,
the demonstration of social facilitation/inhibition,

though important, does not address the question of
why the effects occur. What is the process by which
performance is facilitated or inhibited? In social facilitation
research, social psychologists have focused on
three reasons to explain social facilitation/impairment
effects. These reasons can be broadly construed as
physiological, cognitive, and affective mechanisms.
The physiological explanation was discussed briefly
earlier—the generalized drive and arousal hypothesis;
the cognitive explanation focuses on distraction and
attention; and the affective component focuses on
the anxiety and self-presentational aspects related to
performing in front of others.
Physiological Mechanisms
The drive-arousal hypothesis received some support,
using a variety of methodological techniques. In
a naturalistic setting, social psychologists examined
running speeds of joggers who were filmed unobtrusively
as they rounded a footpath. The experimenters
manipulated the presence of others using three conditions:
mere presence, evaluative, and alone conditions.
The experimenters operationalized these conditions
using a female confederate placed strategically along
the footpath. As runners rounded a bend in the footpath,
the female confederate sat with her back to the
runners (mere presence), the female confederate sat
facing the runners (evaluative), or the female confederate
was not present (alone). Only runners in the
evaluative condition (confronted with a person watching
them run) significantly accelerated their running
pace, demonstrating support for the drive aspect of
facilitation effects.
Though the studies examining running time were
consistent with the arousal explanation, they did not
directly measure physiological arousal. Not until
advances in the field of psychophysiology (the science
of linking psychological states with physiological
responses) occurred were social psychologists able
to properly test the arousal hypothesis of social facilitation
effects. A century after the publication of
Triplett’s seminal article, social psychophysiologist
Jim Blascovich tested the arousal mechanisms that
were believed to underlie social facilitation effects.
This research found that as Zajonc had originally
hypothesized, present others did significantly increase
sympathetic activation during performance tasks
relative to alone conditions (e.g., heart rate and other
cardiac measures increased). However, even though
general autonomic reactivity increased for everyone
in the audience condition, very different physiological
profiles were produced, depending on whether the
cognitive task was novel or well learned. Specifically,
people completing the well-learned task in the presence
of an audience had changes in cardiovascular
responses consistent with a benign (healthier) profile.
These changes included stronger contractility force
of the heart ventricles, more blood ejected from the
heart, and overall dilation of the arterioles, which
allows faster blood flow to the periphery. In stark
contrast, when people completed a novel task in the
presence of an audience, their cardiovascular
responses were consistent with a malignant (unhealthier)
profile that included greater contractile force and
co-occurring decreases in blood volume (indicating
less heart efficiency), and constriction of the arterioles.
This research demonstrated that although Zajonc
was correct in identifying arousal as a critical explanation
in social facilitation/inhibition effects, arousal
is not unidirectional. Instead, while in the presence of
others, different cardiovascular profiles co-occur
when completing novel versus well-learned tasks.
Cognitive Mechanisms
Social Facilitation———899
Evidence for the cognitive mechanisms underlying
social facilitation effects are best articulated by the
distraction-conflict theory. This theory suggests that
the presence of others is distracting and that distraction
creates cognitive overload, which restricts attentional
focus. This results in different effects in simple
versus complex tasks. In simple tasks performance is
improved because attentional focus on present others
results in screening out nonessential stimuli, leading
to better performance. In complex tasks, attentional
focus impairs performance because the complex tasks
require attention to wider ranges of stimulus cues.
Some persuasive evidence for this explanation of
social facilitation/inhibition effects comes from
studies examining attentional focus as a result of present
others using the Stroop task. In the Stroop task,
participants are instructed to say aloud the ink color of
a word. This task is difficult because the word is a
color word printed in an incongruent color (e.g., the
word red would be printed in blue ink); participants
have to say the word blue—the ink color—and simultaneously
suppress the desire to say the word red. The
Stroop task thus requires the inhibition of the dominant
response (reading) and requires the person to

900———Social Facilitation
focus on the details of the printed word. In support of
the distraction-conflict theory, researchers found that,
compared with the alone condition, participants in the
audience condition had less Stroop interference,
meaning that attention shifted away from the central
or dominant response tendency (reading) and toward
processing the stimulus details (the ink color).
Affective Mechanisms
A final related explanation for social facilitation
effects is one that focuses on the affective responses
associated with being evaluated in the presence of others.
This explanation emphasizes the importance of
self-presentational concerns related to performing in
front of others. Some psychologists have argued that
the most significant consequence of an audience (or
coactors) is that their presence shapes the behaviors of
the performer and emphasizes the importance of making
a good impression or avoiding a bad impression.
To the extent that individuals feel that they can selfpresent
positively while being observed, which they
would be more likely to believe if the tasks were simple
or well learned, then present others would facilitate
performance. If, on the other hand, the task is difficult
or novel, the individual may expect to perform poorly.
This anxiety or evaluation apprehension associated
with performing well may ironically worsen their performance.
Persuasive evidence for this idea comes
from studies that found no differences in task performance
when participants performed a task alone or
in the presence of a blindfolded audience. These findings
suggest that the ability of the present others to
evaluate the performance is critical to social facilitation/
inhibition effects.
Related Constructs
Several related constructs appear in the social psychological
literature, but the construct most commonly
confused with social facilitation is social loafing.
Social loafing is the tendency for individuals to perform
worse in a group setting. For example, when a
group of participants was asked to pull on a rope, they
pulled with less strength than when pulling the rope
alone as an individual. This might seem to be a direct
contradiction to social facilitation. However, the constructs
can be clearly differentiated. Social loafing is
more likely to occur when the task performance is
evaluated at a group level. Therefore, any one individual’s
performance cannot be evaluated. In contrast,
social facilitation occurs when an individual’s performance
can be directly evaluated and the performance
is unambiguously related back to the individual.
Implications
Unlike other contemporary psychological theories,
social facilitation/inhibition theory predicts changes
in performance in both physical and cognitive
domains. The utility and application of these findings
are relevant to educational settings, sports psychology,
and organizational behavior, to name a few.
Implications from this theory are particularly relevant
to educational settings where the goal is both
effective learning and testing of knowledge. Social
facilitation/inhibition theory suggests that to increase
learning comprehension, one should try to learn new
material while alone (in this case, the material being
learned is presumed to be novel, difficult, and nondominant),
but one should be tested on well-learned
material in the presence of others.
In addition, sports psychologists use the knowledge
gleaned from social facilitation/inhibition theory on
how to best improve physical performance in observed
domains. They can predict that when athletes are competing
against a clock or their own time, performance
will be worse compared with environments in which
athletes are competing against a present other.
Similarly, games or events that have spectators may
produce better performance than do games with no
spectators. An interesting application of the theory is
the championship choke, which suggests that the home
field advantage may actually be a disadvantage.
Related to the affective mechanisms of social facilitation,
Roy Baumeister has argued that competing in the
most important games in the presence of a home crowd
increases one’s level of self-awareness, which would
not be the case for the visiting team. This increased
self-consciousness, like social inhibition effects, can
produce worse performance.
On some occasions, dominant responses are
unhealthy, and presence of others may encourage these
responses. Social facilitation has been applied to the
study of activities such as teenage drinking, drug use,
overeating, and even acting with more prejudice. In a
recent study, psychologists showed that people most
concerned about appearing prejudiced acted more
prejudiced with others present than when alone. The
authors argued that observers decreased cognitive control,
resulting in more (unintended) prejudice. In other
words, observers facilitated biases and prejudice.

The presence of evaluative others affects one’s performance,
for better or worse. Whether the effect is
positive (better test scores, more touchdowns) or negative
(forgetting lines during a presentation, dropping
a pass on a football field) depends on whether the
task is familiar or novel, the nature of the audience
(friendly or hostile, friends or strangers), and one’s
physiological responses (benign or maladaptive).
Wendy Berry Mendes
See also Choking Under Pressure; Self-Presentation; Social
Compensation; Social Loafing
Further Readings
Blascovich, J., Mendes, W. B., Hunter, S., & Salomon,
K. (1999). Social facilitation as challenge and threat.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 68–77.
Bond, C. F., & Titus, L. J. (1983). Social facilitation: A
meta-analysis of 241 studies. Psychological Bulletin,
94, 265–292.
Geen, R. G. (1991). Social motivation. Annual Review of
Psychology, 42, 377–399.
Harkins, S. G. (1987). Social loafing and social facilitation.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 23, 1–18.
Huguet, P., Galvaing, M. P., Monteil, J. M., & Dumas,
F. (1999). Social presence effects in the Stroop task:
Further evidence for an attentional view of social
facilitation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
77, 1011–1025.
Triplett, N. (1898). The dynamogenic factors in pacemaking
and competition. American Journal of Psychology,
9, 507–533.
Zajonc, R. B., Heingartner, A., & Herman, E. M. (1969).
Social enhancement and impairment of performance in
the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 13, 83–92.
SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY
Definition and History
Social identity theory explains how the self-concept
is associated with group membership and group and
intergroup behavior. It defines group membership in
terms of people’s identification, definition, and evaluation
of themselves as members of a group (social
identity) and specifies cognitive, social interactive and
societal processes that interact to produce typical
group phenomena.
Social Identity Theory———901
Originating in the work of Henri Tajfel in the late
1960s and collaboration with John Turner in the
1970s, social identity theory has a number of different
conceptual foci. The two most significant are the
social identity theory of intergroup relations and the
social identity theory of the group, the latter called
self-categorization theory. Social identity theory has
developed to become one of social psychology’s most
significant and extensively cited analyses of intergroup
and group phenomena, for example, prejudice,
discrimination, stereotyping, cooperation and competition,
conformity, norms, group decision making,
leadership, and deviance.
How People Represent Themselves
People have a repertoire of different ways to conceive
of themselves; they have many different identities that
can be classified as personal identities or social identities.
Personal identities are definitions and evaluations
of oneself in terms of idiosyncratic personal
attributes (e.g., generous, shy), and one’s personal
relationships (e.g., X’s friend, Y’s spouse). Social
identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in
terms of the attributes of specific groups to which one
belongs (e.g., male, nurse, Hindu). Personal identity is
tied to the personal self and associated with interpersonal
or idiosyncratic individual behaviors; social
identity is tied to the collective self and associated
with group and intergroup behaviors. Recently, theorists
have argued that in some cultures, social identity
rests more on networks of relations within a group and
is thus associated with the relational self.
How People Represent Groups
Human groups are social categories that people
mentally represent as prototypes, complex (fuzzy) sets
of interrelated attributes that capture similarities within
groups and differences between groups. Prototypes
maximize entitativity (the extent to which a group is
a distinct entity) and optimize metacontrast (the extent
to which there is similarity within and difference
between groups). If someone says to you, “Norwegian,”
what comes immediately to mind is your prototype of
that national group. Overwhelmingly, people make
binary categorizations in which one of the categories is
the group that they are in, the ingroup. Thus, prototypes
not only capture similarities within the ingroup but also
accentuate differences between a person’s group and
a specific outgroup. Ingroup prototypes can therefore

902———Social Identity Theory
change as a function of which outgroup you are
comparing your group to. In this way, prototypes are
context dependent.
Categorization and Depersonalization
The process of categorizing someone has predictable
consequences. Rather than seeing that person as an
idiosyncratic individual, you see him or her through
the lens of the prototype; the person becomes depersonalized.
Prototype-based perception of outgroup
members is more commonly called stereotyping; you
view them as being similar to one another and all having
outgroup attributes. You can also depersonalize
ingroup members and yourself in exactly the same
way. When you categorize yourself, you view yourself
in terms of the defining attributes of the ingroup (selfstereotyping),
and, because prototypes describe and
prescribe group-appropriate ways to think, feel, and
behave, you think, feel, and behave group prototypically.
In this way, self-categorization produces normative
behavior among members of a group.
Feelings for Group Members
Social categorization affects how you feel toward
other people. Feelings are governed by how prototypical
of the group you think other people are, rather
than by personal preferences, friendships, and enmities;
liking becomes depersonalized social attraction.
Furthermore, because within one’s group there is
usually agreement over prototypicality, prototypical
members are liked by all; they are popular. Likewise,
less prototypical members are unpopular and can be
marginalized as undesirable deviants. Another aspect
of social attraction is that outgroup members are liked
less than ingroup members; outgroupers are very
unprototypical of the ingroup. Social attraction also
occurs because one’s ingroup prototypes are generally
more favorable than one’s outgroup prototypes; thus,
liking reflects prototypicality and the valence of the
prototype.
Intergroup Behavior
The tendency for ingroup prototypes to be more favorable
than outgroup prototypes represents ethnocentrism,
the belief that all things ingroup are superior to
all things outgroup. Ethnocentrism exists because of
the correspondence, through social identity, between
how the group is evaluated and how a person is
evaluated. Thus, intergroup behavior is a struggle over
the relative status or prestige of one’s ingroup, a struggle
for positive ingroup distinctiveness and social identity.
Higher status groups fight to protect their evaluative
superiority; lower status groups struggle to shrug off
their social stigma and promote their positivity.
The strategies that groups adopt to manage
their identity depend on subjective belief structures,
members’ beliefs about the nature of the relationship
between their group and a specific outgroup. Beliefs
focus on status (What is my group’s social standing
relative to the outgroup?), stability (How stable is this
status relationship?), legitimacy (How legitimate is
this status relationship?), permeability (How easy is it
for people to change their social identity by passing
into the outgroup?), and cognitive alternatives (Is a
different intergroup relationship conceivable?).
A social mobility belief structure hinges on a belief
in permeability. It causes members of lower status
groups as isolated individuals to disidentify from their
group to try to join the higher status outgroup; they try
to “pass.” A social change belief structure hinges on
acceptance that permeability is low. It causes low
status groups to engage in social creativity, behaviors
aimed at redefining the social value of their group and
its attributes, coupled with attempts to avoid (upward)
comparison with higher status groups and instead
engage in (lateral or downward) comparisons with
other groups lower in the social pecking order. Where
a social change belief structure is coupled with recognition
that the social order is illegitimate, group members
engage in social competition, direct competition
with the outgroup over status, which can range from
debate through protest, to revolution and war.
Social Identity Motivations
The group pursuit of positive distinctiveness is
reflected in people’s desire to have a relatively favorable
self-concept, in this case through positive social
identity. The self-esteem hypothesis draws out this
logic: Social identity processes are motivated by the
individual pursuit of a relatively favorable selfconcept
and possibly by the global human pursuit of
self-esteem. Research suggests that group membership
generally does make people feel good about themselves,
even if the group is relatively stigmatized, but
feeling good or bad about oneself does not easily predict
whether one will actually identify with a group.

According to uncertainty reduction theory, there is
another basic motivation for social identity processes.
People strive to reduce feelings of uncertainty about
their social world and their place within it; they like
to know who they are and how to behave, and who
others are and how they might behave. Social identity
ties self-definition and behavior to prescriptive and
descriptive prototypes. Social identity reduces uncertainty
about who you are and about how you and others
will behave, and is particularly effective if the
social identity is clearly defined by membership in a
distinctive high entitativity group. Research confirms
that uncertainty, especially about or related to self,
does motivate identification particularly with high
entitativity groups.
When Does Social Identity
Come into Play?
A social identity comes into play psychologically to
govern perceptions, attitudes, feelings, and behavior
when it is psychologically salient. People draw on
readily accessible social identities or categorizations
(e.g., gender, profession), ones that are valued,
important, and frequently employed aspects of the
self-concept (chronically accessible in memory), or
because they are self-evident and perceptually obvious
in the immediate situation (situationally accessible).
People use accessible identities to make sense
of their social context, checking how well the categorization
accounts for similarities and differences
among people (structural/comparative fit) and how
well the stereotypical properties of the categorization
account for people’s behavior (normative fit).
People try different categorizations, and the categorization
with optimal fit becomes psychologically
salient. Although largely an automatic process,
salience is influenced by motivations to employ categorizations
that favor the ingroup and do not raise
self-uncertainty.
Social Influence in Groups
People in groups adhere to similar standards, have similar
attitudes, and behave in similar ways. They conform
to group norms and behave group prototypically.
Self-categorization is the cognitive process responsible
for an individual group member behaving prototypically,
transforming his or her self-concept and behavior
to be identity-consistent. In gauging what the
appropriate group norm is, people pay attention to the
behavior of people who are most informative about the
norm, typically highly prototypical members and leaders,
but also, as contrast anchors, marginal members
and deviants, and even outgroup members (referent
informational influence theory).
Michael A. Hogg
See also Group Identity; Ethnocentrism; Self-Categorization
Theory; Self-Concept
Further Readings
Hogg, M. A. (2006). Social identity theory. In P. J. Burke
(Ed.), Contemporary social psychological theories
(pp. 111–136). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hogg, M. A., & Abrams, D. (1988). Social identifications:
A social psychology of intergroup relations and group
processes. London: Routledge.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1986). The social identity theory
of intergroup behavior. In S. Worchel & W. Austin (Eds.),
Psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 7–24). Chicago:
Nelson-Hall.
Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., &
Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group:
A self-categorization theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
SOCIAL IMPACT THEORY
Social Impact Theory———903
Definition
Social impact theory proposes that the amount of
influence a person experiences in group settings
depends on (a) strength (power or social status) of the
group, (b) immediacy (physical or psychological
distance) of the group, and (c) the number of people
in the group exerting the social influence (i.e., number
of sources). Thus, a group that has many members
(rather than few members), high power (rather than
low power), and close proximity (rather than distant
proximity) should exert the most influence on an
individual. Conversely, if the strength of the person
exposed to the social influence (i.e., target) increases,
the immediacy of the group decreases, or if the number
of targets increases, the amount of influence
exerted by the group on the individual decreases. The
theory therefore has direct applications to persuasion
and obedience.

904———Social Impact Theory
Social impact theory differs from other models of
social influence by incorporating strength and immediacy,
instead of relying exclusively on the number of
sources. Although criticisms have been raised, the theory
was (and continues to be) important for the study of
group influence. Reformulating social impact theory to
accommodate the influence of targets on sources (i.e.,
dynamic social impact theory) has further increased its
validity and range of explainable phenomena. Furthermore,
pushing social impact theory into applied areas
in social psychology continues to offer fresh perspectives
and predictions about group influence.
Tests of Social Impact Theory
Number of Sources
Social impact theory predicts multiple sources will
have more influence on a target than will a single
source. Research has generally supported this prediction:
Many studies have shown a message presented
by multiple people exerts more influence than does
the same message presented by a single person.
However, the effect of multiple sources only holds
true under three conditions. First, the influencing message
must contain strong (rather than weak) arguments.
Weakly reasoned arguments, whether given by
multiple sources or not, result in little attitude change.
Second, the target must perceive the multiple sources
to be independent of one another. The effect of multiple
sources disappears if the target believes the
sources “share a single brain.” The colluding party
will in such cases be no more effective than will a
single source. Third, as the number of sources grows
large, adding additional sources will have no additional
effect. For example, the effect of 4 independent
sources substantially differs from the effect of 1
source, but the effect of 12 independent sources does
not substantially differ from the effect of 15 independent
sources.
Strength and Immediacy
The inclusion of strength and immediacy as variables
is unique to social impact theory; no other social
influence theory includes these variables. Defining
strength and immediacy in research studies is less
straightforward than is defining the number of
sources, but the operational definitions have been relatively
consistent across studies. Researchers usually
vary the source’s strength with differences in either
age or occupation (adults with prestigious jobs presumably
have more strength than do young adult college
students). Researchers usually vary the source’s
immediacy either with differences in the physical distance
between the source and the target (less distance
means more immediacy) or, in cases of media presentation,
with differences in the size of the visual image
of the source (a larger image focused more on the face
relative to the body means more immediacy).
Surprisingly, however, these two components of
the model have received considerably less empirical
investigation than has the number of sources; therefore,
the effects of strength and immediacy on influence
are less clear. A statistical technique called
meta-analysis, which allows researchers to combine
the results of many different studies together, has
helped researchers draw at least some conclusions.
Across studies, meta-analyses on these two variables
indicate statistically significant effects of low magnitude
(i.e., the effects, though definitely present, are
not very strong). Furthermore, strength and immediacy
appear to only exert influence in studies using
self-report measures; the effects of strength and
immediacy wane when more objective measures of
behavior are examined.
Dynamic Social Impact Theory
In its traditional form, social impact theory predicts
how sources will influence a target, but neglects how
the target may influence the sources. Dynamic social
impact theory considers this reciprocal relationship.
The theory predicts people’s personal attitudes,
behaviors, and perceptions will tend to cluster
together at the group level; this group-level clustering
depends on the strength, immediacy, and number of
social influence sources. Day-to-day interaction with
others leads to attitude change in the individual, which
then helps contribute to the pattern of beliefs at the
group level. In support of the immediacy component
of dynamic social impact theory, for example, studies
have shown randomly assigned participants were
much more likely to share opinions and behaviors
with those situated close to them than with those situated
away from them, an effect which occurred after
only five rounds of discussion.
New Directions for Social Impact Theory
Recently, researchers have pushed social impact theory
outside the areas of persuasion and obedience into

more applied areas of social psychology. For example,
recent studies have examined social impact theory
in the context of consumer behavior. In one study,
researchers varied the size and proximity of a social
presence in retail stores, and examined how this
presence influenced shopping behavior. Furthermore,
several tenets of social impact theory seem to predict
political participation. One study found as the number
of people eligible to vote increases, the proportion of
people who actually vote asymptotically decreases.
This finding accords with social impact theory, which
predicts an increasingly marginal impact of sources as
their number grows very large.
Social impact theory has enjoyed great theoretical
and empirical attention, and it continues to inspire
interesting scientific investigation.
See also Attitude Change; Influence; Persuasion
Further Readings
Scott J. Moeller
Brad J. Bushman
Harkins, S. G., & Latané, B. (1998). Population and political
participation: A social impact analysis of voter
responsibility. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and
Practice, 2, 192–207.
Latané, B., & Wolf, S. (1981). The social impact of
majorities and minorities. Psychological Review, 88,
438–453.
SOCIAL INFLUENCE
See INFLUENCE
SOCIAL JUSTICE ORIENTATION
Definition
When, why, and how do people decide that something
is fair or unfair? For the past half-century, social
justice has been an active area of study for social
psychologists. Social justice researchers study both
individuals and groups, trying to understand how
people make justice decisions and what they perceive
and feel about the fairness of others’ decisions.
Just-World Theory
Social Justice Theories
Do most people care about justice? Cynics say no
and point out people’s inhumanity to each other as
proof. But Melvin Lerner proposed a theory called
belief in a just world, stating that all people want to
imagine that they live in a just world. Experiments
show people’s desire to maintain the illusion of
fairness often leads them to do cruel acts. If someone
receives bad outcomes, others look at the person and
believe that he or she did something to deserve the bad
outcomes. This belief shields observers from feeling
vulnerable to unjust outcomes because they know that
they themselves are not bad people, but the process
also results in victim blaming.
Distributive Justice
Social Justice Orientation———905
How do people decide that something is just or
not? In social psychology, early research approached
this question by focusing on distributions, arguing that
it is how things of value are distributed that guides
people’s feelings and perceptions regarding justice.
Of particular importance to researchers was equity
theory. The central point of equity theory states that
every justice decision is determined by comparisons
between people. According to equity theory, one person
will compare his or her inputs and outcomes to
the inputs and outcomes of another. An input is what
you put into the situation (e.g., studying for an exam,
being smart in a subject) and the output is what you
get out of the situation (e.g., the grade on the test).
An example illustrates the process. Imagine that
two coworkers in a firm are working equally hard and
well on an important project that will determine the
amount of their bonus checks. If the supervisor
decides to give a big bonus check to one and a little
check to the other, the latter employee would likely
find the situation unjust and would find the situation
more unjust than if no bonus were given.
Equity theory applies well to most economic transactions,
but the input-outcome calculations are not the
only method for deciding whether a distribution of
rewards is fair. According to Morton Deutsch, when
people make justice decisions regarding social relationships,
equality is preferred over equity. In a social
situation, an equal division of costs and benefits
seems the most fair. Thus, for example, when you go
out to dinner with friends, it usually seems as fair just

906———Social Learning
to split the bill as it does to calculate precisely the cost
of each person’s meal. A third consideration is need.
Deutsch argued that when making justice decisions
regarding personal development and welfare, people
will be most likely to consider the needs of those
affected by the justice decision. It seems fair to buy
shoes for the baby even though the baby has brought
no income into the house, and it seems fair to put the
baby’s needs in front of the mother’s or father’s needs.
Procedural Justice
Researchers have noticed that sometimes people
feel upset with an interaction even though they obtain
the desired outcome. People also often accept decisions
that are not to their advantage if they view the
decision-making process as fair. The researchers
began to look beyond simple questions about distributions
of outcomes and instead turned their attention
toward the ways in which outcomes are distributed;
thus, the field of procedural justice was born.
A good example of the power of procedural justice
is an effect researchers call voice. If a person has an
opportunity to express his or her views to decision
makers, that person will be more likely to find the outcome
fair. Imagine, for example, that your town wants
to knock down several houses to make way for a new
interstate highway. If the town holds hearings where
citizens can voice their concerns, homeowners will
find the situations less unjust than if the town has no
meetings—even if the meetings occur after the decision
to demolish!
Why do procedures have such an effect on the perception
of justice? Tom Tyler has noticed that procedures
matter to people because fair treatment signals
that one is regarded as a good person. When a person is
treated fairly by other members of his or her group, the
person feels respected, and when the person is treated
fairly as a member of the group, he or she feels pride.
Retributive Justice
For a long time, researchers concentrated on how
people make decisions about justice but did not
emphasize how people react in situations in which a
wrong has already been committed. Several factors
influence how people react to wrongs. If the harmful
outcome seems accidental, there is less outrage; if the
harm seems intentional, there is more outrage. Low
outrage results in low punishment. Moderate outrage
results in punishments that emphasize righting the
wrong done to the victim. High outrage results in
punishment that takes away the privileges, rights, and
even the life of the offender.
Implications
Social justice continues to remain an important topic
to study because of its far-reaching implications for
both oppressed and powerful individuals and groups,
particularly in the realm of affirmative action, legal,
welfare, and environmental policy.
Kristina R. Schmukler
Elisabeth M. Thompson
Faye J. Crosby
See also Attitudes; Blaming the Victim; Distributive Justice;
Equity Theory; Just-World Hypothesis; Procedural Justice
Further Readings
Deutsch, M. (1985). Distributive justice: A socialpsychological
perspective. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
Lerner, M. J. (1980). The belief in a just world:
A fundamental delusion. New York: Plenum.
Skitka, L. J., & Crosby, F. J. (Eds.). (2003). New and current
directions in justice theorizing and research [Special
issue]. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 7(4).
Tyler, T., & Blader, S. L. (2000). Cooperation in groups:
Procedural justice, social identity and behavioral
engagement. Philadelphia: Psychology Press.
SOCIAL LEARNING
Definition
Social learning refers to the learning that occurs in
social contexts. More precisely, it refers to adaptive
behavior change (learning) stemming from observing
other people (or other animals), rather than learning
from one’s own direct experience. People acquire and
change social behaviors, attitudes, and emotional
reactions from observing and imitating the actions
demonstrated by models such as parents or peers. This
learning occurs from merely observing the actions of
others and from observing the consequences of their
actions. For example, if you see someone else touch a
hot plate and then pull his or her hand away in pain,
you do not have to imitate or repeat the action yourself:

You will avoid touching the hot plate as if you yourself
had been burned by it.
Background and History
In the first half of the 20th century, psychological theories
of learning were primarily behavioral in nature,
focusing on direct consequences of one’s own actions.
For example, in B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning
theory, learning occurs through the experience of
rewards or reinforcements, such as studying behaviors
being reinforced with good grades. The rigid adherence
to environmental rewards and punishments in the
behaviorist models was addressed by John Miller and
Neal Dollard’s work in the 1940s on social learning
that highlighted the importance of the social setting on
learning. Although this research had limitations (e.g.,
they maintained that learning could not occur without
imitation and reinforcement), it did underscore the
role of internal, cognitive processes in learning and it
spurred considerable theoretical work and empirical
research into social learning.
Probably the most influential and comprehensive
researcher and theorist in social learning is Albert
Bandura. He introduced his social learning theory in
the 1970s, which suggests that although humans
do learn from the responses they receive when they
engage in behaviors (such as a painful burn reinforcing
the need to use a potholder to remove items from
a hot oven), most human behavior is learned through
the observation and modeling of others’ behaviors.
According to social learning theory, children may
learn how to behave in a restaurant setting by mimicking
the behavior of their parents, and adolescents
may learn their political attitudes by listening to
conversations of adults. Social learning theory is a
synthesis of cognitive and behavioral approaches to
understanding learning: It is behavioral in its emphasis
on the observation and mimicking of models, but it
is cognitive in that it highlights the human ability to
think, anticipate outcomes, and symbolize.
In the 1970s, Bandura expanded his theory to include
an important element missing from theories on social
learning: self-beliefs. He renamed his theory social cognitive
theory to highlight the importance of cognition in
learning, motivation, and behavior. From this theoretical
perspective, human functioning is a product of the
dynamic interaction between environmental, personal,
and behavioral influences; this dynamic interplay is
referred to as reciprocal determinism. For example,
if an individual receives a poor grade on an exam
Social Learning———907
(environmental factor) that may affect his or her belief
(personal factor) about his or her ability in that domain,
which in turn would influence his or her behavior
(changed approaches to studying), and his or her behavior
influences his or her environment (the individual
now convenes a study group to prepare for exams).
Vicarious Learning, Modeling,
Self-Regulation, and Self-Efficacy
Social learning theory contends that people do not
need to imitate behavior for learning to occur. An
important element of social learning is observing the
consequences others receive when they engage in
behaviors, which is termed vicarious learning. These
consequences inform the learner about the appropriateness
of the behavior and the likely outcomes of the
behavior. People are more likely to model behavior
that has been rewarded and is deemed appropriate than
behavior that has been punished. Thus, a boy seeing
his sister get punished for lying to their father is likely
to learn that he shouldn’t lie, and he does not need to
engage in that behavior himself for learning to occur.
Modeling, or observing others’ actions and their
resultant consequences, can influence behavior in a
number of ways. First, modeling can teach people
new behaviors, such as how to swing a golf club properly.
Next, modeling can facilitate existing behaviors,
such as deciding it is time to leave a party. Modeling
also changes people’s inhibitions (self-imposed
restrictions on behaviors); for example, the inhibition
against passing notes in the classroom can be
strengthened by seeing the teacher reprimand a notepassing
peer. Finally, emotional reactions can be
changed by observing a model’s emotions, for example,
watching an uneasy speaker will likely increase
one’s own fear of public speaking.
Research into social learning has revealed that not
all models are equally effective. Individuals are most
likely to model behavior of those who are perceived to
be similar to them (for example, same-sex models are
generally more influential than opposite-sex models),
to be competent, and to have high status (such as
admired athletes or influential leaders). In addition,
models can either be real people, such as parents or
best friends, or they can be symbolic, such as a book
or a film character.
Bandura’s social cognitive theory also highlights
the important concepts of self-regulation and selfreflection.
Self-regulation involves goal setting, selfobservation,
self-assessment, and self-reinforcement.

908———Social Learning
Once goals have been set, people monitor their behavior,
judge it against their own standards, and reinforce
or punish themselves. Importantly, standards for
behavior are quite variable, and although one person
may pat himself or herself on the back for a job well
done after receiving a B on an exam, another may kick
himself or herself for such poor performance. Selfreflection
is expressed in the concept of self-efficacy,
which refers to individuals’ perceptions of their competence
to perform a specific task or a range of tasks
within a certain domain. Self-efficacy is context
dependent, and although a person may have high selfefficacy
in one domain (such as math), he or she may
have low self-efficacy in another domain (such as
leadership). Ample empirical evidence suggests that
self-efficacy is an important motivational construct
that influences the choices people make, the goals
they set for themselves, the effort and persistence put
forth toward their goal, and their performance within
a given domain.
Processes
According to social learning theory, four subprocesses
underlie the social learning process: attention, retention,
production, and motivation. First, to learn from
others, individuals must pay attention to the relevant
aspects of the behavior being modeled. For example,
a child learning to tie his or her shoelaces must pay
close attention to the finger movements of the model.
Next, the learner must also remember what the model
did by committing the lace-tying movements into
memory; often this information is committed to memory
in either symbolic or verbal form. The next, likely
difficult, step is for the learner to translate his or her
understanding of how to tie his or her laces into overt
lace-tying behaviors. Finally, people are more likely
to attend to, remember, and engage in the modeled
behavior if they are motivated to do so, and doing so
will result in rewarding outcomes. Thus, the child is
most likely to effectively engage in these social learning
processes if he or she is adequately motivated to,
for example, stop tripping on his or her laces or gain
the approval of his or her parents.
Importance and
Consequences of Social Learning
Although social learning has been thought to be particularly
important for children, it has been broadly
applied to learning that occurs over a person’s life
span. The social learning perspective has been very
important for developing techniques for promoting
behavior change (such as health promotion) and reducing
unwanted behaviors such as aggressive behavior.
Social learning has also contributed to our understanding
of a wide range of phenomena including classroom
learning, the influence of groups and leaders on individual
behavior, health-related issues such as medical
therapy compliance and alcohol abuse, and the moral
and value internalization of children.
Perhaps the area of research most influenced by the
social learning perspective is the study of antisocial,
aggressive behavior. Significant research in this area
indicates that an array of aggressive models can elicit a
wide variety of aggressive behaviors. In a set of wellknown
BoBo doll experiments, Bandura and colleagues
successfully demonstrated that children learned behaviors
by simply watching others. They examined the
behavior of mildly frustrated children who were previously
exposed to an adult who either kicked, threw
around, and punched an inflatable BoBo doll or was
quiet and reserved around the doll. Children who were
exposed to the aggressive adult were themselves more
aggressive with the doll than were those exposed to the
docile adult. However, children were less likely to imitate
the aggressive behavior when they saw the adult get
punished for the behavior.
Importantly, the models do not need to be physically
present to influence the learner, aggressive models on
television (including cartoon characters) can serve as
effective models of aggressive behavior. Children are
particularly vulnerable to this influence, and they learn
that violence is acceptable because they see “good”
people aggress, and they learn how to aggress from
models. In addition to learning specific aggressive
behaviors, they also learn attitudes regarding aggression
as well as “scripts” to guide social behavior in
different situations that may lead people to engage in
aggressive behaviors by following the scripts that have
been learned. On a more optimistic note, changing the
model can influence behavior such that nonaggressive
models decrease aggressive behavior. In addition,
social learning has also been shown to play a large role
in the learning of prosocial, helping behavior.
Crystal L. Hoyt
See also Bobo Doll Studies; Modeling of Behavior; Self-
Efficacy; Self-Regulation

Further Readings
Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. New York:
General Learning Press.
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and
action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall.
SOCIAL LOAFING
Definition
Social loafing refers to a decline in motivation and
effort found when people combine their efforts to
form a group product. People tend to generate less
output or to contribute less effort when working on a
task collectively where contributions are combined
than when working individually. The consequence is
that people are less productive when working as part
of a group than when working individually. Social
loafing is similar to the free rider effect, whereby
people contribute less to a collective effort when they
perceive their contributions are dispensable. This is
also similar to the sucker effect, whereby people withhold
their contributions to a group to avoid being the
victim of the social loafing or free riding efforts of
other group members. However, the free rider effect
and the sucker effect are narrower terms that refer to
specific causes of social loafing. Social loafing is a
broader construct that refers to any reduction in motivation
and effort that occurs when contributions are
pooled compared with when they are not pooled.
History and Modern Usage
Social loafing was first documented in the latter half
of the 19th century by a French engineer named Max
Ringelmann who observed men pulling or pushing a
two-wheeled cart. Ringelmann noted that doubling or
tripling the number of men performing the task did not
produce a doubling or tripling of output, that is, twoman
groups did not perform twice as well as individual
men. More recently, researchers have observed
social loafing on other physical tasks such as pulling a
rope in a tug-of-war game, generating noise by clapping
and cheering, swimming in a relay race, pumping
air, and wrapping pieces of candy, and on cognitive
tasks such as solving mazes, evaluating an editorial or
poem, and generating uses for objects. For example,
participants wearing blindfolds were instructed to pull
Social Loafing———909
a tug-of-war rope as hard as they could. Although
participants believed they were pulling alone in some
trials and as part of a group in other trials, in all conditions
participants pulled the rope alone. Participants
pulled harder on the rope when they believed they
pulled alone than when they believed they pulled as
part of a group.
Research reveals a variety of circumstances that
influence whether people work hard versus loaf. For
example, people work hard when offered strong external
rewards for a good group performance, when they
find the task intrinsically interesting or personally
involving, and when they believe low effort will be
punished. Conversely, people loaf when they perceive
their efforts or contributions as redundant with the
efforts or contributions of fellow group members.
They loaf when they perceive the task as unimportant.
They are more likely to loaf when the task is easy than
when it is difficult. Perhaps most important, people
loaf when they believe that their contributions cannot
be identified, allowing them to hide in the crowd.
Understanding when people loaf requires distinguishing
between effort (the contribution individuals
make), performance (the product of those contributions),
and outcome (the reward or consequences
attached to the performance). With this distinction in
mind, the various circumstances that influence social
loafing can be organized under three broad conditions,
and people will loaf when any of the conditions occur.
First, people loaf when they perceive their individual
efforts as unrelated or inconsequential to a good performance.
For example, if a student working on a
group project believes that the group will produce a
good performance regardless of whether he or she
individually works hard, then he or she is likely to
loaf. Likewise, if the student believes that a good
group product is unachievable regardless of whether
he or she works hard, then he or she is likely to loaf.
Second, people loaf when they perceive that the
outcome is unrelated to the quality of the performance.
For example, if group members perceive that
the group’s performance will be rewarded regardless
of the quality of the group performance, they will loaf.
Likewise, if people perceive that the group’s performance
will go unrewarded regardless of the quality of
the group performance, they will loaf.
Third, people will loaf when they do not value the
outcome. More specifically, people will loaf when
they perceive the costs of achieving the outcome
exceed any benefits of achieving the outcome. For

910———Social Neuroscience
example, students may understand that a good group
project in a class will receive an A, but also recognize
that the time required to produce a good group project
will impinge on the time they need to study for other
classes. Thus, they may loaf because they are unwilling
to sacrifice study time for their other classes to
achieve a good group project. Notably, the finding that
people loaf when contributions cannot be identified
also illustrates the third condition. When contributions
cannot be identified, individual contributors cannot be
appropriately rewarded for their high efforts but also
cannot be appropriately punished should they loaf.
Social loafing is often described as a group problem
that only occurs when individual members combine
their efforts toward a common goal. Indeed, group settings
seem particularly vulnerable to social loafing.
However, the conditions that prompt social loafing in
group settings can also prompt a reduction in motivation
and effort among people undertaking individual
tasks. Specifically, people will withhold efforts on
individual tasks to the extent that they perceive no relationship
between their efforts and their performance,
no relationship between their performance and the
outcome, do not value the outcome, or believe that the
costs of achieving a good outcome outweigh the benefits
of receiving a good outcome.
Social loafing has often been characterized as a
social disease. However, it is a disease with a cure.
Managers, teachers, and other people who depend on
groups, as well as people working in groups, can reduce
or eliminate social loafing by making sure that each of
the following conditions is in place. First, people must
believe that their efforts make a difference and that
their contributions are essential to achieve a good performance.
Second, people must perceive a strong link
between performance and the outcome. They must
believe that a good performance (both individual and
group) will be rewarded and that a poor performance
will not. Often, this condition requires making individual
contributions identifiable. Finally, the outcome
must be important to the contributors. Moreover, the
benefits of achieving a good performance must exceed
the costs of achieving a good performance.
Jodi Grace
James A. Shepperd
See also Effort Justification; Group Performance and
Productivity; Social Facilitation; Social Compensation
Further Readings
Karau, S. J., & Williams, K. D. (1993). Social loafing:
A meta-analytic review and theoretical integration.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65,
681–706.
Latané, B., Williams, K., & Harkins, S. (1979). Many hands
make light the work: The causes and consequences of
social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 37, 822–832.
Shepperd, J. A. (1993). Productivity loss in performance
groups: A motivation analysis. Psychological Bulletin,
113, 67–81.
Shepperd, J. A., & Taylor, K. M. (1999). Social loafing and
expectancy-value theory. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1147–1158.
SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE
Definition
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field of
science that deals with the biological mechanisms
underlying social processes and behavior, considered
by many to be one of the major problems for the neurosciences
to address in the 21st century. Social neuroscience
also involves using biological concepts
and methods to develop and refine theories of complex
human behavior in the social and behavioral
sciences.
Background and History
During the 20th century in the biological sciences,
the architects of development and behavior were conceived
as anatomical entities (e.g., genes) sculpted by
the forces of evolution and located within living cells
far from the reaches of the social world. The brain was
treated as a rational information-processing machine.
Social factors, such as early family environment or
social isolation later in life, were thought to have minimal
implications for basic development, structure, or
processes of the brain, which meant that social factors
need not be considered to understand the human mind
and behavior. And even if relevant, the notion was that
considering social factors made the study of the
human mind and behavior too complicated to sustain
scientific progress.

The embrace of the neurosciences by cognitive and
social scientists throughout most of the 20th century
was no less antagonistic. World wars, a great depression,
and civil injustices made it clear that social and cultural
forces were too important to address to await the full
explanation of cellular and molecular mechanisms.
Given the antagonism between biological and social sciences
that characterized psychology throughout most of
the 20th century, research crossing social and biological
levels of analysis was relatively rare.
By the dawn of the 21st century, neuroscientists,
cognitive scientists, and social scientists began to
collaborate more systematically, joined by the common
view that complex human behavior must
consider both biological and social factors and mechanisms.
The research in social neuroscience has
quickly grown to be broad and diverse. Investigations
in the field include genetic studies of social recognition
and affiliation in mice, research on social perception
in stroke patients, animal studies of nurturance
and affiliation, autonomic (e.g., neural pathways to and
from internal organs) and neuroendocrine (e.g., hormones)
research of social stressors and morbidity, and
brain imaging studies of racial prejudice, social cognition,
decision making, and interpersonal processes—to
name but a few. The meteoric growth in research crossing
social and biological levels of analysis during the
past decade is testimony that the gap between the neurosciences
and social sciences can be bridged, that the
mechanisms underlying complex human behavior will
not be fully explicable by a biological or a social
approach alone, and that a common scientific language
grounded in the structure and function of the brain and
biology can contribute to this end point.
Reductionism Versus
Substitutionism
Reductionism means that the nature of complex things
can be explained by (i.e., reduced to) simpler or more
fundamental things. The term reductionism comes
from reducing something complex, such as the human
mind, to something simpler, such as areas of brain
activity. The sensitive issue that has worried social
scientists about brain studies is that scientists might
want to reduce all behavior to brain processes, as if
self, attitudes, and other social processes are nothing
else but brain activity. Extreme reductionists may
even say there is no need for social psychology
Social Neuroscience———911
research because studies of brain processes can
replace everything that social psychologists do.
All human social behavior, at some level, is biological,
but this is not to say that biological description or
reductionism yields a simple or satisfactory explanation
for complex behaviors, or that molecular forms of representation
provide the only or best level of analysis for
understanding human behavior. Scientific constructs
such as those developed by social psychologists provide
a means of understanding highly complex activity
without needing to specify each individual action of the
simplest components, thereby providing an efficient
means of describing the behavior of a complex system.
Social psychologists are not alone in their preference
for the simplest form of representation to perform certain
tasks. Chemists who work with the periodic table
on a daily basis nevertheless use recipes rather than the
periodic table to cook, not because food preparation
cannot be reduced to chemical expressions but because
it is not cognitively efficient to do so. In other words,
even though cooking can be reduced to chemical
processes, it is still useful and more efficient to think
about it and do it at a higher level.
Reductionism, a systematic approach to investigating
the parts to understand better the whole, is
sometimes confused with substitutionism, which is
the denial of the value or usefulness of a higher level
of representation once one has a lower level description.
The chemist who sees no value in recipes when
cooking because these recipes can be described
in chemical equations illustrates substitutionism.
Reductionism, in fact, is one of various approaches to
better science based on the value of data derived from
distinct levels of analysis to constrain and inspire the
interpretation of data derived from other levels of
analysis. In scientific reductionism, however, the
whole is as important to study as are the parts, for only
in examining the interplay across levels of analysis can
the beauty of the design be appreciated. Social neuroscience
is a reductionistic rather than a substitutionistic
approach to the study of complex human behavior,
and as such, it also seeks to contribute to theory and
research in social psychology and related sciences.
Organizing Principles
Contemporary work has demonstrated that theory and
methods in the neurosciences can constrain and inspire
social psychological hypotheses, foster experimental

912———Social Power
tests of otherwise indistinguishable theoretical
explanations, and increase the comprehensiveness and
relevance of social psychological theories. That is,
social neuroscience improves scientific understanding
of complex human behavior. Several principles from
social neuroscience indicate why this might be the case.
The principle of multiple determinism specifies
that human behavior can have multiple antecedents
within or across levels of organization. For instance,
one might consume a considerable quantity of pizza in
an effort to remedy a low blood-sugar condition (biological
determinant) or win a food-eating contest
(social determinant). If either the biological or social
level of analysis is regarded as inappropriate for its science,
then that science will be ignoring an entire class
of determinants and, therefore, will not be able to provide
a comprehensive explanation for such behaviors.
The principle of nonadditive determinism specifies
that properties of the whole are not always readily predictable
from the properties of the parts. Nonadditive
determinism is also sometimes called emergent properties
because the higher-level entity has properties
that are not predictable by the properties of the lowerlevel
pieces. In an illustrative study, the behavior of
nonhuman primates was examined following the
administration of amphetamine or placebo. No clear
pattern emerged until each primate’s position in the
social hierarchy was considered. When this social factor
was taken into account, amphetamine was found to
increase dominant behavior in primates high in the
social hierarchy and to increase submissive behavior
in primates low in the social hierarchy. A strictly physiological
(or social) analysis, regardless of the sophistication
of the measurement technology, may not have
unraveled the orderly relationship that existed.
Finally, the principle of reciprocal determinism
specifies that there can be mutual influences between
microscopic (e.g., biological) and macroscopic (e.g.,
social) factors in determining behavior. For example,
the level of testosterone in nonhuman male primates
promotes sexual behavior; however, the availability of
receptive females increases the level of testosterone in
nonhuman primates. That is, the effects of social and
biological processes can be reciprocal.
Social neuroscience, which is built on these principles,
makes it more likely that comprehensive
accounts of complex human behavior can be achieved
because the biological, cognitive, and social levels of
organization are considered as relevant.
Throughout most of the 20th century, social and
biological explanations were cast as incompatible.
Advances in recent years have led to the development
of a new view synthesized from the social and biological
sciences. The new field of social neuroscience
emphasizes the complementary nature of the different
levels of organization spanning the social and biological
sciences (e.g., molecular, cellular, system, person,
relational, collective, societal) and how multilevel
analyses can foster understanding of the mechanisms
underlying the human mind and behavior.
John T. Cacioppo
See also Biopsychosocial Model; Reductionism; Social
Cognitive Neuroscience; Social Psychophysiology
Further Readings
Cacioppo, J. T. (2002). Social neuroscience: Understanding
the pieces fosters understanding the whole and vice versa.
American Psychologist, 57, 819–830.
Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (2005). Social
neuroscience. New York: Psychology Press.
Frith, C. D., & Wolpert, D. M. (2004). Neuroscience of social
interaction: Decoding, imitating, and influencing the
actions of others. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gazzaniga, M. (2004). The cognitive neurosciences (3rd ed.).
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Harmon-Jones, E., & Winkielman, P. (2007). Social
neuroscience. New York: Guilford Press.
SOCIAL POWER
Definition
Social power is the potential for social influence. The
available tools one has to exert influence over another
can lead to a change in that person. Social power and
social influence are separate and distinct concepts.
Although social power is potential (which may or may
not be used), social influence is an effect, an actual
change (or deliberate maintenance) in the beliefs,
attitudes, behavior, emotions, and so on, of someone
because of the actions or presence of another. The
person or group that is the source of influence is
commonly known as the influencing agent, whereas
the object of the attempted or successful influence

attempt is commonly known as the target (of the influence).
Thus, influencing agents have social power,
which are the means they may use to influence targets.
Background and History
The ability of one person (or group) to get others to do
his or her will, also known as social power, has long
been of interest to social psychologists. Perhaps this is
because so much of human interaction involves the
change or the attempt to change the beliefs, attitudes,
or behaviors of another. Because of the long-standing
interest in the topic, several different investigations
have used different definitions of social power and
different ways of measuring power. However, an extensive
survey has found that the approach most commonly
used originally identified five distinct potential
tactics one could use in an influence attempt. This
approach was updated some years ago and now
includes six distinct tactics that can be subdivided into
11 varieties. Of course, in an influence attempt multiple
types of influence are often used at the same time.
The types of social power are as follows:
Informational. This type is the ability to rationally
persuade someone.
Expert. This social power is similar to informational
power except that arguments are not necessary because
the target trusts the influencing agent.
Referent. The referent type is based on the target’s identifying
and liking the influencing agent and, because of
this, wanting to comply with his or her requests.
Coercive power. This type involves threat of punishment.
These can be things such as monetary fines (impersonal)
or simply personal disapproval (personal).
Reward power. This social power type stems from the
ability of the influencing agent to grant some kind of
reward, either impersonal or personal.
Legitimate power. Based on what general society typically
expects of us, this includes (a) the formal legitimate
(or position) norm, which is the right to ask for
something based simply on position or job title; (b) the
reciprocity norm, whereby if someone does something
for you, you owe him or her the favor in return; (c) the
equity norm, the idea that one is expected to help others
receive what they deserve, for example, if you work
hard, you should get rewarded; and (d) social responsibility
(or dependence), whereby people are obligated to
help those who depend on them.
The type of social power used in an influence
attempt often depends on a person’s motivations.
Sometimes people are consciously aware of their motivations,
and sometimes they are not. Clever influencing
agents often choose the kind of influence they use
based on considerations of potential effectiveness and
other factors. These factors can be quite varied. For
example, some people are motivated by the desire
to appear powerful. To feel powerful, an influencing
agent may choose a type of influence strategy that
makes him or her feel as though he or she is in control
of the target of influence. If so, the influencing agent
may choose to use coercion or reward in the influence
attempt. Similarly, a desire to enhance one’s sense of
power in the eyes of others, status, security, role
requirements, the desire to harm a target of influence,
and self-esteem considerations might lead one to
choose the more controlling, stronger, or harsher types
of influence tactics (such as coercion). Others may
wish to maintain a friendship or appear humble. In that
case, they would rely more on information.
When these stronger or harsher types of power are
used effectively, they enhance the influencing agent’s
view of himself or herself because the influencing
agent can attribute subsequent change in the target
tohimself or herself. When this occurs, the powerholder
then tends to think less of the target of influence. It has
been argued that simply through the continual exercise
of successful influence, the powerholder’s view of others
and himself or herself changes in a harmful way.
The powerholder begins to view himself or herself as
superior to the person that over which he or she is exercising
power, and because of this feeling of superiority,
may treat the target of influence in a demeaning manner.
This effect would be consistent with the common
belief that power is a corrupting influence.
Evidence
Social Power———913
Hundreds of studies published in respected scientific
journals involving social power as described earlier
have been conducted in several diverse fields, including
health and medicine, family relations, gender relations,
education, marketing and consumer psychology, social
and organizational psychology, and examinations of

914———Social Projection
confrontation between political figures. Studies have
been conducted in the context simulations and questionnaires,
strictly controlled laboratory settings using
traditional experimental methods, real-world settings
such as hospitals and other large organizations, and
through historical case study analysis.
Importance
Much of what humans do as individuals and society
involves influencing others. People want and need
things from others, things such as affection, money,
opportunity, work, and justice. How they get those
things often depends on their abilities to influence
others to grant their desires. In addition, people are also
the constant targets of the influence attempts of others.
Thus, it is important to understand what causes people
to comply with others’ wishes, and how the exercise of
power affects both targets and influencing agents. The
study of social power provides that knowledge.
See also Compliance; Influence; Power; Power Motive
Further Readings
Gregg Gold
Gold, G. J., & Raven, B. H. (1992). Interpersonal influence
strategies in the Churchill-Roosevelt bases for destroyers
exchange. Journal of Social Behavior and Personality,
7, 245–272.
Kipnis, D. (1972). Does power corrupt? Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 33–41.
Raven, B. H. (2001). Power/interaction and interpersonal
influence: Experimental investigations and case studies. In
A. Y. Lee-Chai & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), The use and abuse
of power (pp. 217–240). Ann Arbor, MI: Sheridan Books.
SOCIAL PROJECTION
Definition
Social projection refers to the tendency to assume that
others are similar to oneself. Students who cheat on their
statistics exams, for example, probably believe that
many others cheat as well, whereas honest students think
that cheating is rare. Projection is not limited to valueladen
behaviors such as cheating versus being honest,
and therefore, projection is not necessarily a defense
mechanism. Statistically, projection is simply a positive
correlation between what people say about themselves
and what they believe is common in the group.
Though not considered a defense mechanism, it was
believed for a long time that projection is a judgmental
bias that people should rather get rid of. Surely, the
argument was, people have enough information about
others to make accurate estimates about the group. An
individual’s own attitude, preference, or personality
trait is but a single bit of data that should not make a
difference. It is now recognized, however, that projection
can improve the accuracy of the perception of the
group when knowledge of the self is all a person has.
Useful Projection
Suppose a person is brought to the laboratory and told
that there are different types of people, and that each
individual’s type can be measured by a new test. After
testing, the person is informed of being type T. Not
knowing anything about how many different types there
are and how common each one of them is, the person
can speculate that his or her type is the most common
one. Now, the person’s single data point is useful. This
is a good guessing strategy because most people are by
definition in the majority rather than the minority.
Consider another example. A new gene is discovered,
but it is unknown whether many (e.g., 90%) or
few people (10%) have it. Both possibilities seem
equally likely at first. Now a randomly chosen person
tests positive for the gene. Because this person is more
likely to represent a group in which the gene is common
than a group in which it is rare, it can be inferred
that the gene is common. This kind of inductive
reasoning supports the idea that social projection is
rational when a person has little knowledge other than
self-knowledge. The more that is known about individual
others, the more projection should diminish—
and generally does.
A good example of a situation in which a person
knows little about others is the one-shot Prisoner’s
Dilemma. To illustrate, suppose each of two players
has a coin that must be placed heads up or tails up. If
both choose heads, both get $15; if both choose tails,
both get $5; if they make different choices, the one
choosing heads gets nothing, whereas the one choosing
tails gets $20. Heads is the cooperative choice
because it leads to the best result for the group; tails is
the defecting choice that yields the best outcome for
the individual regardless of what the other person
does. Most people project after making a choice, irrespective
of what that choice was. Cooperators expect

cooperation, and defectors expect defection. More
important, social projection can increase the probability
that a person chooses to cooperate. People
who strongly believe that others will make the same
choices as they themselves do will expect to receive
the payoff for mutual cooperation ($15) rather than
the sucker’s payoff ($0) if they don’t cooperate.
Harmful Projection
Sometimes people project when they should not.
Public speakers, for example, know certain things
about themselves that are hidden from the audience.
They know how well they prepared, how anxious they
feel, or which critical piece of information they forgot
to mention. Many people cannot help but assume that
the audience knows what they themselves know, especially
when their own experiences are as emotional
and vivid as their awareness of their own stage fright.
Here, the projective assumption that one’s own feelings
and thoughts are transparent to others leads to overprojection.
Unfortunately, efforts to suppress awareness of
these unpleasant states or self-consciousness do not
diminish projection. Instead, the unwanted thoughts
become hyperaccessible, that is, they push themselves
back into consciousness and are then projected even
more strongly onto others.
Even seasoned public speakers must be wary of
projection. The more knowledgeable they are about
their topic, the more they are inclined to assume the
audience already knows what they are about to say. To
appreciate the actual differences between themselves
and the audience, these speakers must deliberately
adjust their expectations. Students can experience how
difficult it is to overcome this projection of knowledge
when taking an exam. They can predict the performance
of others from their own experience with the
test’s difficulty. In this regard, students are similar to
one another and projection is useful. When, however,
students have been informed of the actual test results,
they also project this knowledge to others who do not
have it, and their predictions get worse.
Variations in Social Projection
Social projection tends to be strong regardless of
whether people predict attitudes, behaviors, or personality
traits. This is so, partly because people have
some latitude to define the meaning of these attributes
in self-serving terms. A person who cheats on exams
may downplay the severity of the offense and thereby
conclude that cheating is common. A lover of Pinot
may think that the superiority of this grape is a fact of
nature, to be recognized by all except the most boorish
of people. Estimates regarding abilities are different
because abilities are defined as relative. To believe that
one has a high ability to play chess is to believe that one
can beat most competitors. It is not possible to predict
that most others will also beat most others. By contrast,
it is easy to project one’s love for the game to others.
For any type of personal attribute, projection is weak
when people make predictions for groups to which they
themselves do not belong. Men, for example, project
their own attributes only to other men (the ingroup) but
not to women (the outgroup), whereas women project
to other women but not to men. Because most people’s
self-concepts comprise mostly desirable attributes, the
lack of projection to outgroups has serious consequences
for social stereotyping and intergroup
relations. Inasmuch as they limit their projections
to ingroups, people come to see these groups as extensions
of themselves, and thus, as mostly desirable.
Their perceptions of outgroups, which do not benefit
from projection, are comparatively neutral. In the context
of intergroup relations, an increase of projection to
the outgroup would be a good thing.
Joachim I. Krueger
See also Attribution Theory; False Consensus Effect;
Projection
Further Readings
Social Psychophysiology———915
Krueger, J. I., Acevedo, M., & Robbins, J. M. (2005). Self
as sample. In K. Fiedler & P. Juslin (Eds.), Information
sampling and adaptive cognition (pp. 353–377).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Robbins, J. M., & Krueger, J. I. (2005). Social projection to
ingroups and outgroups: A review and meta-analysis.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 32–47.
Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of
transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 618–625.
SOCIAL PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY
Definition
Broadly defined, social psychophysiology is the study
of human social behavior as it relates to and is revealed
by physiological or bodily responses. Hence, social

916———Social Psychophysiology
psychophysiologists investigate the interplay between
social psychological and physiological processes.
Generally, and in distinction to what has come to be
known as social neuroscience, social psychophysiology
focuses largely on the relationship between skeletalmuscular
and visceral physiological processes controlled
via the peripheral nervous system rather than on
central nervous system or brain physiology.
History
Although social psychophysiology’s history can be
traced to the ancient Greeks and Romans, its modern
roots stem from theory and empirical work at the end of
the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries by William
James, James Cannon, Hans Selye, and others. By the
late 1960s, an important chapter, “Physiological
Approaches to Social Psychology,” that appeared in the
second edition of the prestigious Handbook of Social
Psychology, marked the recognition of the value of
interdisciplinary work combining social psychology
and physiology for the field of social psychology.
Similar recognition by the field of physiology occurred
only indirectly a decade or two later when the relevance
of social psychophysiological research for health and
illness became established.
Social psychologists provided the main impetus and
the lion’s share of the work in this relatively new field.
But they generally lacked training in physiology. As a
consequence, their investigation and use of physiological
measures were overly simplistic. Specifically,
early social psychophysiologists focused on general
arousal theory rather loosely defined, which basically
assumed that physiological measures such as heart
rate, blood pressure, skin conductance, respiration
rate, muscle tension, and so forth were interchangeable
measures, an assumption that today we know is wrong
(see later discussion).
By the 1980s, however, this overly simplistic view
of physiological processes began to come undone as
social psychophysiologists such as John Cacioppo and
Louis Tassinary became as well versed in physiology
as they were in social psychology. Furthermore, they
piqued the interest of physiological experts and others
in social psychophysiology. Equally important, they
became the primary disseminators of physiological
knowledge, methodologies, and technical expertise to
social psychologists. Their efforts included an edited
volume of social psychophysiological research in 1983,
a series of month-long intensive advanced physiological
training institutes for social psychological researchers
during the summers of 1986 through 1990, and two
comprehensive handbooks of social pstychophysiology,
one published in 1990 and the other in 2000. This group
pioneered and revolutionized the field of social psychophysiology,
paving the way for much more sophisticated
and important research linking social psychology
and physiology, and laying the groundwork for the field
of social neuroscience as well.
Background
Social psychophysiology fits within the broader
category of mind-body interactions, thereby rejecting
centuries-old notions of mind-body dualism or
separation. Social psychophysiology is based on the
assumption that is termed the identity thesis. This thesis
states that all mental, and hence psychological,
states and processes are embodied rather than unembodied
(e.g., spiritual). It suggests that understanding
bodily responses helps the understanding of mental
states and processes, and vice versa. The identity thesis
implies that psychological (including social psychological)
and biological (including physiological)
disciplines must be combined if the mind-body relationship
is to be understood.
The aspects of human physiology most pertinent to
social psychophysiology can be divided into control
and operational systems. Control systems include the
central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and the
endocrine system, which includes all the glands (e.g.,
pituitary, adrenal) that excrete hormones (e.g., adrenalin)
into the bloodstream. Operational systems control
various bodily responses and include, for example, the
cardiovascular (heart, vasculature, and blood), the
somatic (skeletal muscle) system, and the visceral
(stomach, small and large intestines) systems. The
central nervous system operates by transmitting operating
instructions via one type (efferent) of neurons
and monitoring operational systems via another type
(afferent) of neurons. Similarly, the endocrine system
transmits operating instructions and monitors operational
systems via circulating hormones.
Physiological Measures of
Social Psychological Constructs
Social psychophysiologists pursue research questions
that involve the interaction of intra-individual
and interindividual psychological processes and

physiological control and operating systems. Most
social psychophysiologists seek to understand the
effects of social psychological variables on physiological
responses, and to be able to use that understanding
to create physiological measures of those social
psychological variables.
To create physiological measures of variables of
interest, social psychophysiologists, as social psychologists,
define the nature of their social psychological
variables or constructs as precisely as possible.
Further, social psychophysiologists as physiologists
identify candidate physiological measures that should
be related to the variable of interest and specify a
plausible physiological rationale for linking physiological
measures to the variables.
As mentioned previously, the specification of a
physiological rationale was quite limited (e.g., general
arousal) and overly simplistic (e.g., increases in psychological
states are accompanied by across the board
increases in sympathetically (neurally) controlled autonomic)
responses, resulting in the use of simple unitary
physiological measures such as heart rate and skin
conductance to index literally dozens of constructs.
However, therein is the problem. The psychologicalsympathetic
nervous system rationale failed to provide
social psychophysiologists with distinctive physiological
indexes of their constructs. For example, heart rate
increases occurred during both approach and avoidance
states. Today, social psychophysiologists strive to identify
more specific (and complex) physiological theories
and rationales to support their choice of sets of physiological
responses to measure their constructs of interest.
The pattern of increases and decreases from rest
among these multiple measures provides distinctive
physiological indexes of the constructs.
A good case in point is affect, a central construct
for many research questions in social psychology.
Affect is defined as the general emotional state that
results in either an overall positive or negative feeling
state. In the case of affect, Charles Darwin’s ethological
observations of the expressions of emotions provides
a theoretical physiological formulation pointing
toward specific physiological measures of it. Briefly,
Darwin pointed to the face as the location of emotional
expression in primates. Later, others identified
specific facial muscles involved in the experience of
positive and negative affect. More specifically, an
increase in zygomaticus majori (smile muscles) activity
and a decrease in corrugator supercilii (frown muscles)
activity occur during the experience of positive
affect; and, the reverse during the experience of negative
affect. Muscle activity is typically measured using
electromyographic (EMG) techniques. Cacioppo and
his colleagues validated these patterns of EMG activity
as measures of positive and negative affect. An
interesting aspect of EMG activity is that it can measure
positive or negative affect even if one could not
detect it from just looking at the person.
Examples
Social psychophysiologists are not merely interested
in identifying and validating physiological indexes of
constructs. Rather, they use these indexes to test theories
involving the constructs.
Racial Prejudice
For example, facial EMG has been used to study
racial prejudice. Theoretically, prejudice involves
negative affect toward members of a group. A longstanding
problem for prejudice researchers is that
people are reluctant to self-report their own prejudices.
An advantage of physiological measures is that they
are not subject to self-presentation problems.
Eric Vanman found that White research participants
self-reported more positive affect for imagined Black
than for imagined White partners but exhibited more
facial EMG activity indicative of negative affect for
Blacks than for Whites. In addition, he found that during
presentations of photos of Blacks and Whites,
high-prejudice participants exhibited lower zygomaticus
and higher corrugator activity during presentation
of Black than of White target photos, indicating higher
negative affect; in contrast, low-prejudice participants
did not differ in EMG activity between photo groups.
Psychological Threat
Social Psychophysiology———917
Social psychophysiologists are also interested in
social factors that influence whether individuals
experience psychological threat in potentially stressful
performance situations (e.g., taking exams, giving
speeches, negotiations). Threat occurs when an individual’s
perceived resources fail to meet the demands
of the situation. Richard Dienstbier’s theory of physiological
toughness and weakness based on animal
work suggests a pattern of cardiovascular responses
that should occur during threat in humans. Specifically,
both heart rate and heart muscle contractility

918———Social Relations Model
should increase during threat, but cardiac output (the
amount of blood pumped by the heart) should remain
stable or decrease because of relative increases in total
peripheral resistance (constriction of the arteries).
Jim Blascovich and his colleagues validated this
pattern in humans. They also used the cardiovascular
threat index to test many theoretical notions including
the long-held assumption by stigma theorists that
individuals interacting with members of stigmatized
groups (e.g., people with physical deformities, people
with low socioeconomic status). In several studies,
Blascovich and colleagues demonstrated that individuals
engaged in a cooperative task evidenced the threat
pattern when playing with a stigmatized than with a
nonstigmatized individual.
Implications
Physiological measures are now well established in
the methodological toolbox of social psychologists.
As more researchers become interested in mind-body
interactions, its value will increase.
Jim Blascovich
See also Biopsychosocial Model; Health Psychology;
Research Methods; Social Neuroscience
Further Readings
Blascovich, J. (2000). Psychophysiological methods. In
H. T. Reis & C. M. Judd (Eds.), Handbook of research
methods in social and personality psychology (pp. 117–137).
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Blascovich, J., Mendes, W. B., Hunter, S.B., Lickel, B.,
& Kowai-Bell, N. (2001). Perceiver threat in social
interactions with stigmatized others. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 253–267.
Blascovich, J., Mendes, W., Hunter, S., & Salomon, K.
(1999). Social facilitation, challenge, and threat. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 68–77.
Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., Losch, M. E., & Kim, H. S.
(1986). Electromyographic activity over facial muscle
regions can differentiate the valence and intensity of
affective reactions. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 50, 260–268.
Shapiro, D., & Crider, A. (1969). Psychophysiological
approaches in social psychology. In G. Lindzey &
E. Aronson (Eds.). The handbook of social psychology (2nd
ed., Vol. 3, pp. 19–49). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
SOCIAL RELATIONS MODEL
Definition
The social relations model is a theoretical and statistical
approach to studying how people perceive others.
Although investigations of person perception have a
long history in social psychology, early methodological
approaches relied on research participants reporting
their perceptions of fictitious others who were
described in brief stories. The social relations model
allows researchers to move beyond such vignette
studies and address a variety of questions related to
interpersonal perception while studying real people
engaged in real social interactions.
Background and History
Perceptions of other people are fundamental components
of social interactions and, therefore, have a prominent
place in social psychology. A person must perceive
other people’s traits accurately so that he or she can predict
how they will behave. If you correctly perceive that
someone is friendly, then you can probably expect that
person to help you. What is more, people should also
value knowing what other people think of them. For
example, knowing that someone doesn’t like you might
be useful so that you can avoid interactions with that
person. Such beliefs about how others perceive one’s
self are termed metaperceptions. Because person perception
is so basic to social interaction, researchers have
conducted many studies to learn how people form
perceptions (Is John seen as friendly?), the attributions
people make following perceptions (Why is John seen
as friendly?), and the relative accuracy or inaccuracy of
perceptions (Is John really friendly?).
Many of the early person perception studies, however,
relied on vignettes, or stories, about imaginary
other people. So, for example, a research participant
might be given a paragraph that purportedly describes
another student. After reading the paragraph, the participant
would be asked to report his or her perceptions of
the student in the story. Using such an approach makes
person perception akin to object perception. That is,
the target person becomes static and noninteractive, no
different than perceptions about a chair or book. The
vignette method has a clear advantage in that the
researcher can control and manipulate the information
that participants receive about the target person. Yet

elying on written descriptions of another person
removes much of the richness of real social interactions.
Some researchers have improved the vignette
approach by using videotapes of a person’s behavior,
which allows for a more vivid portrayal of the target
person. Regardless of whether the vignette is presented
as written or videotaped, participants in these studies
know that the perceptual process is a one-way street.
That is, although participants can make perceptions of
the person in the vignette, the fictitious character cannot
make a perception of the participant. Therefore, it
would be unrealistic to ask participants to report on
metaperceptions in such circumstances.
To further enhance the vignette method, some
researchers have used assistants (called confederates)
to pretend as if they are participants and engage the
real participant in a seemingly authentic social interaction.
Thus, participants believe that they are having an
active, spontaneous interaction with another person.
Under these conditions, participants should be able to
report both perceptions and metaperceptions. Yet even
a confederate approach to person perception is limited
because the research assistant is generally required to
play a prespecified role and use scripted responses.
Thus, regardless of the specific approach described
earlier, the researcher is not able to study the real giveand-take
of an unscripted social interaction.
Given the problems associated with vignette and
confederate approaches to studying person perception,
one might conclude that an easy solution
is to study real interactions between real people.
Unfortunately, the major strength of such an approach
(the give-and-take of real interactions) leads to
challenges when interpreting data. Specifically, the
perceptions in a real interaction depend on a variety of
factors, including the particular person making the
perception, the particular person being perceived, and
the unique relationship between those two people. For
example, John’s perception of Mary’s friendliness
could be due to the way John perceives most people,
the way Mary is perceived by most people, or something
about the specific relationship between John and
Mary. This situation is often referred to as a problem
of nonindependence between the perceiver and the
target (e.g., John’s perception of Mary might be
dependent on John, Mary, or both people). Thus, until
the development of the social relations model, it
would have been difficult for most researchers to
account for these different components of perceptions
that are generated by real social interactions.
Social Relations Model———919
Details of the Model
David Kenny developed the social relations model to
give researchers a means to account for the nonindependence
of perceivers and targets that emerges from
real social interactions. The social relations model
provides a theoretical way to conceptualize interpersonal
perceptions, a methodological guide for designing
studies that use real interactions, and a statistical
approach to analyze the data from these studies.
According to the model, interpersonal perceptions are
a function of five components: a constant, a perceiver
effect, a target effect, a relationship effect, and error.
These components, described further later, can be
summed to yield the overall perception or metaperception.
So John’s perception of Mary’s friendliness
(P) could be described with the following equation:
P = constant + John’s perceiver effect + Mary’s
target effect + relationship effect + error
The constant is the average score on the perception
across all perceivers and all targets. Perhaps, on
average, people are seen as somewhat friendly. The
perceiver effect is how a participant views others in
general. For example, John might view everyone as
very friendly, including Mary. The target effect is the
degree to which a person elicits a certain perception.
So Mary might be somewhat reserved and, in turn, be
rated as less friendly by most of her interaction partners.
The relationship effect represents the variance
caused by the unique combination of a specific perceiver
and a specific target. John may view Mary as
especially friendly beyond his perceiver effect and
beyond her target effect. Although social relations
model analyses often lump together the relationship
effect and error, it is possible to separate these two
components. If a researcher has John rate Mary on
friendliness using multiple measures or on multiple
occasions, one can determine how much of the rating
is due to the John-Mary relationship and how much is
random across measure or time.
Conducting a study to use the social relations model
requires a particular methodological approach.
Specifically, multiple perceivers must rate multiple targets.
So John would need to report not only Mary’s
friendliness but Bill’s and Sally’s too. Having multiple
raters and targets can be accomplished in several ways,
but is most easily done using a round-robin design in
which each person rates, and is rated by, each other

920———Social Support
person in the group. A block design, in which people
rate some members of the group but not others, is a
common alternative to the round-robin study. Block
designs are often used when a researcher is specifically
interested in intergroup perceptions. For example, do
men perceive women in the same way that women perceive
men? Specialized software programs (SOREMO
and BLOCKO) are used to analyze data from the different
social relations model designs.
Using the social relations model, a researcher can
investigate a variety of topics, including what Kenny
calls the nine basic questions of interpersonal perception.
Three of these questions can be answered by
evaluating variability in the perceiver, target, and relationship
effects. If perceptions are largely a function
of the perceiver effect, then one has evidence for
assimilation. That is, perceivers tend to see all of their
targets in a similar way. For example, John might see
Mary, Bill, and Sally as friendly, regardless of actual
differences among them. Conversely, when perceptions
are driven by the target effect, a researcher has
evidence for consensus. In this case, perceivers tend to
agree on which targets are high or low on a trait. John,
Bill, and Sally might concur that Mary is somewhat
unfriendly. Finally, strong relationship effects make
the case for uniqueness: A given person’s perception
of another person is idiosyncratic.
The remaining basic questions are addressed by
evaluating the degree to which the social relations
model effects are related to each other, self-perceptions,
or metaperceptions. For example, one might wonder
whether people see others as others see them, called
reciprocity. Evidence for reciprocity would be documented
by an overlap between perceiver effects (how
people see others) and target effects (how people are
seen by others). Another intriguing possibility is assessing
meta-accuracy, which is the degree to which people
know how others see them. This would be evaluated by
related perceiver effects in metaperceptions (how
people think they are seen by others) with target effects
in perceptions (how people are actually seen by others).
The last four questions include assessing whether
people can accurately perceive another person’s traits
(target accuracy), whether people assume others see
them as they see others (assumed reciprocity), whether
people see others as they see themselves (assumed similarity),
and whether people see themselves as others
see them (self-other agreement).
P. Niels Christensen
See also Empathic Accuracy; Personality Judgments,
Accuracy of; Person Perception
Further Readings
DePaulo, B. M., Kenny, D. A., Hoover, C. W., Webb, W.,
& Oliver, P. V. (1987). Accuracy of person perception:
Do people know what kinds of impressions they convey?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52,
303–315.
Kenny, D. A. (1994). Interpersonal perception: A social
relations analysis. New York: Guilford Press.
Kenny, D. A., Albright, L., Malloy, T. E., & Kashy, D. A.
(1994). Consensus in interpersonal perception: acquaintance
and the Big Five. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 245–258.
SOCIAL SUPPORT
Definition
In general, social support refers to the various ways
in which individuals aid others. Social support has
been documented as playing an important and positive
role in the health and well-being of individuals.
To receive support from another, one must participate
in at least one important relationship. However, social
support has often been summarized as a network of
individuals on whom one can rely for psychological
or material support to cope effectively with stress.
Social support is theorized to be offered in the
form of instrumental support (i.e., material aid),
appraisal/informational support (i.e., advice, guidance,
feedback), or emotional support (i.e., reassurance
of worth, empathy, affection).
Perceived and
Conditional Social Support
Perceived social support is support that an individual
believes to be available, regardless of whether the
support is actually available. Perception of support
may be a function of the degree of intimacy and affection
within one’s relationships. Compared with actual
support, perceived support may be just as important
(and perhaps more so) in improved health and wellbeing.
Actually, perceived support appears to correlate
more closely with health status than does actual social
support. Similar to actual support, perceived support

may heighten the belief that one is able to cope with
current situations, may decrease emotional and physiological
responses to events, and may positively alter
one’s behavior.
Conditional support is defined as one’s expectation
of receiving support only after fulfilling certain expectations
or requirements. Conditionality of support is
correlated with actual support. For example, those
who offer little support will only be supportive given
the fulfillment of certain expectations.
Buffering and
Direct Effects Hypotheses
Social support is theorized to affect health through one
of two routes: (1) an indirect, buffering, or mediational
route and (2) a direct, main-effects route. The stressbuffering
hypothesis has been more frequently studied
than the main-effects hypothesis. The stress-buffering
hypothesis asserts that an individual’s social network
supplies the individual with the resources needed to
cope with stressful events and situations. Accordingly,
the beneficiary aspects of support are only seen during
stressful periods. That is, the stress-buffering hypothesis
posits that social support tends to attenuate
(weaken) the relationships between stressful life
events and negative physical or psychological difficulties,
such as cardiovascular disorders and depression.
In addition, proponents of the stress-buffering model
believe that support will only be effective when there
is good support-environment fit (i.e., type of support
provided matches the situational demands). For example,
having someone offer empathy and reassurance
will be helpful when a person has lost a loved one, but
receiving empathy may be useless when one is facing
stresses associated with financial difficulties.
Conversely, the main-effects hypothesis postulates
that social support is beneficial whether one is
going through a stressful event or not. The maineffects
hypothesis asserts that the extent of an individual’s
participation in the social network plays a vital
role in the degree of social support benefits. In other
words, there is a direct monotonic link between social
support in one’s social network and well-being (i.e.,
the more support, the greater one’s well-being).
A related concept to social support is social
integration. Social integration is defined as an individual’s
involvement in a wide variety of social relationships.
Social integration can also refer to the quality of
the social relationship. For example, negative social
Social Support———921
relationships could have negative effects on health,
whereas positive social relationships and interactions
usually have a beneficial effect on health and
well-being. Previous research has demonstrated that
social integration tends to be a main effect. That is, one’s
relationships with others may provide multiple avenues
of information to influence health-related behaviors.
Social Support and Stress
The presence of a support network has been found to
reduce the negative effects of stress. The support of
one’s social network can act as a buffer to stress in
many ways. For example, individuals in one’s support
network can offer less threatening explanations for
stressful events (e.g., instead of being called into the
boss’s office to be fired, perhaps it is to be asked to
head a special committee instead). A positive social
support network can also increase an individual’s selfesteem
and self-efficacy. For example, effective coping
strategies may be suggested (e.g., a list of pros and
cons or a priority list). In addition, the support network
may suggest solutions to current problems or
stressors being faced. Having a support group can also
alter perceptions of the stressor by decreasing the perceived
importance of the stress. Furthermore, having
a supportive group of people surrounding a person
can result in increased positive behaviors such as
more exercise, proper rest, and better eating habits.
Likewise, interactions with others may help distract
attention from the problem.
Strong social networks can buffer against social
pain (e.g., loss of a loved one, betrayal, exclusion) as
well as buffer against negative aspects of other relationships.
For example, widows with a confidant
(someone to talk to about personal things) were less
depressed than were widows without a confidant. One
caveat to this buffering effect is that for support to
buffer the effects of stress, the supporter cannot also be
a source of conflict or additional stress. As such, having
a strong and stable support network may lessen the
negative effects of stress. In addition, support is associated
with adaptive coping to stressful events and
greater protection from the negative effects of stress.
Social Support and Health
Social support also has important effects on one’s
health and well-being. Overall, support has been
linked with good health and well-being as well as

922———Social Support
improved adjustment to specific illnesses, such as cardiovascular
disorders and cancer. For example, having
a strong support network has been correlated with
lower mortality rates, less depression, better adherence
to medical treatment, greater health-related behaviors
(e.g., lower rates of smoking), maintenance of health
behaviors, lower incidences of cardiovascular disorders,
and improved adjustment to breast cancer.
Furthermore, social support has been linked to adaptation
to surgery. That is, patients who had a social support
network received lower doses of narcotics,
displayed less anxiety, and were released from the hospital
sooner than were individuals who had no type of
social support.
Conversely, lack of social support has been associated
with increased anxiety and depression, an
increase in cardiovascular problems, feelings of
helplessness, and unhealthy behaviors (e.g., sedentary
lifestyle, habitual alcohol use). For example, a lack in
parental support predicted potential increases in
depressive symptoms and onset of depression in
adolescent girls. That is, girls who had very little to no
support from their parents were more likely to develop
depression than were girls who had parental support.
In addition, females reporting low levels of perceived
support also have more eating problems than do
females reporting high levels of support.
Social Support and Self-Esteem
Researchers have suggested that social support is one
of the key elements that influence self-esteem, especially
the support of one’s parents early in development.
Perceived support, rather than actual support,
has been most frequently examined in relation to selfesteem.
Researchers have found that the best predictor
of self-esteem in adolescents is the amount of perceived
social support from their classmates and the degree of
parental approval they receive. In other words, an individual’s
perceptions of support tend to influence his or
her reports of self-esteem. Therefore, the more support
one believes he or she is receiving, the higher his or her
self-reported self-esteem. Furthermore, social support
moderates the level of self-esteem depending on the
degree of competence in an area. In other words, people
who are highly competent in an area but receive little
support report lower levels of self-esteem than do
people who are highly competent but receive a lot of
social support. In addition, the higher the degree of conditional
support, the lower one’s self-esteem will be.
Negative Aspects of Social Support
Although the benefits of social support are well
known, there may also be negative aspects. For example,
a difference in the desired support and actual
support received can result in poorer psychosocial
adjustment in breast cancer survivors. Among older
adults, too much social support can heighten the negative
impact of stress, perhaps by eliciting feelings of
incompetency, lower self-esteem, and less selfcontrol.
In addition, being the provider of social support
may take a toll on the providers’ physical health,
psychological well-being, and emotional resources.
The act of providing support, especially over a long
duration, may be taxing because of the amount of
emotional, financial, and mental resources that must
be made available to provide such support.
Attachment Style and Social Support
Adult attachment style has been consistently linked
to individual differences in actual and perceived social
support. The relative quality of support caregivers provide
young children is believed to influence how they
perceive themselves and others in the future. In other
words, internal working models that involve expectations
about whether others will provide support
develop. Research has found that adults with secure
working models are more likely to believe they will
receive support when needed and are more satisfied
with the support they receive compared with adults
with insecure working models. In addition, secure
attachment has been positively associated with seeking
social support and providing support to others.
Personality and Social Support
Evidence supports a link between Big Five personality
traits (i.e., Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness,
Neuroticism, Openness to Experience) and
social support. Specifically, there appears to be a reciprocal
relationship between personality characteristics
and support. Personality traits likely influence relationships
(and thus support and perceptions of support).
In turn, support will affect relationships. As
such, changes in personality characteristics have been
positively related to changes in perceptions of support.
Agreeableness and Extraversion are two dimensions
that have been previously related to interpersonal
behavior. For example, Agreeableness has been

linked to interpersonal behaviors reflecting a need to
maintain positive relations with others. Consequently,
Agreeableness has been found to be most strongly
associated with support and perceived support.
Research has shown that Agreeableness positively
predicts the amount of support received. Furthermore,
providing job-related support mediates the relationship
between Agreeableness and received job-related
support. Similarly, Extraversion has been linked to
support in non–job-related and positive job-related
events. Extraversion and received job-related support
are mediated by job-related support provided. In addition,
Extraversion plays a role in the perceived support
received by children from parents, but not vice versa.
Gender Differences in Social Support
Much of the early research in gender differences of
social support used self-report measures and found
that women are more skillful providers of support than
are men. For example, wives affirm their husbands at a
greater rate than husbands affirm their wives and more
frequently offer support in post-stress situations than
husbands offer. In addition, wives will complete more
household chores (and thus relieve some stress
and pressure) when the husband has had a stressful
workday. Studies observing support behavior (i.e.,
observing supportive behavior rather than self-report
measures) among marital couples have not found these
gender differences and instead find that husbands and
wives offer comparable support to one another.
Recent research indicates that the skill of providing
social support is similar among husbands and wives. It
has been suggested that the key distinction in previously
found gender differences lies in when spouses
offer support. For example, wives offer greater
amounts of support when their husbands are experiencing
greater stress whereas when wives experience
increased stress, husbands do not necessarily offer
greater support. In other words, women are more likely
to provide greater support during severely stressful
times than are men.
Evidence indicates that social support may differentially
affect men and women. For example, widows
with support experienced improved quality of life,
greater well-being, and increased self-esteem, whereas
these elements were negatively correlated with received
social support among widowers. Support received by
men can be moderated by their desire to be independent.
Men who have a strong desire to be independent
Social Support———923
are more likely to react negatively to social support than
are men who do not have a strong desire to be independent
or who desire to be dependent. In women, the
influence of social support does not appear to be contingent
on the desire to be independent.
Culture and Social Support
A possible determinant in the decision to seek or
solicit social support may be one’s culture or the norms
that govern that culture. For example, individuals in
Eastern cultures are less likely to solicit social support
from their social network than individuals in Western
cultures are. This cultural pattern seems counterintuitive
since Eastern cultures tend to be collectivistic and
emphasize interdependence, whereas Western cultures
tend to be individualistic and emphasize independence.
It would seem as though individuals in collectivistic
cultures would be the ones to seek and solicit
help from their social support network. However,
research has shown that the opposite is true. That is,
individuals in individualistic cultures are those who are
soliciting help from their social support network. The
underlying reason for this counterintuitive pattern may
be the result of cultural norms, such as cultural norms
that discourage the use of a social support network
when solving problems and coping with stress.
Workplace Social Support
The amount of social support one receives from
others in the workplace depends on numerous factors
such as social competence, reciprocity relationships,
and job commitment. For example, individuals who
are socially competent tend to receive a greater amount
of emotional and instrumental support from coworkers
than do individuals who are not as socially competent.
However, many studies show that an individual’s
support network is usually a network of people outside
of his or her job such as family members, spouses, and
so forth. In any case, support given in the workplace
positively predicts support received.
Social support has also been shown to moderate the
relationship between long work hours and physical
health symptoms. In other words, physical health tends
to decrease when an individual has long work hours
and lacks social support. Conversely, individuals who
have a social support network tend to be buffered
against the adverse effects of longer working hours.

924———Social Value Orientation
Influences
Perceived social support and actual social support are
both influential in a multitude of facets in one’s life.
Social support can have either a direct (or main) effect
or a buffering (or mediation) effect on one’s health. The
influence of social support can be seen widely from an
effect in the workplace to intimate relationships. In addition,
social support has effects on one’s health, ability to
handle stress, and self-esteem level. Furthermore, one’s
personality, cultural background, and gender may influence
or moderate the effects of stress.
Jennifer M. Knack
Amy M. Waldrip
Lauri A. Jensen-Campbell
See also Buffering Effect; Cultural Differences; Gender
Differences; Helping Behavior; Need to Belong;
Self-Efficacy; Self-Esteem; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Cohen, S. (2004). Social relationships and health. American
Psychologist, 59(8), 676–684.
Collins, N. L., & Feeney, B. C. (2004). Working models of
attachment shape perceptions of social support: Evidence
from experimental and observational studies. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 363–383.
Krohne, H. W., & Slangen, K. E. (2005). Influence of social
support on adaptation to surgery. Health Psychology,
24(1), 101–105.
Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Kim, H. S., Jarcho, J., Takagi,
K., & Dunagan, M. S. (2004). Culture and social support:
Who seeks it and why? Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 87(3), 354–362.
SOCIAL TRAP
See SOCIAL DILEMMAS
SOCIAL VALUE ORIENTATION
People differ in how they approach others. Some
people tend to approach others in a cooperative manner,
whereas other people tend to approach others in a more
self-centered manner. Such social dispositions have
been demonstrated to be quite important in various
contexts and are often examined under the heading of
social value orientation. This concept refers to preferences
for particular distributions of outcomes for self
and others. One could discriminate among various
social value orientations, such as altruism, equality,
cooperation, individualism, competition, aggression,
and the like. However, research has supported a threecategory
typology that discriminates among three
orientations—prosocial orientation, individualistic
orientations, and competitive orientation.
Prosocial orientation is defined in terms of enhancing
one’s own and another’s outcomes (“doing well
together”) as well as equality in outcomes (“each receiving
an equal share”), individualistic orientation is defined
in terms of enhancing outcomes for self and being
largely indifferent to outcomes for another person (“doing
well for oneself”), and competitive orientation is defined
in terms of enhancing the difference between outcomes
for self and another in favor of oneself (“doing better—
or less worse—than another person”).
Measurement
The concept of social value orientation is rooted in
classic research on cooperation and competition,
which revealed (largely unexpected, at that time) a
good deal of individual stability in behavior over a
series of interactions and across situations. These
considerations, as well as the aim of disentangling (or
decomposing) interpersonal goals underlying behavior
in experimental games, have inspired researchers to
design a measure that is closely linked to game behavior.
Rather than focusing on a 2-by-2 matrix game,
such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game, the instrument
represents decompositions of game situations, capturing
consequences of one’s behavior for oneself and
another person. A frequently used instrument is the
Triple-Dominance Measure of Social Values. In this
instrument, outcomes are presented in terms of points
said to be valuable to self and the other, and the other
person is described as someone the person does not
know and that he or she will never knowingly meet in
the future (in an effort to exclude the role of considerations
relevant to the future interactions).
An example of a decomposed game is the choice
among three options:

Option A: 480 points for self and 80 points for the other
person
Option B: 540 points for self and 280 points for the other
person
Option C: 480 points for self and 480 points for the other
person
In this example, option A represents the competitive
choice because it yields the greatest outcomes for self
relative to the other (480 – 80 = 400 points); option B
represents the individualistic choice because it yields
the greatest absolute outcomes for self (540 points);
and option C represents the prosocial choice because it
yields the greatest joint outcomes (480 + 480 = 960
points) as well as the smallest absolute difference
between outcomes for self and other (480 – 480 = 0
points). In research using this instrument, most individuals
are classified as prosocial (about 60%–65%), followed
by individualists (about 25%), and only a small
minority is classified as competitive (about 10%–15%).
Of course, these percentages might differ as a function
of the sample, depending on variables such as (sub)cultural
differences, gender, number of siblings, and age.
For example, prosocial orientation is more likely to be
observed in collectivistic cultures (as opposed to individualistic
cultures), in women (as opposed to men),
and among people with a large number of siblings,
especially sisters. And prosocial orientations are more
commons among older people (at least up to 65 years)
than among younger people.
Research
Research revealed that social value orientation exhibited
considerable ability to predict actual behavior in a
variety of different experiment games, with prosocial
exhibiting greater cooperation than individualists and
competitors. Moreover, social value orientations often
exert their influence not only in terms of independent
effects but also in combination with several variables,
such as personality impressions of the partner, or the
strategy pursued by the interaction partner. Also, social
value orientation is associated with several cognitive
processes, including the use of morality (good versus
bad) versus competence (intelligent versus stupid,
weak versus strong) in person judgment and impression
formation. For example, whereas prosocials tend
to judge cooperative and noncooperative others in
Social Value Orientation———925
terms of good and bad (e.g., fair or unfair), individualists
and competitors tend to judge these people in
terms of strong versus weak or smart versus dumb.
Recent research has also examined how individual
differences in social value orientation could have an
impact on cognition, affect, and behavior in contexts
outside of the laboratory, that is, in everyday life.
Evidence increasingly reveals that prosocials and
individualists report a greater willingness to sacrifice
for their partners than do competitors. Prosocials also
report working harder for their housemates (to maintain
a clean apartment), which is an interesting finding
because prosocials were judged by their roommates
and friends as more philosophical than individualists
and competitors. Also, prosocials are more likely than
individualists and competitors to volunteer in participating
in psychological experiments. Last but not
least, social value orientation is also very important at
the large societal level, showing that prosocials are
more likely to make donations to noble causes than
are individualists and competitors, and prosocials are
more likely to hold a left-wing political orientation
(valuing equality and solidarity), whereas individualists
and competitors are more likely to hold a rightwing
political orientation.
Implications
In short, what is fascinating about social value orientation
is that only a small number of games (which
can be assessed in only a couple of minutes) appear to
be useful tools for understanding prosocial behavior
as diverse as sacrifice in ongoing relationships, citizenship
in groups, participation in experiments, and
donations to help the poor and the ill. This is remarkable
from a measurement perspective and from the
theoretical perspective. Recall that many theories tend
to portray individuals as self-interested individuals,
calculated or not. This view on human nature appears
to be incomplete, and therefore partially inaccurate, so
it is good to realize that some people may be quite
prone to value good (and equal) outcomes for all,
whereas others want to make sure that they do not get
less than others. Outcomes are inherently social.
Paul A. M. Van Lange
Chris P. Reinders Folmer
See also Cooperation; Prosocial Behavior; Social Dilemmas;
Values

926———Sociobiological Theory
Further Readings
Kuhlman, D. M., & Marshello, A. (1975). Individual
differences in game motivation as moderators of
preprogrammed strategic effects in prisoner’s dilemma.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32,
922–931.
Liebrand, W. B. G., Jansen, R. W. T. L., Rijken, V. M.,
& Suhre, C. J. M. (1986). Might over morality: Social
values and the perception of other players in experimental
games. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 22,
203–215.
Messick, D. M., & McClintock, C. G. (1968). Motivational
bases of choice in experimental games. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 4, 1–25.
Van Lange, P. A. M. (1999). The pursuit of joint outcomes
and equality in outcomes: An integrative model of social
value orientation. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 77, 337–349.
Van Lange, P. A. M., Otten, W., De Bruin, E. N. M.,
& Joireman, J. A. (1997). Development of prosocial,
individualistic, and competitive orientations: Theory and
preliminary evidence. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 73, 733–746.
SOCIOBIOLOGICAL THEORY
In 1975, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson published
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, wherein he
outlined a framework for investigating the biological
basis of social behavior. As a branch of evolutionary
biology, sociobiology aims to use demographic parameters
(e.g., growth and mortality rates, gender and
age distributions) and the genetic structure of populations
to predict patterns of social organization across
species. One of the conceptual tools sociobiology contributes
to investigations of social behavior is an analysis
of ultimate causation. Whereas proximate causal
analyses focus on, for example, the behavioral, developmental,
physiological, or neural mechanisms operating
within an individual’s lifetime to produce a
particular phenotype, an ultimate causal analysis
focuses on the selective forces that operated over generations
and led to the evolution of the specific phenotype
manifest in the individual. In this way, proximate
explanations answer the question of how mechanisms
operate (e.g., the catalog of hormones, neurotransmitters,
and brain regions governing behavior); ultimate
explanations answer the question of why they were
selected for (i.e., how a particular trait affected the
probability of survival and reproduction).
Sociobiologists have made progress in understanding
a wide range of behaviors, both their proximate mechanisms
and ultimate functions, including altruism, patterns
of communication, aggression, mating systems,
and parental care of offspring. Such behaviors have been
investigated in a wide range of species including ants,
birds, frogs, and chimps. Wilson’s volume sparked
heated controversy regarding his last chapter, which
extended the principles of evolutionary ultimate causation
and population genetics to explain the social
behavior of humans. Among the many reasons for this
controversy were (a) misunderstandings about sociobiology
and genetic determinism and, (b) the long-held
view in the social sciences that social behavior in
humans is the product of cultural forces, rather than biological
ones. Many opponents mistook sociobiology for
arguing that social behaviors are genetically fixed and
immutable when, in fact, much of sociobiology focuses
on how evolved social behavior is capable of adapting to
different environmental situations (e.g., morphological
and behavioral change given particular environmental
cues). Controversy also occurred because sociobiology
ran counter to the prevailing view in the social sciences.
Indeed, one goal of sociobiology is the reshaping of the
humanities and social sciences to make them consistent
with the principles of modern evolutionary biology.
Though based on many of the same principles,
sociobiology is distinct from evolutionary psychology.
Although both disciplines consider ultimate causal
explanations, evolutionary psychology uses this level
of analysis to construct models of the information
processing circuitry (i.e., the cognitive programs)
required to produce an adaptive response. In contrast,
sociobiology steps from selective forces (e.g., limited
resources) to social behavior (e.g., aggression) without
making explicit the kinds of cognitive programs
required to produce a particular behavior. So, though
related, there exists a set of non-overlapping goals
distinct to each field. Nevertheless, sociobiology and
its related disciplines take seriously the claim that
principles derived from the modern synthesis, which
united Darwin’s theory of evolution and Mendelian
genetics, can be used to explain the constellation of
behaviors in humans and nonhumans alike.
Debra Lieberman
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Genetic Influences on
Social Behavior; Sociobiology

Further Readings
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
SOCIOBIOLOGY
Definition
Sociobiology is an approach to studying the biological
bases of social behavior that focuses on applying
evolutionary theory and the principles of genetics to
explain specific instances of social behavior in a wide
variety of species.
Background
John P. Scott coined the term sociobiology in 1948, but
it was not until 1964 that William Hamilton laid the theoretical
foundations of the field. Hamilton introduced
the idea that, in the evolution of species, the transmission
of genes from one generation to the next matters
much more than any individual organism’s success
in survival and reproduction. He and others went on to
conclude that, because social behaviors may aid in
the passing on of genes, such behaviors may have evolutionary,
and ultimately biological, bases.
The modern era of sociobiology effectively began in
1975, however, with the publication of entomologist
E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Wilson’s prominent yet controversial work advocated
the integrative and systematic application of many disciplines,
including evolutionary theory and genetics, to
the study of social behavior. With the release of Wilson’s
book, the amount of work in this area increased dramatically.
Many of the core principles of sociobiology persist
today in the field of evolutionary psychology.
What Sociobiologists Study
Sociobiologists try to identify the evolutionary origins
of social behaviors in all species. To do this, they
examine specific social behaviors and the environments
in which they occur, and then infer how such
behaviors may have been adaptive in enabling species
to pass on their genes. Although most sociobiological
research has focused on behavior in nonhuman animals,
sociobiologists have also examined the evolutionary
bases of human social behavior. Research on
helping, for instance, has shown that the likelihood
that people will aid those in distress depends partly on
how genetically related the helper is to the person in
need. This supports the idea that altruism has an evolutionary
basis in aiding the survival of those who
share one’s genes.
Constraints on Human Sociobiology
Although many interpret sociobiological research
on humans to suggest that people’s behavior can
be explained using evolutionary theory, others have
argued that this approach is limited because the precise
influence of genes in most human behavior is difficult
to pinpoint. This is because most of the social
behaviors sociobiologists attribute to genetic influence
also can be explained by the influence of cultural
norms and learning. For example, cultural norms
promote helping one’s close relatives over helping
strangers. In addition, sociobiologists have difficulty
specifying the adaptive value of complex cultural phenomena
such as art and religion. Nonetheless, study of
the evolutionary bases of human behavior has proved
a novel, and increasingly influential, approach to
understanding human social behavior.
Spee Kosloff
See also Evolutionary Psychology; Genetic Influences on
Social Relationships; Sociobiological Theory
Further Readings
Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. Oxford, UK: Oxford
University Press.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical theory of social
behavior: I and II. Journal of Theoretical Biology,
7, 1–52.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap.
SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS
Socioeconomic Status———927
Definition
Socioeconomic status (SES) is an indicator of an individual’s
social and economic standing in society and
often is determined by a combination of ratings on occupational
status, income level, and education. Individuals

928———Sociological Social Psychology
with low SES ratings tend to have low-status occupations,
such as service industry jobs; income at or
below the poverty level; and low levels of formal education.
These individuals have limited access to the
kinds of financial, educational, and social resources
that could promote their own health and well-being
and that of their families. Individuals with high SES
ratings are likely to work in prestigious positions, such
as in medicine or law; have higher salaries; and have
more advanced education. These individuals have greater
access to resources that can contribute to their success and
to the perpetuation of similar benefits for their families.
Importance
Low SES has been associated with a variety of negative
developmental and social outcomes, especially
for children. For example, low SES is associated with
health problems, such as premature birth, low birth
weight, respiratory illnesses, and iron deficiencies in
children. Children in low-SES households are more
likely to be exposed to tobacco, less likely to have
adequate nutrition, less likely to be immunized, and
less likely to receive high-quality health care than
their higher SES peers. These conditions also affect
the health of adults, with women living in poverty
being more likely than their higher SES counterparts
to suffer from disease, chronic health conditions, and
disabilities.
Low SES also is associated with lower academic
performance and IQ scores for children. Low-
SES parents likely have limited access to high-quality
books, libraries, and schools for their children, and
they may provide fewer enriching educational opportunities
for their children to develop their intellectual
skills. Teachers also may unknowingly contribute to
the lower academic performance of these children,
by subtly conveying their low expectations in a way
that actually undermines performance. Ultimately, a
low-SES child’s poor performance may confirm the
teacher’s original negative expectation, creating a selffulfilling
prophecy. Some experts think the causation
goes in the opposite direction, that low IQ (which they
regard as genetically determined) causes people to
end up with low SES.
Low SES also has been linked with maladaptive
social functioning. Children and adolescents growing
up in low-SES households exhibit more aggressive
and delinquent behavior, and both low SES children
and adults have a higher likelihood of suffering from
psychological disorders, such as depression. Moreover,
individuals with limited financial resources likely have
more difficulty finding and receiving appropriate,
affordable, and effective mental health treatment, further
limiting their functioning.
Low SES often co-occurs with minority, recent
immigrant, and disability status; single-parent households;
and exposure to violence, making low-SES
individuals frequent targets of prejudice. People may
assume that low SES reflects personal failings, without
considering possible societal constraints. This
assumption may undermine their willingness to help
low-SES individuals improve their social standing,
further perpetuating a cycle of social inequality.
See also Prejudice; Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Further Readings
Elizabeth L. Cralley
Bradley, R. H., & Corwyn, R. F. (2002). Socioeconomic
status and child development. Annual Review of
Psychology, 53, 371–399.
SOCIOLOGICAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Definition
Although most social psychologists are psychologists
working in psychology departments, an important
minority are sociologists working in sociology departments.
The two groups share an interest in many of the
same research problems, but their approaches are distinct.
Psychological social psychologists tend to focus
on the single person, on how an individual’s perceptions
of a social situation affect how she or he thinks,
feels, and behaves in that situation. Sociological social
psychologists, however, tend to focus on the relationship
between the individual and larger social systems
(e.g., society). Beyond this general orientation, however,
sociological social psychology consists of a
diverse set of perspectives and theories. Most often,
sociologists distinguish between two major variants of
sociological social psychology—symbolic interactionism
and social structure and personality—though an
emerging third variant has come to be called structural
social psychology.

History and Background
Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionism is itself a diverse variant
of sociological social psychology, the rise of which is
connected with the emergence of American sociology
in the early part of the 20th century, largely because
of George Herbert Mead’s ideas concerning the selfsociety
relationship. At the core of Mead’s theorizing
is the idea that society gives rise to the self, the self in
turn influences behavior, and behavior acts back to
maintain society, though emergent behavioral patterns
may also promote societal change.
Toward the mid-20th century, symbolic interactionism
split into two different strands, often referred to as
the Chicago School and the Iowa School. Although
both claimed inspiration from Mead’s ideas on self and
society, the two schools make different assumptions
about the nature of the individual, the nature of interaction,
and the nature of society. Consequently, the two
schools offer contrasting views regarding the kinds of
empirical and theoretical methods that are appropriate
for sociological analysis.
The Chicago School. After Mead’s death in 1931, a
version of his work was carried on at the University of
Chicago by his student Herbert Blumer, who posthumously
published Mead’s lecture notes and is credited
with coining the phrase symbolic interactionism.
Blumer’s interactionism emphasizes the ever-changing,
chameleon-like nature of the self and its tentative
role in social interaction (i.e., the self is only one
object among many objects that can influence a person’s
behavior in a situation). Accordingly, Blumer
viewed social interaction as largely unpredictable,
and society as carefully balanced, infinitely alterable,
and thus full of potential for change. As such, Blumer
advocated explorative methodologies and inductive
theory-building as a means of achieving an interpretive
understanding of social life.
The Iowa School. An alternative view of Mead’s
interactionism was developed by Manford Kuhn, who
taught at the State University of Iowa from 1946 until
his death in 1963. Compared with Blumer, Kuhn saw
far more constancy in the self, arguing that people have
a core self (i.e., a set of stable meanings toward themselves)
arising from the social roles they occupy.
According to Kuhn, the core self constrains a person:
Each person experiences social reality and chooses
Sociological Social Psychology———929
behaviors in line with his or her core self across situations.
Thus, Kuhn viewed social interaction as highly
patterned and predictable, and society as a relatively
stable place relating people in role networks. Accordingly,
Kuhn argued on behalf of developing deductive
theories from which predictions about human behavior
could be formed and subsequently tested. Toward this
effort, Kuhn developed the now-famous Twenty
Statements Test in 1950, which within a few years
became a popular research tool used for assessment of
the core self. In this test, respondents are asked to provide
20 responses to the statement, “Who am I?”
Recent Advances. Major developments in modern
symbolic interactionism represent ongoing efforts to
translate Mead’s ground-breaking yet vague ideas
about self and society into testable claims. Central to
some of these noteworthy efforts is the concept of identity,
which refers to the components of the self containing
the specific meanings that individuals assign to
themselves because of the roles they occupy in society.
Modern theories of identity fall under two distinct
(though not competing) approaches. The structural
approach, represented by the pioneering work of
Sheldon Stryker and his colleagues, focuses on how
social structures shape identities that, in turn, influence
social behavior. Cognitive approaches, represented by
Peter Burke’s identity control theory and David Heise’s
affect control theory, focus on the psychological mechanisms
that affect how individuals express identities
in social interaction. One important similarity between
Burke’s theory and Heise’s theory is that both offer a
“control systems” view of the relationship between
identities and behavior. In other words, identity meanings
work like a temperature setting in a thermostat.
When a room gets too cool, the thermostat tells the furnace
to turn on and heat the room to the desired temperature.
Similarly, if a person receives feedback from the
environment (i.e., from others) that is not consistent
with meanings associated with an identity, then the
person will change her or his behavior to try to bring
feedback into line with the identity.
An important difference between Burke’s identity
control theory and Heise’s affect control theory, however,
concerns the assumptions each makes about
what people strive to control. Burke’s view is more
individualistic: People behave in ways that confirm
their own self meanings. For example, a person who
thinks of herself or himself as a bright student will
behave in ways (e.g., working hard, striving to achieve

930———Sociological Social Psychology
excellent grades, participating frequently) to produce
social feedback from others (parents, teachers, classmates)
that confirms this self-view. By contrast, Heise
argues that people behave in ways to create situations
that confirm not only their own self meanings but also
the meanings of other objects in the situation, including
other people. Thus when a bright student interacts
with a hardworking teacher in a classroom, each is
motivated to behave toward the other in a manner that
creates a socially appropriate situation for these
identities in this particular context (i.e., the classroom).
In this respect, Heise’s theory is consistent
with Blumer’s view that the self is only one object that
influences social behavior. Yet Heise’s theorizing,
unlike Blumer’s, shows how behavior can nonetheless
be predicted amid such incredible social complexity.
Social Structure and Personality
Social structure and personality shares many of
symbolic interactionism’s general ideas and concerns,
yet it has traditionally emphasized how societal
features influence many different aspects of people’s
individual lives. In this perspective, individuals are
viewed as occupying different positions in a society.
The relationships among the positions characterize the
system’s social structure. Social-structural positions
place individuals in different social networks (including
family, friendship, and coworker networks),
involve specific expectations for behavior, and convey
different levels of power and prestige. In turn, these
features of social-structural positions affect their
occupants in numerous ways. Social structure and
personality studies have shown how the positions that
people occupy in society (e.g., in terms of factors such
as their occupational roles, gender, race, and relationship
status) determine a variety of outcomes,
including physical and mental health, involvement
in criminal behavior, personal values, and status
attainment. Mark Hayward at the University of Texas
Population Center has conducted fascinating research
showing that social conditions in childhood (such as
socioeconomic status, whether the child grew up with
both biological parents or in another type of family
structure, whether the child’s mother worked outside
the home, etc.) affect age of death in adulthood. In
recent years, however, analyses of social structure and
personality have begun to place more emphasis on
how individuals can influence societal patterns and
trends. The actions of members of disadvantaged
groups can sometimes lead to societal-level changes
in the distribution of power, prestige, and privileges.
A classic example is that of Rosa Louise McCauley
Parks, an African American woman whose refusal to
give up her bus seat to a White passenger in 1955
eventually led to the overturning of racial segregation
laws across the United States. Indeed, Congress
awarded Parks the prestigious Congressional Gold
Medal in 1999, recognizing that she is widely hailed
as the first lady of civil rights and the mother of the
freedom movement.
Structural Social Psychology
Structural social psychology is an emerging variant
of sociological social psychology that is similar to
symbolic interactionism and social structure and personality
in its recognition that social structures influence
social interaction, and that social interaction
perpetuates and sometimes leads to changes in social
structure. However, the most distinctive and controversial
feature of structural social psychology is its
minimalist view of individuals. Although, for example,
some social structure and personality researchers
have called for richer, more detailed descriptions of
individuals (incorporating a wide range of personality
attributes, personal interests, goals, desires, etc.),
structural social psychological theories stress just the
opposite: Only those qualities of individual actors
thought to be relevant to a specific theoretical question
ought to be included. The guiding principle of
this approach is what is referred to as scientific parsimony.
That is, structural social psychologists aim to
develop general theories that explain as much as possible
while employing as few concepts and assumptions
as possible. In contrast to a “more is better”
ambition, structural social psychologists advocate a
“less is more” approach. Major theories in this tradition
include (but are not limited to) Joseph Berger and
colleagues’ expectation states theory, Noah Friedkin’s
social influence network theory, Barry Markovsky’s
multilevel theory of distributive justice, and Barry
Markovsky and colleagues’ network exchange theory.
An especially promising aspect of structural social
psychological theorizing is its compatibility with
agent-based modeling (ABM), the most recent
approach to designing computer simulations of complex
phenomena. Using what is called a bottom-up
strategy, ABMs illustrate how complex system-level
patterns emerge from the coordinated behaviors of

actors assumed to follow very simple interaction rules
(i.e., minimalist actors). For example, Craig Reynolds
from Sony Corporation developed a now-famous
ABM called boids that shows how complex and elegant
flocking formations exhibited by birds in the real
world are produced by computer-simulated birds that
follow just three simple collision-avoidance rules.
ABMs are now being used to model emergent complex
patterns of human social behavior, including
crowd behavior, cooperation, learning, and social
influence. ABMs and structural social psychology
have much to gain from one another. ABMs currently
stress how complex social patterns and structures
emerge from individual behavior, whereas structural
social psychological theories have tended to emphasize
(though not by necessity) the opposite (i.e., how
social structures influence individual behavior). In the
future, the two will realize their full potential by drawing
from one another’s strengths.
Implications
What do we make of the diversity of approaches
to social psychology within the field of sociology? On
one hand, the diverse character of sociological social
psychology (and of sociology more generally) may in
part indicate a lack of shared standards for developing
and testing theories, which, as Barry Markovsky has
argued in various places, lends itself to the creation of
nebulous theories that lack true explanatory power.
On the opposing hand, one might argue that the wide
variety of approaches in sociological social psychology
may reflect the diverse and multifaceted nature of
the social phenomena under investigation, so theoretical
and methodological differences ought to be tolerated,
if not appreciated and cultivated. Resolution of
this ongoing debate is perhaps one of the most important
tasks facing sociology today.
Will Kalkhoff
See also History of Social Psychology; Self; Symbolic
Interactionism
Further Readings
Axelrod, R., & Tesfatsion, L. (2006). On-line guide for
newcomers to agent-based modeling in the social
sciences. Retrieved September 29, 2006, from
http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/abmdemo.htm
Cook, K. S., Fine, G. A., & House, J. S. (Eds.). (1995).
Sociological perspectives on social psychology. Boston:
Allyn & Bacon.
Heise, D. (n.d.). Affect control theory. Retrieved from
http://www.indiana.edu/~socpsy/ACT/
House, J. S. (1977). The three faces of social psychology.
Sociometry, 40(2), 161–177.
Lawler, E. J., Ridgeway, C., & Markovsky, B. (1993).
Structural social psychology and the micro-macro
problem. Sociological Theory, 11(3), 268–290.
Macy, M. W., & Willer, R. (2002). From factors to actors:
Computational sociology and agent-based modeling.
Annual Review of Sociology, 28, 143–166.
SOCIOMETRIC STATUS
Definition
Sociometric status refers to how much a child is liked
and noticed by peers. It reflects a broader categorization
of peer acceptance than simple friendships. Sociometric
categories include popular, rejected, neglected,
controversial, and average children. Sociometric status
is important because peer relations play a significant
role in the social and emotional development of
children.
Evaluation
Sociometric status is evaluated by asking children to
nominate the peers whom they most like and dislike,
rate each peer on a scale ranging from like very much
to dislike very much, or indicate their preferred playmates
from among different pairs of children. Teachers,
parents, and researchers also can provide their
observations. Researchers use these positive and
negative nominations to categorize each child’s
sociometric status.
Popular
Sociometric Status———931
Sociometric Categories
Popular children receive many positive and few
negative nominations. They are well liked by others.
Popular children are cooperative, sociable, friendly, and
sensitive to others. Although they are assertive and
capable of using aggression, they exhibit few disruptive
and negative behaviors. Instead, they appear to use their

932———Sociometric Status
social skills to get what they want without resorting to
aggression. Popular children also tend to show high
levels of academic and intellectual abilities. Children,
teachers, and parents generally agree which children
are popular. Overall, popular children are skilled in initiating
and maintaining positive social interactions and
relationships.
Rejected
Rejected children receive many negative and
few positive nominations. They are actively disliked.
Rejected children exhibit fewer positive social skills
and traits than do children in the other groups, and
they show weaker academic and intellectual abilities.
Recent research indicates two types of children who
are rejected: Children who display disruptive and
aggressive behavior, and children who are socially
anxious and withdrawn.
Children in the rejected-aggressive group display
high levels of hostile and threatening behavior, physical
aggression such as pushing and fighting, and
disruptive behavior such as breaking rules. They also
may display a hostile attribution bias or a tendency to
assume that other children have hostile intentions in
ambiguous situations. For example, if one child drops
an art project and a second child steps on it before it
can be retrieved, the scenario is ambiguous; it is
unclear whether the second child stepped on it on purpose
or by accident. Although nonrejected children
recognize the ambiguity, rejected-aggressive children
may assume that the negative act was purposeful,
subsequently responding with aggressive retaliation.
This aggressive retaliation is perceived as unwarranted
by those who recognized the situational ambiguity,
which feeds into the cycle of peer rejection.
Other children may be rejected because they display
socially anxious behavior. These children are not overly
aggressive. Rather, they are timid and wary in social situations,
leading to uncomfortable, awkward interactions.
Peers may find it difficult to predict how these
children will act and may be less willing to approach
them. Socially anxious children may then withdraw
from future social situations. Rejected-withdrawn
children appear to lack the social skills that make
smooth interactions with peers possible.
Neglected
Neglected children receive few positive and few
negative nominations. They engage in few disruptive
and aggressive behaviors, and they show less sociability
than their peers. However, research indicates that
neglected children are not at great risk for negative
outcomes. Indeed, in more structured activities, these
children show more sociability. Otherwise, they may
prefer solitary activities, ultimately contributing to
their neglected status. Neglected children are not disliked.
They simply are not noticed.
Controversial
Controversial children receive both positive and
negative nominations. They are well liked by some
children but actively disliked by others. These children
engage in as much aggressive behavior as rejectedaggressive
children. However, they compensate for
their aggression with positive social behaviors. Similar
to popular children, they tend to have high levels of
academic and intellectual abilities. Their positive
behaviors and attributes offset their higher levels of
aggression. Ratings by children, teachers, and parents
are less consistent regarding controversial children,
perhaps because controversial children curb their
aggressive displays when adults are present. Although
controversial children engage in aggressive behavior,
they are also cooperative and sociable.
Average
Average children receive an average number of
positive and negative nominations. They do not fit
into one of the more extreme categories. Most
children fit into this category. They are more sociable
than rejected and neglected children but not as sociable
as popular and controversial children.
Stability and Implications
Over short periods, such as a few weeks or months,
ratings for popular and rejected children remain fairly
stable. Children in the neglected and controversial
categories may fluctuate as school activities change
and social skills develop. Over longer periods, stability
ratings for rejected children are higher than for the
other groups. In other words, children who are popular,
neglected, or controversial when they are young
may or may not hold that status several years later.
However, children who are actively rejected at a
young age still tend to be rejected several years later.
Without intervention, they do not acquire the social
skills they need to experience peer acceptance.

Rejected children, especially rejected-aggressive
children, are at high risk for negative outcomes such
as delinquency, hyperactivity, attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, conduct problems, and substance
abuse. In addition, they are at higher risk than are the
other groups for feelings of loneliness, depression, and
for obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, these
children can benefit from interventions. Parents and
teachers who coach children on how to deal with
conflict and difficult social situations, how to meet and
interact with unfamiliar peers, and who also model
and reinforce socially competent behavior can assist
children in developing their social skills. Ultimately,
children who learn about appropriate social behaviors,
how to implement them, and how to interpret social
feedback from others should become more socially
competent and experience better peer relations.
Elizabeth L. Cralley
See also Aggression; Hostile Attribution Bias; Ostracism;
Rejection; Research Methods
Further Readings
Newcomb, A. F., Bukowski, W. M., & Pattee, L. (1993).
Children’s peer relations: A meta-analytic review of
popular, rejected, neglected, controversial, and average
sociometric status. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 99–128.
SPONTANEOUS TRAIT INFERENCES
Definition
The notion of spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) refers
to a frequently demonstrated empirical finding. Observing
behaviors or reading behavior descriptions gives
rise to immediate trait inferences, beyond the actually
given information. Thus, somebody who steps on a
partner’s feet on the dance floor elicits the inference
clumsy. Witnessing a student succeeding on a difficult
task gives rise to the spontaneous inference clever.
Such inferences take place even though the trait is not
strictly implicated. Stepping on someone’s feet can
happen to nonclumsy people, just as even a dull student
can solve a task under auspicious conditions.
Logically, singular behaviors do not imply general
traits. STIs are called spontaneous because they can
be assumed to occur in the absence of explicit task
instructions and deliberate intentions to think about
Spontaneous Trait Inferences———933
the traits that correspond to a given behavior. In STI
experiments, researchers make serious attempts to
conceal their interest in trait inferences, ruling out
demand characteristics that might account for controlled
trait inferences.
Measurements
Several paradigms have been developed to investigate
STI effects experimentally. In the original cued-recall
paradigm, participants are exposed to a list of behavior
descriptions (e.g., “Steven stepped on his partner’s feet
on the dance floor”). Then, on a so-called cued-recall
test, their task is to recall the previously presented
behavior descriptions based on variable cue words or
phrases. The specific types of cues given in the recall
test are manipulated. As it turns out, trait words that
represent reasonable inferences but that never
appeared in the original sentences (such as clumsy)
provide more effective retrieval cues than such words
or phrases that actually occurred in the list, suggesting
that traits must have been inferred spontaneously. In
another word-fragment completion paradigm, being
exposed to behavior descriptions facilitates the subsequent
generation of a corresponding trait concept from
an incomplete letter string. For instance, a person who
has been primed with the earlier sentence takes less
time to generate the word concept clumsy from the
word fragment c–m–y than does somebody who was
not exposed to that behavior. The faster response
latency provides evidence that the trait concept has
already been inferred implicitly. Unlike the cued-recall
method, this method warrants trait inferences that
occur immediately after the behavior has been presented,
ruling out inferences during a later recall stage.
In a picture-priming paradigm, behaviors are presented
in pictures or moving pictures (film clips), and
participants have to identify a trait word that is first
hidden behind a mask and that appears only gradually
(over 3 seconds or so) as small pieces of the mask are
removed in random order. Again, an STI effect is evident
in response speed. When the trait to be identified
constitutes a reasonable inference from the behavior
presented in the preceding picture or film, the identification
time is slower than on nonmatching trials.
This method has been extended to control for the
mental activity during behavior presentation, by
inserting a verification task. Thus, participants have to
verify an aspect of the picture or film (e.g., whether
the presented behavior is an instance of hitting or
attacking or an instance of hostile), before the trait

934———Spotlight Effect
identification task (e.g., involving the trait aggressive)
starts. In this fashion, the trait inference process can
be guided or tuned experimentally.
In still another method based on response latencies,
the probe-recognition paradigm, the reaction time
required to correctly falsify a trait word as having not
appeared in a text passage is prolonged if that trait
constitutes a plausible inference from a behavior
read in a preceding sentence. Last but not least, the
savings-in-relearning paradigm measures STI effects
in terms of the reduced time required to relearn
trait words when the list to be learned involves traits
inferred from previously presented behaviors.
Practical and Theoretical Relevance
STIs have important practical and theoretical implications.
Practically, drawing quick and unreflected
inferences about people’s traits can lead to premature
action, uncritical decisions, and serious conflicts in
diverse areas, such as personnel assessment or legal
decisions. STIs can contribute to social stereotypes
and cultural knowledge.
Theoretically, STI research is expected to further the
understanding of quick and seemingly automatic social
judgments based on unintended thought and unplanned,
effortless cognitive operations. However, although trait
inferences can occur spontaneously, in the absence of
deliberate instructions or intentions, and demand little
mental resources, other evidence suggests that the
process is not fully automatic in some respects. First,
STIs are stronger when inferred traits are consistent with
an existing stereotype of the target. Accordingly, the trait
submissive is more likely to be inferred from a corresponding
behavior when the target person is female than
male because submissive is part of the female gender
stereotype. Second, trait inferences depend on the linguistic
implications of the verbs used to describe a
behavior. The same aggressive behavior will more likely
elicit the trait inference aggressive when an action verb
(such as attack) is used to describe this behavior than
when a state verb (hate) is used because action verbs
imply internal causes within the actor, whereas state
verbs imply external causes outside the actor. Third, trait
inferences can be influenced through attentional manipulations;
they are bound to persons or faces that are the
focus of attention when behaviors are observed.
The STI effect provides a theoretical model for the
interpretation of several intriguing phenomena. These
include the correspondence bias (default tendency to
attribute behavior internally to person dispositions,
while neglecting situational constraints), spontaneous
trait transference (blaming or praising communicators
of unpleasant or pleasant messages), and perseverance
effects (adhering to premature inferences that full
debriefing has revealed to be wrong). Importantly, STI
must not be equated with internal attributions of behaviors
to person dispositions. Behaviors can also give rise
to spontaneous situation inferences, implying external
causes of the observed behavior in the environment.
Current Issues
Current research and theoretical discussions revolve
around such issues as the cognitive states or mind-sets
that facilitate STI tendencies, the binding of trait inferences
to particular persons of faces associated with the
observed behavior, and the intriguing issue of differences
between cultures. Members of (Eastern) collectivist
cultures have been shown to be less prone to trait
inferences than are members of (Western) individualist
cultures, in accordance with the assumption that collectivist
cultures put less weight on personal factors in
explaining the world than individualist cultures do.
Klaus Fiedler
See also Attributions; Collectivistic Cultures; Personality
Judgments, Accuracy of; Priming
Further Readings
Newman, L. S., & Uleman, J. S. (1989). Spontaneous trait
inference. In J. S. Uleman & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), Unintended
thought (pp. 155–188). New York: Guilford Press.
Skowronski, J. J., Carlston, D. E., Mae, L., & Crawford, M. T.
(1998). Spontaneous trait transference: Communicators
take on the qualities they describe in others. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 837–848.
Uleman, J. S., Hon, A., Roman, R., & Moskowitz, G. (1996).
On-line evidence for spontaneous trait inferences at
encoding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
22, 377–394.
SPOTLIGHT EFFECT
Definition
The spotlight effect is a very common psychological
phenomenon that psychologists define as a person’s
tendency to overestimate the extent to which others
notice, judge, and remember his or her appearance and

ehavior. In other words, it represents a person’s conviction
that the social spotlight shines more brightly on
him or her than is actually the case. Would you be
reluctant to go to the movies alone because of a fear
that others might see you there and conclude that you
don’t have many friends? Do you spend long periods
in front of the mirror each day making sure that your
hair is groomed just right or that your clothes create
just the right impression? Does it feel like all eyes are
on you when you walk into a classroom a few minutes
late? If you answered yes to any of these questions,
you are prone to the spotlight effect.
Evidence
It’s easy to find evidence of the spotlight effect. In one
study, students arrived individually at a laboratory and
were asked to don a T-shirt with a large picture of the
pop singer Barry Manilow on the front. (This student
population generally regarded Manilow as corny and
uncool.) Students were then instructed to report to
another laboratory down the hall. When they did so,
they encountered another experimenter and several
students seated around a table filling out questionnaires.
After a brief time in this room, the student was told to
wait outside because everyone else was too far ahead
with the day’s tasks. After waiting outside for a few minutes,
the second experimenter emerged from the laboratory
and asked the student a simple question: “How
many of the students who were filling out questionnaires
in the laboratory would be able to state who was
pictured on your T-shirt?” Consistent with the idea that
people tend to overestimate the extent to which others
attend to them, the students wildly overestimated the
number of students who noticed that it was Barry
Manilow depicted on their T-shirts. The students
thought that roughly half of those in attendance noticed,
when in reality only about a quarter of them did so.
Other research has demonstrated that people overestimate
the extent to which their own contributions to
a group discussion are noticed and affect the other
group members, that people think their absence from a
group will stand out to others more than it actually
does, and that people are convinced that the ups and
downs of their performances—their good days and bad
days—will register with others more than it truly does.
Research has also shown that people tend to overestimate
the extremity of others’ judgments of them: They
think they will be judged more harshly for potentially
embarrassing mishaps and judged more favorably for
their momentary triumphs than is actually the case.
People of all ages are prone to the spotlight
effect, but it appears to be particularly pronounced
among adolescents and young adults. This can be
attributed to the fact that people are intensely social
creatures, and so a heightened concern with how
one stands in the eyes of others is an essential component
of successful group life. But having a heightened
concern with one’s social standing means, by
its very nature, that one is vulnerable to having an
excessive concern with one’s standing—and hence,
is likely to overestimate the extent to which one is
the target of others’ thoughts and attention.
Implications
Should knowing about the spotlight effect encourage
people to act differently than they would otherwise?
Perhaps. One must often decide whether to act or
not—to dive in the waves or stay on the beach, to go
to the dance or stay home, to audition for a theater
production or join a softball league—and sometimes
social considerations play a prominent role in these
calculations. What would others think? How would I
look if I tried (and possibly failed)? What the existence
of the spotlight effect suggests is that if these
sorts of social considerations are largely making one
lean against pursuing such actions, perhaps one
should be more venturesome and take the plunge.
After all, fewer people are likely to notice, and the
social consequences are likely to be less pronounced,
than one imagines.
Not that one should be cavalier about taking such
actions. These calculations are rarely simple and,
given that humans are fundamentally social creatures,
their excessive sensitivity to what others think
of them exists for a reason. What knowledge of the
spotlight effect can contribute to these internal
debates is a focus on the opinions that really matter—who
the audience is that individuals are most
concerned about—and a recognition that they are
less salient to most audiences than they tend to
think.
Thomas Gilovich
See also Self-Awareness; Social Anxiety; Social Comparison
Further Readings
Spotlight Effect———935
Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The
spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in
estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and

936———Spreading of Alternatives
appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
78, 211–222.
Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (1999). The spotlight effect and
the illusion of transparency: Egocentric assessments of
how we’re seen by others. Current Directions in
Psychological Science, 8, 165–168.
Savitsky, K., Epley, N., & Gilovich, T. (2001). Is it as bad as
we fear? Overestimating the extremity of others’
judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
81, 44–56.
SPREADING OF ALTERNATIVES
Inspired by cognitive dissonance theory, hundreds of
experiments have demonstrated that following a difficult
decision, compared with an easy one, individuals
change their attitudes to be more consistent with their
decisions. That is, following a decision, individuals
evaluate the chosen alternative more positively and
the rejected alternative more negatively than they did
before the decision. This effect has been referred to as
spreading of alternatives because the attitudes toward
the chosen and rejected alternatives spread apart.
Attributes of decision alternatives also become more
coherent or more related with each other following
decisions. Memories are also affected by choice, such
that individuals incorrectly remember more positive
features of chosen options and more negative features
of rejected options.
In experiments on spreading of alternatives, people
are induced to make an easy or difficult decision.
An easy decision is created by having people chose
between two things that are very different in value,
with one being liked much and the other not being
liked as much. A difficult decision is created by having
people chose between two things that are close in
value but with different attributes. According to the
theory of cognitive dissonance, after one makes a difficult
decision, one will evaluate the chosen alternative
as more positive and the rejected as more
negative. The decision does not need to be between
two initially positively valued items; negatively valued
items cause spreading of alternatives too.
After the person makes a decision, each of the negative
aspects of the chosen alternative and positive
aspects of the rejected alternative is dissonant (that is,
inconsistent) with the decision, whereas each of the
positive aspects of the chosen alternative and negative
aspects of the rejected alternative is consonant or (that
is, consistent) with the decision. Difficult decisions
arouse more dissonance than do easy decisions
because there are a greater proportion of dissonant
cognitions after a difficult decision than after an easy
one. Because of this, there will be greater motivation
to reduce the dissonance after a difficult decision.
Dissonance following a decision can be reduced by
removing negative aspects of the chosen alternative or
positive aspects of the rejected alternative, or adding
positive aspects to the chosen alternative or negative
aspects to the rejected alternative.
Research in both lab and field settings has provided
support for the prediction that difficult decisions cause
more spreading of alternatives than easy decisions do.
Most evidence has been in the form of self-reported
attitudes, though some research used behavioral and
physiological measures. Research has revealed that
individuals high in action orientation (who efficiently
implement actions) show greater spreading of alternatives
than do individuals low in action orientation.
Spreading of alternatives research has implications for
life satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, gambling,
smoking, and many other issues. For example,
when persons make a decision to commit to a relationship,
they would be expected to increase their positive
evaluations of the relationship partner and decrease
their negative evaluations. This would lead to greater
relationship satisfaction.
Eddie Harmon-Jones
Cindy Harmon-Jones
See also Attitude Change; Cognitive Dissonance Theory;
Decision Making
Further Readings
Beauvois, J. L., & Joule, R. V. (1996). A radical dissonance
theory. London: Taylor & Francis.
Harmon-Jones, E., & Mills, J. (1999). Cognitive dissonance:
Progress on a pivotal theory in social psychology.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Wicklund, R. A., & Brehm, J. W. (1976). Perspectives on
cognitive dissonance. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) is a highly
influential and controversial study run by Philip

Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University in
1971. The researchers originally set out to support the
notion that situational forces are just as powerful and
perhaps more powerful than dispositional forces in
influencing prison behavior. In addition to providing
support for their hypothesis, the study was heavily
covered in the mainstream media and had far-reaching
ethical implications. Regardless, and perhaps because
of its controversial nature, the SPE remains one of the
most well-known experiments in social psychology.
Purpose
The SPE was conceived as a reaction to the popular
belief that the violent and oppressive nature of U.S.
prisons and subsequent reports of humanitarian violations
were due to the unique personality characteristics
of the prisoners and guards. Because of
self-selection, prison guards were believed to possess
characteristics such as sadism and a lack of sensitivity.
Prisoners, of course, are usually incarcerated because
at some point in time they exhibited illegal behavior.
Zimbardo and colleagues argued that this view discounts
the powerful influence of the social situation in
which guards are pitted against prisoners under a variety
of social and political influences.
Methodology
To test their hypothesis, Zimbardo and colleagues
created a realistic mock prison in the basement of
Stanford University. The participants included 21 male
college students, specifically chosen for their normal
responses on a battery of background questionnaires.
The participants were randomly assigned to be either a
guard or a prisoner, with an undergraduate research
assistant acting as warden and Zimbardo himself
taking on the role of superintendent. The prisoners
stayed in the prison 24 hours per day, while the guards
worked 8-hour shifts. Aside from a restriction on physical
violence, guards were given great latitude in how
they could deal with prisoners, including the rules they
could establish and punishments they could dole out.
The experimenters went to great lengths to establish
realism. Prisoners were unexpectedly “arrested”
at their houses by the local police department, were
taken to the police station to be charged their “crime”
and brought to the prison at Stanford. Prisoners were
assigned a number and wore only a smock, which was
designed to deindividuate the prisoners. Guards were
Stanford Prison Experiment———937
fitted with a uniform, nightstick, and reflective sunglasses
to establish power. The prison cells consisted
of a 6- by 9-foot space furnished with only a cot. To
further increase realism, a catholic priest and attorney
were brought in and a parole board was established.
Once the participants had arrived at the prison, the
situation escalated at a surprising rate. On the second
day, a prisoner rebellion was quickly quelled by the
guards, who punished the prisoners through means
conceived without guidance from the experimenters.
For example, prisoners were stripped naked, forced
to do menial tasks, and in many cases were deprived
of their cots, meals, and bathroom privileges. After
the attempted revolt and subsequent punishment,
five prisoners began to experience extreme emotional
reactions and were eventually released. As the obedience
tactics became more brutal and humiliating and
prisoners displayed increasingly negative affectivity,
Zimbardo eventually decided to end the study on the
sixth day of what had been planned as a 2-week study.
Findings
Zimbardo and colleagues construed the increasingly
hostile behavior of the guards and increasingly passive
behavior of the prisoners, each of which had
started out as groups of normal young men, as evidence
that the extreme nature of the prison situation
breeds such volatile and desperate behavior. Indeed,
the SPE is often cited as evidence for the strong role
of the situation over individuals in ways in which they
often do not predict. The researchers also compared
their work to Stanley Milgram’s research on obedience
in that both provide support for the notion that
given an extreme situation, good people can be
coerced into doing evil things. Despite these exciting
findings, the SPE has been criticized from both a
methodological and ethical standpoint.
Methodological Criticisms
Methodologically, critics have argued that participants
of the SPE never fully accepted the situation as real and
were merely playing the stereotypic roles of prisoners
and guards. In essence, it was argued that the results
were driven by demand characteristics of the experimental
situation. It did not help the original authors’
argument that Zimbardo himself played a prominent
role in the experiment, sometimes guiding the way
in which the study played out. Regardless, evidence

938———Stealing Thunder
suggests that participants did internalize the situation,
as well as their roles in the situation. For instance, only
one-tenth of the conversations between prisoners
contained speech about life outside of the experiment.
Ethical Criticisms
The SPE was likely more controversial from an ethical
point of view. The ethical implications of the
study, as well as Zimbardo’s dual role as investigator
and superintendent of the Stanford prison were highly
criticized at the time. Zimbardo himself admitted that
his own acceptance of the prison situation and his
desire to run a good prison clouded his judgment, suggesting
that even he had internalized his role in the situation.
Although the experiment did conform to the
guidelines set forth by the ethics review board at the
time, few would argue that the sadistic and humiliating
acts performed during the study were ethical by
today’s standards. Even Zimbardo admits that it was
unethical for the study to continue after the first
prisoner showed an extreme negative reaction.
Replications
Stephen Reicher and S. Alexander Haslam attempted to
replicate the SPE, skirting ethical guidelines through
allowing the experiment to take place in the context of
a British reality television show. The results of the SPE
were not replicated; in Reicher and Haslam’s version,
the guards never organized themselves and were eventually
overthrown.
Jason Chin
See also Aggression; Fundamental Attribution Error;
Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Studies; Robbers Cave
Experiment
Further Readings
Adam, D. (2002). Reality TV show recreates famed social
study. Nature, 417, 213.
Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal
dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of
Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.
Zimbardo, P. G., Maslach, C., & Haney, C. (1999).
Reflections on the Stanford Prison Experiment: Genesis,
transformations, consequences. In T. Blass (Ed.),
Obedience to authority: Current perspectives on the
Milgram paradigm (pp. 193–237). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
STEALING THUNDER
Definition
Stealing thunder is a social influence tactic in which
in anticipation of negative information being revealed
about a person, that person chooses to reveal it first.
By doing so, the negative impact is reduced or, in
some cases, eliminated. An individual’s representative
can also steal thunder with similar consequences, as in
the case of an attorney who steals thunder by revealing
the worst bit of evidence before the opposing
counsel brings it out.
Courtrooms provide the best example of the use of
stealing thunder. Defense attorneys may reveal incriminating
evidence about their clients, for instance that they
had a prior conviction, before prosecuting attorneys can
reveal it. The defense attorney might use the stealing
thunder technique to minimize the damage caused by
incriminating evidence against his or her client.
Evidence
Based on naive theories and research, beginning an
interaction by revealing damaging information about
one’s self would seem to backfire by creating a negative
first impression that would negatively bias future
information and impressions. In many circumstances,
the fact that the negative information is revealed again
(as in the case of a courtroom trial) by someone else
would also increase the salience of the information.
Nevertheless, research has demonstrated that stealing
thunder can be quite effective. In mock trial studies,
researchers have found that both the defense (in a
criminal trial) and plaintiffs (in a civil trial) can benefit
by stealing thunder. Legal experts suggest that the
reason that stealing thunder is potentially effective is
that the attorney who reveals it first can put a positive
spin on the negative information.
In addition to showing the effectiveness of stealing
thunder in courtroom settings, research has also
found positive benefits in a political domain. Voters
(or mock voters) are more likely to indicate a willingness
to vote for a candidate who reveals a transgression
himself or herself, than they are if an adversary

(or the media) reveals the same information. News
editors also indicate less interest in pursuing the story
when candidates reveal the information.
Reasons for Effectiveness
Recent research suggests several reasons stealing
thunder might work. One is that the revealer appears
to be credible, and thus, likeable. Another is that
because the negative self-revelation is so unexpected,
message recipients force the meaning of the information
to be less damaging. Another reason is that stealing
thunder allows the revealer to cast the information
in a favorable light, but the available research suggests
that putting a positive spin on the information is not
necessary for the effect to emerge. Still another reason
that stealing thunder may work is that by making the
information more public and common, less attention
and value are placed on it. When people perceive
information to be scarce or secret, they think it is more
valuable. Stealing thunder diminishes the perception
that the information is scarce.
Limitations
The question still remains, when will stealing thunder
work and not work? Do factors such as the timing of
stealing thunder, the seriousness of the thunder information,
and the use of compelling spin moderate the
effects? In a courtroom context, the existing research
suggests that the timing of stealing thunder does not
seem to affect how well thunder stealing works.
Damaging information presented by the defendant’s
lawyer earlier or later in the case did not reduce the
benefits of stealing thunder. Nor did it matter if the
opposing counsel chose not to reveal the negative
information after all. However, acknowledging incriminating
evidence after it has been disclosed does not
reduce the impact of negative information.
Regardless of how serious the damaging information
is (bouncing a series of check compared with
smuggling drugs), stealing thunder appears to reduce
the information’s negative impact. Stealing thunder
continues to work even if the information is very damaging.
In a mock court case involving homicide resulting
from reckless driving, stealing thunder remained
effective at reducing negative information even when
the defendant admitted veering into the oncoming
traffic lane. One boundary condition discovered so far
is that if the message recipients (in this case, mock
jurors) are told during closing arguments that the
other attorney manipulated their opinions by using
the stealing thunder tactic, then they are no longer
positively influenced by stealing thunder.
Whether stealing thunder works best under heuristic
(i.e., low effort) or systematic (i.e., high effort)
processing remains to be determined. Whereas source
credibility is often used as a short-cut to message
processing, changing the meaning of the message to
be consistent with the message source would require
considerable cognitive effort and elaboration.
Implications
Stealing thunder has been demonstrated to be an
effective way to minimize (or eliminate) the impact
of incriminating information in a variety of different
contexts. Most legal experts already are aware of its
benefits (even if they are not aware of the reasons
why it works) and use it regularly in court. Ironically,
politicians (many of whom are lawyers) are generally
not willing to take the chance of stealing thunder and
are more likely to deny wrongdoings to the bitter end.
Kipling D. Williams
James Wirth
See also Embarrassment; MUM Effect; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Stereotypes and Stereotyping———939
Williams, K. D., & Dolnik, L. (2001). Revealing the worst
first: Stealing thunder as a social influence strategy. In
J. P. Forgas, & K. D. Williams (Eds.), Social influence:
Direct and indirect processes (pp. 213–231). Philadelphia:
Psychology Press.
STEREOTYPES AND STEREOTYPING
Definition
A stereotype is a generalized belief about the characteristics
that are associated with the members of a social
group. In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann first
popularized the term stereotype, which he described as
the image people have in their heads of what a social
group is like. Early researchers examined the content
of social stereotypes by asking people to indicate
which psychological traits they associate with various

940———Stereotypes and Stereotyping
ethnic and national groups (e.g., Germans, Blacks,
Jews). This research indicated that there was a good
deal of consensus in the public’s image of these social
groups, with generally strong agreement about which
characteristics are typical of each group. There was
also a tendency for these “pictures in our heads” to
contain more negative than positive characteristics.
Origins
Having cataloged the content of stereotypes, subsequent
generations of researchers sought to explain how and
why stereotypes develop. One approach examined how
socialization processes perpetuate stereotypes, emphasizing
the ways whereby parents, peers, and the media
communicate and reinforce stereotypic images of social
groups. The consensus of stereotypes can be explained,
from this perspective, by the transmission of broader
cultural biases to new generations of children as they
develop within a society. However, this approach does
not explain where the stereotypes came from in the
first place. To answer that question, some researchers
turned to motivational approaches. From this perspective,
stereotypes arise to satisfy important psychological
needs. For example, a person’s stereotypes about other
groups may make the person feel superior. In support
of that possibility, researchers have shown that after
experiencing a threat to one’s self-esteem, stereotypic
thoughts about a minority group are more likely to
come to mind. Stereotypes also function to support and
rationalize intergroup conflict over valuable resources,
making one social group feel justified in hostile actions
taken toward other groups. In addition, as noted in system
justification theory, stereotypes work to justify the
status quo, making a person feel comfortable with the
disparities that are present in society. That is, stereotypes
provide people with a way of convincing themselves
that there are good (and fair) explanations for social
inequality. For example, a person might reason that if
some social groups have achieved less economic success,
it must be because of their inherently deficient
characteristics (e.g., laziness, lack of ability). In this
way, social inequality can be blamed on the disadvantaged
groups themselves (rather than on unfair discrimination
or the legacy of historical disadvantages).
Interestingly, the need to justify the social system
appears to be so strong that even disadvantaged minorities
themselves sometimes accept these negative stereotypes
of their own groups. These kinds of motivational
explanations can readily account for the predominantly
negative quality of many social stereotypes.
Recent research shows that stereotypes tend to
cluster around two broad themes. One theme concerns
competence: Are members of the group smart and
successful? The second theme concerns warmth: Are
members of the group likeable, friendly, and unthreatening?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, members of the dominant
(majority) social group tend to regard their own
group as both competent and warm. Many other groups
are regarded with a mixture of ambivalent stereotypes.
Some groups, such as women and the elderly, are commonly
seen as being quite warm but lacking competence,
whereas other groups, such as Asians and Jews,
tend to be seen by the majority group as being quite
competent but lacking in warmth. Only relatively few
groups (e.g., the homeless, drug addicts) are seen as
lacking on both dimensions. In general, however, this
research confirms that the stereotypes of many social
groups are marked by at least one negative theme.
Much research in recent decades has examined the
cognitive processes underlying stereotyping. From this
perspective, stereotypes serve a knowledge function,
organizing and structuring one’s understanding of the
social environment. The social cognition perspective
emphasizes that stereotypes arise from the normal,
everyday operation of basic mental processes such as
attention, memory, and inference. In everyday life, a
person is potentially exposed to information about the
members of various social groups in diverse ways. One
may see them on TV, hear friends talk about them, or
actually encounter them in person. The social cognition
perspective asserts that the stereotypes a person
forms will be determined by which aspects of this
parade of information he or she pays attention to and
remembers. Essentially, there is a basic process of
learning involved in the formation of stereotypes, but
this process may not necessarily be objective and unbiased.
Indeed, an important question that has not yet
been fully addressed is the extent to which everyday
learning processes result in stereotypes that are reasonably
accurate.
Certainly, it seems intuitively unlikely that one
would form wildly inaccurate stereotypes, and even if
one did, it is still unclear how he or she could maintain
them in the face of continual disconfirmation.
Yet social cognition research suggests that it is indeed
possible for people to be systematically biased in what
they “know” about social groups. People often possess
an extensive mental database containing evidence
supporting the apparent accuracy of their stereotypes,
but this seemingly compelling evidence may be substantially
illusory. First, for people to form accurate

images of a social group, they would need to be
exposed to representative samples of group members;
however, representative samples may be hard to come
by (especially for groups that are personally encountered
less frequently) if the media, gossip, and other
forms of public discourse focus selectively on the
more negative aspects of a social group’s behavior.
Even if a representative sample of behavior is available,
people would still have to be equally sensitive
to all types of presented information for their mental
image of a group to be objectively accurate. Research
suggests that again, there is a tendency to pay greater
attention to negative information, especially when it
is associated with a distinctive social group (such as
a minority group). And when people start out with a
clear expectation about what a group is like, they may
be biased in what they perceive and remember in subsequently
encountered information about the group.
Although it is an open question just how accurate most
social stereotypes are, available research shows that
exaggerated and inaccurate stereotypes can form and
be maintained under at least some circumstances.
Consequences
When a person encounters a member of a stereotyped
group, the stereotypes associated with that group
may be automatically activated; that is, the specific
characteristics that are seen as typical of the group may
become more accessible in the person’s mind. This
process of stereotype activation can happen even in
cases in which a person does not personally endorse or
accept the stereotype as accurate. As long as there is
an association between the group and the stereotypic
characteristic stored in memory (e.g., from frequent
exposure to common cultural images of a group), the
stereotype can become activated upon encountering a
member of the stereotyped social group. If this happens,
the stereotype can exert a host of effects on the
way this person is perceived and treated. Most of these
effects occur rapidly, involuntarily, and often without
any awareness that they are taking place.
Social psychologists have developed several ways
of detecting that stereotypes become activated in
people’s minds rapidly and automatically. For example,
research indicates that many people are influenced
by gender stereotypes in this manner. Participants are
exposed to a series of photographs of men and
women, and after each photograph, they have to
respond to a target word as quickly as possible. After
seeing a picture of a man, people tend to be reliably
Stereotypes and Stereotyping———941
faster to respond to stereotypically masculine concepts
(e.g., “strong”) but reliably slower to respond to
stereotypically feminine concepts (e.g., “soft”). The
converse pattern happens after exposure to a picture
of a woman. Thus, merely encountering a picture of a
person is all it takes for gender-related stereotypic
concepts to become more accessible in the minds
of perceivers. The automatic activation of stereotypes
is common but by no means universal. Substantial
individual differences exist, and the immediate context
is important too. For example, in a situational
context in which ethnicity is more salient than sex, the
same set of target photos might evoke automatic racial
stereotypes but not gender stereotypes. In most cases,
however, a person does form some kind of rapid
impression of another person, and often this impression
is based partly on the application of activated
stereotypes regarding some (but probably not all) of
the target person’s social groups.
Once activated, stereotypes can exert a host of
important effects on the way a person sees the world.
For example, once a stereotype is activated, it can bias
the way the person interprets ambiguous behavior.
If one holds the stereotype that Arabs are dangerous,
then even fairly mundane behavior by an Arab (or
someone who looks vaguely like an Arab) can take
on seemingly sinister overtones in one’s mind. In this
kind of situation, ambiguous behavior is assimilated
to the stereotypic ideas that are activated in the perceiver’s
mind. Stereotypes can also bias the way a
person explains social events. For example, leadership
skill is stereotypically associated more with men than
with women. A successful male executive is often
credited with business savvy and leadership skill,
whereas a successful female executive’s performance
might be explained by favorable economic conditions
or even blind luck. Because the causes of most events
are often at least somewhat ambiguous, stereotypes
can influence which elements of the situation stand
out as causally important. Stereotypic outcomes readily
suggest stereotypic personal causes (e.g., a male’s
leadership skill), whereas counterstereotypic outcomes
call for situational or temporary causes (e.g.,
favorable market conditions). Notice that these biasing
effects of stereotypes tend to reinforce the stereotype’s
apparent accuracy by adding to one’s mental
database of confirmatory instances (simultaneously
overlooking or discounting disconfirming instances).
Stereotypes may also be self-perpetuating in the
sense that people who hold strong stereotypes may act
in ways that bring about the confirmation of their

942———Stereotypes and Stereotyping
beliefs. For example, if a person believes that African
Americans are hostile, then he or she may interact with
African Americans in a relatively unfriendly way; such
treatment often tends to elicit a response that is also
unfriendly, thereby seeming to confirm the expected
hostility. This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy adds to
the appearance of stereotype accuracy.
People form stereotypes about all kinds of social
groups, but much of the focus of social psychological
research has been on stereotypes about groups defined
by basic demographic features (such as ethnicity, sex,
or age). Because of the historical injustices associated
with racism, sexism, and ageism, researchers have
sought to understand the connections between stereotypes
and discrimination in these particular domains. In
most cases, it does not seem that people engage in generalized
discrimination toward minority groups; that is,
they do not tend to respond negatively or unfairly to
group members generally, irrespective of context or circumstances.
Instead, the forms of discrimination often
align with the content of stereotypes. Sexist discrimination
provides a clear example. Women face employment
discrimination primarily in situations in which
they seek to take on traditionally masculine roles (e.g.,
business executive), but not in cases in which they
seek traditionally feminine roles (e.g., school teacher).
Stereotypes create the expectation that women, despite
their many positive qualities, “don’t have what it takes”
to be forceful, effective business leaders. Research
on racial stereotypes similarly shows that race-based
discrimination against ethnic minorities is much more
likely in stereotypic cases. In some studies, for example,
African Americans and Latinos have been judged
more likely to be guilty of blue-collar crimes (such as
theft or assault) than a White defendant, but the pattern
reverses for white-collar crimes (such as embezzlement
or computer hacking). Thus, people do not discriminate
against any particular group across the board; rather,
the content of social stereotypes directs the focus
and form of discrimination faced by the members of
stereotyped groups.
Social psychologists are not the only ones to notice
these connections between stereotyping and discrimination.
During the 20th century, the general public
also came to associate stereotyping of these groups
with social injustice, leading to the common view that
stereotyping is inappropriate and unacceptable. As a
result, people often disavow stereotypic ideas, yet as
previously noted, this personal rejection of stereotypes
provides no guarantee that their activation and
influence will be avoided. One strategy for avoiding
unwanted stereotypic reactions is to try to suppress
stereotypes, or prevent them from coming into one’s
mind. Numerous studies have examined the effects of
trying not to have stereotypic thoughts come to mind.
This research emphasizes that, although the process of
activating and using stereotypes is often quite efficient
and largely automatic, the process of trying to squelch
these stereotypes is typically much more effortful.
It takes mental energy and focused effort to do it successfully.
If perceivers have consistent motivation and
ample free attention, they can succeed in suppressing
stereotypic responses, but if their motivation lapses, or
they become distracted, trying to suppress stereotypes
can actually result in a rebound effect, in which the
stereotypes become even more accessible than they
would have been if suppression had never been
attempted. Fortunately, there is growing evidence that
it is possible for perceivers to unlearn unwanted cultural
stereotypes and to become quite efficient in
inhibiting these stereotypes. Research examining the
most rapid responses that happen in the first seconds
of encountering a member of a stereotyped group
confirm that individuals can succeed in overcoming
stereotypic biases and that this process of inhibiting
stereotypic responses does not have to remain effortful
and taxing (although it may start out that way).
Implications
Stereotypes play an important role in how people
perceive and form impressions of others. Once an
individual is categorized as a member of a particular
group, he or she can come to be judged in terms of
group-based expectations. In the absence of clear
disconfirmation, the person can easily be seen as a
“typical” member of that group, interchangeable with
other group members. In contrast to such categorybased
impressions, perceivers can instead judge individuals
on the basis of personal attributes, some of
which may be typical of their group, but many of
which are not. This process of individuation, though
escaping the risks of inaccurate or exaggerated stereotyping,
requires a much larger investment of time
and energy. To come to know an individual’s personal
attributes, rather than simply assuming that he or
she possesses group-typical attributes, requires fairly
extensive contact and unbiased appraisals of the individual
who is encountered. Given these demands,
stereotyping may often be the default process guiding

social perception when the need or desire for accurate
impressions is not especially pressing.
Galen V. Bodenhausen
Andrew R. Todd
Andrew P. Becker
See also Automatic Processes; Expectancy Effects; Mental
Control; Outgroup Homogeneity; Prejudice; Racism; Self-
Stereotyping; Sexism; Social Categorization; Subtyping;
System Justification
Further Readings
Jost, J. T., & Hamilton, D. L. (2005). Stereotypes in our
culture. In J. F. Dovidio, P. Glick, & L. A. Rudman (Eds.),
On the nature of prejudice: Fifty years after Allport
(pp. 208–224). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Lippmann, W. (1961). Public opinion. New York: Macmillan.
Operario, D., & Fiske, S. T. (2004). Stereotypes: Content,
structures, processes, and context. In M. B. Brewer &
M. Hewstone (Eds.), Social cognition (pp. 120–141).
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Quinn, K. A., Macrae, C. N., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2003).
Stereotyping and impression formation: How categorical
thinking shapes person perception. In M. A. Hogg &
J. Cooper (Eds.), The Sage handbook of social psychology
(pp. 87–109). London: Sage.
Schneider, D. J. (2003). The psychology of stereotyping.
New York: Guilford Press.
STEREOTYPE THREAT
Definition
Stereotype threat arises from the recognition that
one could be judged or treated in terms of a negative
stereotype about one’s group. This sense of threat usually
happens when one is doing something to which
such a stereotype applies. Then one knows that one is
subject to be judged or treated in terms of that stereotypes—as
when, for example, an older person is trying
to remember where he or she placed the house
keys. The negative stereotype alleging poorer memory
among older people applies. As the person searches,
he or she is aware of confirming this stereotype or
being seen as confirming it. If the person is invested in
having a good memory, the prospect of being judged
or treated this way could be upsetting, distracting. It
Stereotype Threat———943
could even have the ironic effect of interfering with
the person’s ability to find the lost keys. Most research
on stereotype threat has examined how this threat
affects the intellectual performance of groups whose
intellectual abilities are negatively stereotyped in
the larger society—for example, women performing
advanced math, as well as minority groups performing
difficult cognitive tasks in general.
Most often stereotypes are seen to affect their
targets through the discriminatory behavior and judgment
of people who hold the stereotype. An implication
of stereotype threat, however, is that stereotypes
can affect their targets even before they are translated
into behavior or judgments. The mere threat of such
judgment and treatment—like the threat of a snake
loose in the house—can have effects of its own.
Stereotype threat has several features and parameters.
General Features
Stereotype threat is situational in nature. It arises from
situational cues signaling the relevance of a stereotype
to one’s behavior. Experiencing it doesn’t depend on a
particular state or trait of the target such as believing
in the stereotype, or holding low expectations that
might result from chronic exposure to the stereotype.
Such internal states or traits are neither necessary nor
sufficient to the experience of stereotype threat.
Stereotype threat is a general threat that is experienced
in some setting or another by virtually everyone.
All people have some social identity for which
negative stereotypes exist—the elderly, the young,
Methodists, Blacks, Whites, athletes, artists, and so
forth. And when they are doing things for which those
stereotypes apply, they can experience this threat.
The nature of the threat depends on the content of
the negative stereotype. The specific meaning of the
stereotype determines the situations, the people, and
the activities to which it applies, and thus becomes
capable of causing a sense of stereotype threat. For
example, the type of stereotype threat experienced by
men, women, and teenagers would vary considerably,
focusing on sensitivity in the first group, math skills in
the second, and maturity and self-control in the third.
And for each group, the threat would be felt in situations
to which their group stereotype applies, but not
in other situations. For example, a woman could feel
stereotype threat in a math class where a negative
group stereotype applies but not in an English class
where it doesn’t apply.

944———Stigma
The Strength of a
Stereotype Threat
The strength of a stereotype threat also depends, in
part, on the meaning of the stereotype involved. Some
stereotypes have more negative meaning than others
do. A stereotype that demeans a group’s integrity
should pose a stronger threat than a stereotype that
demeans a group’s sense of humor, for example.
How much a person identifies with the domain
of activity to which a stereotype applies should also
affect the strength of the stereotype threat he or she
experiences. The more one cares about a domain, the
more upset one is likely to be over the prospect of
being stereotyped in it.
The more one cares about the group identity that is
being stereotyped, the more upset one should be by
the prospect of being group stereotyped
Generally, the more capable one feels about coping
with the threat, the less intense the experience of
stereotype threat should be.
See also Identity Status; Self-Stereotyping; Stigma
Further Readings
Claude Steele
Joshua Aronson
Steve Spencer
Spencer, S. J., Steele, C. M., & Quinn, D. M. (1999).
Stereotype threat and women’s math performance.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 4–28.
Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes
shape the intellectual identities and performance of
women and African-Americans. American Psychologist,
52, 613–629.
Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the
intellectual test performance of African-Americans.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69,
797–811.
STERNBERG’S TRIANGULAR
THEORY OF LOVE
See TRIANGULAR THEORY OF LOVE
STIGMA
Definition
Stigma is an attribute or characteristic that marks a person
as different from others and that extensively discredits
his or her identity. Ancient Greeks coined the term
stigma to describe a mark cut or burned into the body
that designated the bearer as someone who was morally
defective, such as a slave, criminal, or traitor.
Sociologist Erving Goffman resurrected the term, defining
stigma as an attribute that spoils a person’s identity,
reducing him or her in others’ minds “from a whole and
usual person to a tainted, discounted one.” Stigmatizing
marks are associated with negative evaluations and
devaluing stereotypes. These negative evaluations and
stereotypes are generally well known among members
of a culture and become a basis for excluding, avoiding,
and discriminating against those who possess (or are
believed to possess) the stigmatizing mark. People who
are closely associated with bearers of stigma may also
experience some of the negative effects of stigma, a phenomenon
known as stigma by association.
Stigma does not reside in a person but in a social
context. For example, within the United States, gays
and lesbians are stigmatized across a range of situations,
but not in a gay bar. African Americans are stigmatized
in school but not on the basketball court. This
contextual aspect of stigma means that even attributes
that are not typically thought of as being stigmatizing
may nonetheless lead to social devaluation in some
social contexts (e.g., being heterosexual at a gay
pride rally). Some marks, however, are so pervasively
devalued in society that they cause bearers of those
marks to experience stigmatization across a wide
range of situations and relationships. The consequences
of stigmatization are far more severe for these
individuals than for those who experience stigmatization
only in very limited contexts.
Types and Dimensions
Goffman categorized stigmatizing marks into three
major types: tribal stigma, abominations of the body,
and blemishes of character. Tribal stigmas are passed
from generation to generation and include membership
in devalued racial, ethnic, or religious groups.
Abominations of the body are uninherited physical

characteristics that are devalued, such as obesity or
physical deformity. Blemishes of character are individual
personality or behavioral characteristics that
are devalued, such as being a child abuser or rapist.
Stigmas also differ on important dimensions, such
as the extent to which they are concealable, controllable,
and believed to be dangerous. These differences
have important implications for how the stigmatized
are treated by others, and how stigma is experienced
by those who have a stigmatizing condition.
Some marks (e.g., obesity) are visible or cannot
be easily concealed from others, whereas others (e.g.,
being a convicted felon) are not visible or can more
easily be concealed. Individuals whose stigma is visible
must contend with different issues than do those
whose stigma is invisible. The visibly stigmatized
are more likely to encounter avoidance and rejection
from others than those whose stigmas are concealed.
Consequently, the former may be more likely to interpret
others’ behavior in terms of their stigma and be
more concerned with managing others’ treatment of
them. People whose stigmas are concealable, in contrast,
have a different set of concerns. Although they
may be able to “pass” or hide their stigma from others,
they may be preoccupied with figuring out the
attitudes of others toward their (hidden) stigma and
with managing how and when to disclose their stigma
to others. They must live with the fear of others finding
out about their stigma, and of being discredited.
They may also have a harder time finding others like
themselves to interact with, which may lead to social
isolation and lowered self-esteem.
The perceived controllability of a stigma is also
important. Stigmas are perceived as controllable when
the bearer is thought to be responsible for acquiring
the stigmatizing mark or when it is thought that the
condition could be eliminated by the behavior of the
bearer. Obesity, drug addiction, and child abuse are
examples of marks generally perceived to be controllable;
whereas skin color and physical disability are
examples of marks generally thought to be uncontrollable.
People with stigmas that are believed to be controllable
are more disliked, rejected, and less likely to
receive help than are people whose stigmas are perceived
as uncontrollable. Perceived controllability can
also affect the bearer’s behavior. Those who view their
stigma as controllable, for example, may focus more
on escaping or eliminating it than might those who
perceive their stigma as uncontrollable.
Functions
Most scholars regard stigma as socially constructed,
meaning that the particular attributes or characteristics
that are stigmatized are determined by society. This
view is supported by evidence of variability across
cultures in the attributes that are stigmatized. For
example, obesity is severely stigmatized in the United
States, far less so in Mexico, and is prized in some
cultures. Even within the same culture, the degree to
which a particular attribute is stigmatizing can change
over time. For example, in the United States, being
divorced was much more stigmatizing in earlier than
it is today. Some commonalities exist across cultures,
however, in what attributes are stigmatized.
Social stigma occurs in every society. This universality
suggests that stigmatization may serve some
functional value for individuals, groups, or societies.
At the individual level, putting someone else down
may make one feel better about oneself as an individual.
At the group level, devaluing other groups may
help people feel better about their own groups by comparison.
At the societal level, negatively stereotyping
and devaluing people who are low in social status may
make their lower status seem fair and deserved,
thereby legitimizing social inequalities in society.
Stigmatization may also serve a fourth function.
Evolutionary psychologists propose that it may have
evolved among humans to avoid the dangers that
accompany living with other people. Specifically, they
posit that humans have developed cognitive adaptations
that cause them to exclude (stigmatize) people
who possess (or who are believed to possess) attributes
that (a) signal they might carry parasites or other infectious
diseases (such as a having a physical deformity
or AIDS), (b) signal that they are a poor partner for
social exchange (such as a having a criminal record),
or (c) signal they are a member of an outgroup that can
be exploited for one’s own group’s gain.
Consequences
Stigma———945
Stigmatization has profound and wide-ranging negative
effects on those who bear (or who are thought
to bear) stigmatizing marks. Stigmatization has been
linked to lower social status, poverty, impaired cognitive
and social functioning, poorer physical health,
and poorer mental health. These negative effects can
occur through several pathways.

946———Stigma
Direct Effects
Stigma has direct negative effects on bearers by
increasing their likelihood of experiencing social
rejection, exclusion, prejudice, and discrimination.
Research has established that the stigmatized are vulnerable
to a variety of types of social rejection, such as
slurs, slights, derision, avoidance, and violence. People
who are stigmatized also receive poorer treatment in
the workplace, educational settings, healthcare system,
housing market, and criminal justice system. Stigma
even has negative effects on family relationships. For
example, parents are less likely to pay for the college
education of their daughters who are heavy than of
daughters who are thin. Discrimination can be interpersonal
(e.g., when a woman is rejected by a man
because of her weight) or institutional (e.g., when a
woman is denied a job as a flight attendant because of
institutionalized height and weight requirements).
Stigma also can have direct, negative effects on
the stigmatized through the operation of expectancy
confirmation processes. When people hold negative
beliefs about a person because of the person’s stigma
(e.g., believe that someone who has been hospitalized
for mental illness is dangerous), their beliefs (incorrect
or correct) can lead them to behave in certain ways
toward the stigmatized that are consistent with their
beliefs (e.g., avoid the stigmatized, watch them suspiciously,
refuse to hire them). These behaviors can
cause the stigmatized to respond in ways that confirm
the initial evaluation or stereotype (e.g., they get angry,
hostile). This can happen without the stigmatized person
even being aware that the other person (perceiver)
holds negative stereotypes, and even when the perceiver
is not conscious of holding negative stereotypes.
People who are stigmatized are not always treated
negatively by those who are not stigmatized. People
often feel ambivalence toward the stigmatized; they
may feel sympathy for the plight of the stigmatized
while feeling that the stigmatized are dependent, lazy,
or weak. People may also experience aversion and
negative affect toward the stigmatized yet also desire
to respond positively toward them to avoid appearing
prejudiced, either to others or to themselves. As a
result of these conflicting motives and feelings, bearers
of stigma sometimes are treated extremely positively,
and at other times extremely negatively. People behave
more positively toward the stigmatized in public settings
than in private settings, and report being less
prejudiced on explicit measures of liking (such as attitude
questionnaires) than implicit measures of liking
(such as reaction time, or other measures of attitudes
that are not under conscious control). These conflicting
responses can make it difficult for the stigmatized
to gauge how others really feel about them.
Indirect Effects
Stigma also has indirect effects on the stigmatized
by influencing how they perceive and interpret their
social worlds. Virtually all members of a culture,
including bearers of stigma, are aware of cultural
stereotypes associated with stigma, even if they do not
personally endorse them. People who are stigmatized
are aware that they are devalued in the eyes of others,
know the dominant cultural stereotypes associated
with their stigma, and recognize that they could be victims
of discrimination. These beliefs are collective representations,
in that they are typically shared by others
who bear the same stigma. These collective representations
influence how bearers of stigma approach and
interpret situations in which they are at risk of being
devalued, negatively stereotyped, or targets of discrimination.
For some, their stigma may become a lens
through which they interpret their social world. They
may become vigilant for signs of devaluation and
anticipate rejection in their social interactions.
Collective representations can have negative effects
on the stigmatized by increasing their concerns that
they will be negatively evaluated because of their
stigma, a psychological state termed identity threat.
Identity threat is not chronic, but situational; it occurs
only in situations in which people are at risk of devaluation
because of their stigma. When experienced,
identity threat can interfere with working memory,
performance, and social relationships and can increase
anxiety and physiological stress responses. One form
of identity threat is stereotype threat, concern that
one’s behavior will be interpreted in light of or confirm
negative stereotypes associated with one’s stigma.
Stereotype threat occurs in situations in which negative
group stereotypes are relevant and may be applied to
the self and can impair performance in those domains.
Collective representations can also lead bearers to
experience attributional ambiguity in situations in
which their stigma is relevant. Attributional ambiguity
stems from bearers’ awareness that they may be targets
of prejudice and discrimination. As a consequence of
this awareness, bearers of stigma (particularly those
whose stigma is visible) who are treated negatively may
be unsure whether it was caused by something about
themselves (such as their performance or lack of qualifications)
or was caused by prejudice and discrimination

ased on their stigma. Positive outcomes can also be
attributionally ambiguous. As noted earlier, bearers of
stigma are often exposed to inconsistent treatment and
are aware of discrepancies between how the nonstigmatized
feel and how they behave toward the stigmatized.
As a consequence, bearers of stigma may mistrust the
validity, sincerity, and diagnosticity of positive as well
as negative feedback. This, in turn, can negatively affect
their social relationships as well as interfere with their
abilities to make accurate self-assessments.
Collective representations associated with stigma
influence how bearers of stigma perceive, interpret,
and interact with their social world. Through this
process, stigma can have negative effects on bearers in
the absence of any obvious forms of discriminatory
behavior on the part of others, even if a stigmatizing
mark is unknown to others, and even when no other
person is present in the immediate situation.
Coping Strategies
Some psychological theories describe bearers of stigma
as passive victims who cannot help but devalue themselves
because they are devalued by society. In fact,
research shows that not all bearers of stigma are
depressed, have low self-esteem, or perform poorly.
Indeed, members of some stigmatized groups have
higher self-esteem on average than do members of nonstigmatized
groups. How bearers of stigma respond to
their predicament varies tremendously. An important
determinant of their response is how they cope with the
threats to their identity that their stigma poses.
Bearers cope with stigmatization in a variety of
ways. Some coping efforts are problem focused. For
example, the stigmatized may attempt to eliminate the
mark that is the source of stigmatization, such as when
an obese person goes on a diet or a stutterer enrolls in
speech therapy. This strategy, of course, is not available
to bearers whose stigma cannot be eliminated. Bearers
may also cope by trying to avoid stigmatization, such as
when a person with a concealable stigma “passes” as a
member of more valued group, or an overweight person
avoids going to the gym or the beach. This coping strategy
may severely constrain the everyday lives of the
stigmatized. The stigmatized may also cope by attempting
to overcome stigma by compensating, or striving
even harder in domains where they are negatively
stereotyped or devalued. For example, one study
showed that overweight women who believed that an
interaction partner could see them (and hence believed
their weight might negatively affect the interaction)
compensated by behaving even more sociably compared
with overweight women who thought their
interaction partner could not see them. Although this
strategy can be effective, it can also be exhausting,
especially in the face of enormous obstacles.
Other coping strategies focus on managing the negative
emotions or threats to self-esteem that stigmatization
may cause. For example, the stigmatized may
cope with threats to their identity by disengaging their
self-esteem from domains in which they are negatively
stereotyped or fear being a target of discrimination and
investing themselves more in domains in which they
are less at risk. When they encounter negative treatment,
another coping strategy they may use is to (often
correctly) shift the blame from stable aspects of
themselves (“I am stupid,” “I am unlikable”) to the
prejudice of others. This strategy may protect their
self-esteem from negative outcomes, especially when
prejudice is blatant. Bearers of stigma may also cope
by identifying or bonding with others who share their
stigma. Similarly stigmatized others can provide social
support, a sense of belonging, and protect against feelings
of rejection and isolation. Furthermore, bonding
with others who are similarly stigmatized may also
enable bearers to enact social changes that benefit their
stigmatized group, as demonstrated by the success of
the civil rights movement and the gay pride movement.
In sum, through various coping strategies, bearers of
stigma may demonstrate resilience even in the face of
social devaluation.
Brenda Major
See also Attributional Ambiguity; Coping; Expectancy
Effects; Ostracism; Rejection; Social Exclusion; Social
Support; Stereotype Threat
Further Readings
Stigma———947
Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Boston:
Addison-Wesley. (See, especially, chapter on “Traits due
to victimization.”)
Crocker, J., & Major, B. (1989). Social stigma and selfesteem:
The self-protective properties of stigma.
Psychological Review, 96, 608–630.
Crocker, J., Major, B., & Steele, C. (1998). Social stigma. In
D. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of
social psychology (4th ed., pp. 504–553). Boston:
McGraw-Hill.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the management
of spoiled identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall.

948———Stress and Coping
Heatherton, T. F., Kleck, R. E., Hebl, M. R., & Hull, J. G.
(Eds.). (2000). The social psychology of stigma.
New York: Guilford Press.
Jones, E. E., Farina, A., Hastorf, A. H., Markus, H., Miller,
D. T., & Scott, R. A. (1984). Social stigma: The
psychology of marked relationships. New York: Freeman.
Link, B. G., & Phelan, J. C. (2001). Conceptualizing stigma.
Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 363–385.
Major, B., & O’Brien, L. T. (2005). The social psychology of
stigma. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 393–421.
Steele, C. M. (1992). A threat in the air: How stereotypes
shape intellectual identity and test performance. American
Psychologist, 52, 613–629.
Steele, C. M., Spencer, S. J., & Aronson, J. (2002).
Contending with group image: The psychology of
stereotype and social identity threat. In M. P. Zanna, (Ed).
(2002). Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 34, pp. 379–440). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
STRESS AND COPING
Definition
Stress occurs when an individual perceives that the
demands of a personally important situation tax or exceed
his or her capabilities and resources. The situation can be
a major event such as the death of a loved one, an interaction
with another person such as a disagreement with a
coworker, or even an internal event such as a realization
that one is aging but has not accomplished important life
goals. Stress, especially if experienced chronically, can
have serious negative physical and psychological consequences.
Coping consists of the individual’s thoughts and
behaviors aimed at eliminating the source of the stress,
reducing the negative emotions associated with the stress,
or increasing positive emotion in the context of stress.
The study of coping is important because adaptive coping
can be taught, which can help short-circuit the potentially
harmful effects of stress on mental and physical health.
History and Background
Stress is a ubiquitous term that is commonly used to
describe a wide range of situations, experiences, and
states of being. Practically everyone has had personal,
often daily, experience with stress, and the idea that
stress is harmful to mental and physical well being is
well ensconced in popular culture. Empirical studies of
stress began early in the 20th century with research
focused on the biological aspects of the stress response.
In 1932, Walter Cannon outlined the fight-or-flight
response in which the organism reacts to a threat by
releasing catecholamines that ready the organism physically
to respond to the stressor. Increased heart rate,
blood pressure, blood sugar, and respiration are among
the physiological results of catecholamine release. The
fight-or-flight response is adaptive in the sense that
it provides the necessary physical resources for the
organism to react to acute stress. When the fight-orflight
response is repeatedly or chronically triggered,
there are likely to be harmful physical consequences.
Hans Selye discovered that a variety of stressors such as
extreme cold or fatigue caused enlarged adrenal glands,
shrinking of the thymus, and bleeding ulcers in rats.
Selye outlined a three-stage process called the General
Adaptation Syndrome in which prolonged stress leads to
a breakdown of bodily resistance leaving the organism
vulnerable to what he called diseasesof adaptation such
as cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, or arthritis.
Early biological theories of stress led researchers
to investigate the types of occurrences or events that
resulted in biological changes. A natural outgrowth of
the research of Cannon and Selye was stressful life
events research. Researchers in this tradition were
interested in quantifying the impact of various life
events by their effects on psychological and physical
well-being. Initially, the idea was that those individuals
who experienced life events that required some sort of
adjustment (such as marriage, death of a close family
member, pregnancy, or changing to a different line of
work) would be more likely to experience distress,
depression, and physical illness than would those who
experienced fewer life events. Results of these studies
indicated that although there is a significant association
between life events and well-being, the link is not particularly
strong. Even among those individuals who are
categorized as high risk for deleterious effects based on
the number of stressful life events they experience, a
substantial number do not show increased illness. Thus,
the research focus in stressful life events turned from an
emphasis on the stressful events per se to the study of
other factors that play a role in the association between
stressful events and physical or psychological wellbeing.
Coping is one such factor. Two people who
experience the same objectively stressful event can
have very different psychological and physical outcomes
depending on how they cope with the event.
The concept of coping was born out of the psychodynamic
work on defenses. The theory developed by

Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and early 1900s was
that each form of psychopathology stemmed from
unconscious reliance on a particular defense mechanism
in response to uncomfortable thoughts or feelings.
For example, paranoia was thought to stem from the
defense mechanism of projection—attributing one’s
own unacceptable thoughts and feelings to someone
else. Subsequent theorists classified defense mechanisms
into adaptive (mature) and maladaptive (immature)
with responses such as humor, suppression, and
sublimation considered mature and responses such as
projection and passive aggression considered immature.
One of the hallmarks of defense mechanisms is
that they are relatively unconscious and traitlike.
Although research on defenses continues, in the 1960s,
researchers set a new course for the study of stress and
coping by conceptualizing coping as a context-dependent,
conscious process of thoughts and behaviors that
ordinary people use in response to the events in their
lives that they perceive as stressful.
Stress and Coping Theory
The stress and coping theory developed by Richard
Lazarus and Susan Folkman has served as the foundation
for decades of coping research in several different
samples experiencing a vast variety of types of stress.
The key components of the theory are appraisal and
coping, along with emotion, which is central to both
components.
Appraisal
Appraisal is the evaluation of an event in terms
of its significance for well-being. Whether the individual
appraises the event as stressful depends on characteristics
of the individual (such as personality, goals,
and beliefs) as well as characteristics of the event.
Appraisal is an assessment that focuses on the meaning
of an event or situation for the individual and
occurs on a continuous basis. Humans naturally
appraise or evaluate their surroundings and experiences
constantly in relation to their own well-being.
Primary appraisal addresses the question of whether
anything is at stake for the individual in the context
of the event. Secondary appraisal indicates what, if
anything, can be done in response to the event and
involves the assessment of available coping resources
(e.g., money, time, social support, self-esteem) and
options for coping and whether these are likely to be
effective in the particular situation. For example, imagine
you have an exam coming up in your most difficult
class and you must do well on it to pass the class and
graduate. If graduation is something you value, your
primary appraisal is likely to be one of threat—there is
a lot at stake in the situation for you. As part of the secondary
appraisal process you inventory the resources
at your disposal for addressing the stressor/upcoming
exam. Your coping resources may include textbooks
and other reading materials on the test topic, notes
taken by other students in the class, the willingness of
the teaching assistant to spend time helping you prepare
for the exam, and perhaps your own confidence in
your test-taking ability. Upon reflection on your coping
resources, you may reappraise the upcoming test as
more of a challenge than a threat. Together, primary
and secondary appraisal determine the extent to which
the event is perceived as stressful.
Appraisals are associated with emotional responses.
Those stressful events appraised as threatening are usually
associated with negative emotions such as anxiety.
Events appraised as harmful are associated with negative
emotions such as sadness or anger. A challenge
appraisal—the evaluation of a situation as having the
potential for gain—is usually associated with both positive
and negative emotions. Whereas an appraisal of
challenge is likely to prompt feelings such as excitement
and enthusiasm, there is also the potential for
anxiety and fear because the outcome is uncertain.
Early stress and coping research focused almost
exclusively on negative emotions. However, several
studies have now documented that positive emotion
can occur with relative high frequency, even in the
most dire stressful context, even during periods when
depression and distress are significantly elevated.
Positive emotion in the stress process is thought to
sustain coping, restore depleted resources, and provide
a respite from negative emotions, particularly
under conditions of chronic stress. Furthermore, positive
and negative emotions are associated with different
types of coping. Therefore, it is important to
consider the role of positive as well as negative emotion
in the coping process.
Coping
Stress and Coping———949
The appraisal of the event as a harm, threat, or
challenge prompts a coping response. This coping
response may influence the event itself, the individual’s
appraisal of the event, or the emotions associated

950———Stress and Coping
with the event. In the context of a given stressful
event, appraisal produces emotion and prompts
coping, which, in turn, influences emotion and subsequent
reappraisal of the situation. This appraisalemotion-coping-emotion-reappraisal
process continues
until the situation is resolved or the appraisals are
such that the event is no longer viewed as stressful.
Although there are potentially an infinite number
of ways of coping (e.g., making a plan of action, fantasizing
about an ideal outcome, reminding oneself of
the good that will come out of the situation, pretending
the stressful event didn’t happen), on a theoretical
level, there are two major functions of coping.
Problem-focused coping involves taking steps to deal
with the problem directly, whereas emotion-focused
coping is aimed at reducing the negative emotions
associated with the problem. Some examples of
problem-focused coping are making a plan of action
or concentrating on the next step. Some examples of
emotion-focused forms of coping are engaging in
distracting activities or using alcohol or drugs. Getting
drunk doesn’t really solve the problem, but people
often think it will help them feel better.
The theoretical distinction between problem- and
emotion-focused types of coping is useful for classifying
and discussing the many types of coping, and it
is used extensively in the coping literature. In practice,
however, the distinction between coping aimed at
addressing the problem and coping aimed at addressing
the emotion isn’t always clear. Problem-focused
coping can also serve an emotion-focused function
because by addressing the problem itself, the individual
is also addressing the source of his or her negative
emotions. Thus, if the problem-focused efforts are
successful, the negative emotions associated with the
problem will also be reduced. For example, a problem-focused
response to having a car that repeatedly
breaks down would be to buy a new car. Buying a
new car effectively eliminates the negative emotions
associated with the repeated breakdowns of the old
car. Thus, the problem-focused coping response has
also served an emotion-focused function. Sometimes,
emotion-focused types of coping can ultimately serve
a problem-focused function. Studying in response
to an upcoming exam is a form of problem-focused
coping. However, high levels of anxiety may prohibit
effective studying. Therefore, doing something to
reduce the anxiety such as going to the gym or getting
a massage may facilitate subsequent problem-focused
coping. People rarely rely on just problem-focused or
just emotion-focused types of coping. Usually, in
response to a given stressful event, they employ a mix
of problem- and emotion-focused responses.
Although many stressful events are short-lived
and require only an abbreviated coping response,
many types of life stress are ongoing. These chronically
stressful situations call for repeated and continued
coping efforts over a long period. Examples of
such ongoing stressors include one’s own or a loved
one’s chronic illness, a dysfunctional work environment,
or living in the aftermath of traumatic life
events such as a major natural disaster. Because it
calls for sustained coping efforts over a long period,
chronic stress can deplete an individual’s coping
resources. In this context, meaning-focused coping
becomes important. Meaning-focused coping
responses draw on deeply held values, goals, and
beliefs and help motivate and sustain coping efforts
and bolster coping resources over the long term.
These responses are linked to positive emotion, which
reinforces their motivational and sustaining qualities.
Meaning-focused coping, for example, includes identifying
realistic coping outcomes that are valued by
the person. For example, a husband providing care to
his wife in the terminal stages of cancer who ensures
that his wife is cleaned up and dressed every day
because that helps her retain a sense of normalcy even
though she is unable to leave the house is engaging in
meaning-based coping. The pursuit of these outcomes
creates a sense of control, which produces positive emotion,
which, in turn, helps reinforce coping effort.
Meaning-focused coping is used when a person reorders
priorities so that they are in alignment with his or her
underlying values, goals, and beliefs. The reordering
helps the person allocate attention, resources, and efforts
according to what matters. Benefit-reminding, a form of
positive reappraisal in which the individual appraises
benefit in a stressful situation (e.g., improved personal
relationships, appreciation of the little things in life,
greater sense of self-worth), is also considered a form of
meaning-focused coping.
What Is Effective Coping? A central tenet of stress and
coping theory is that coping is not inherently adaptive
or maladaptive. Instead, coping effectiveness must be
judged in the context of the stressful situation. A given
form of coping may be effective in one situation but
not in another. For example, in a situation in which the
individual has some control, problem-focused forms of
coping are likely to be beneficial. But in situations that

are completely out of the individual’s control, problem-focused
coping is less likely to be effective.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of a given coping strategy
will depend on the outcome of interest. A given
coping response can be beneficial in terms of one outcome
but detrimental in terms of another. For example,
increasing the amount of time you spend on a project
at work may be effective for your career success but
damaging to your relationship with your spouse.
Another consideration in judging coping effectiveness
is proximity of the outcome. A particular coping strategy
may be beneficial in the short run (e.g., confronting
the person responsible for the problem may
make you feel better) but detrimental in the long run
(damage the potential for working with the person
you confronted in the future). Thus, in judging coping
effectiveness, it is important to identify the outcome,
the time point (proximal vs. distal), and the context.
Can Coping Be Changed? Part of the appeal of studying
coping is that because it is a conscious response,
it is potentially amenable to change. A growing body
of evidence indicates that coping can be changed and
people can be taught to cope more effectively with
a variety of stressors. One approach to improving
coping effectiveness is to help individuals identify
whether a situation is changeable or not and then to
match the form of coping to the situation (problemfocused
types of coping for changeable situations,
emotion-focused types of coping for unchangeable
situations, meaning-focused coping in chronic situations).
Another type of coping intervention targets
the individual’s appraisals of the stress and works
to enhance confidence in his or her coping skills.
Traditional stress management interventions can be
viewed as training in emotion-focused coping, and
problem-solving interventions can be thought of as
training in problem-focused coping. In addition, coping
training can take the form of enhancing coping
resources such as social support.
Judith Tedlie Moskowitz
See also Anxiety; Coping; Emotion; Health Psychology;
Projection; Search for Meaning in Life; Stress Appraisal
Theory (Primary and Secondary Appraisal)
Further Readings
Cannon, W. B. (1939). The wisdom of the body (Rev. ed.).
New York: W. W. Norton.
Stress Appraisal Theory (Primary and Secondary Appraisal)———951
Folkman, S., & Moskowitz, J. T. (2004). Coping: Pitfalls and
promise. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 745–774.
Lazarus, R. S., & Folkman, S. (1984). Stress, appraisal, and
coping. New York: Springer.
Park, C. L., & Folkman, S. (1997). Meaning in the context of
stress and coping. Review of General Psychology, 1,
115–144.
Selye, H. (1956). The stress of life. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Zeidner, M., & Endler, N. S. (1996). Handbook of coping.
New York: Wiley.
STRESS APPRAISAL THEORY (PRIMARY
AND SECONDARY APPRAISAL)
Definition
Stress appraisal refers to the process by which individuals
evaluate and cope with a stressful event. It is
concerned with individuals’ evaluation of the event,
rather than with the event per se. People differ in how
they construe what is happening to them and their
options for coping. Stress appraisal comes in two
forms, primary and secondary appraisal, which should
be considered as two stages of appraisal or evaluation.
These two types of appraisal are not mutually exclusive;
they work in concert with one another to complete
the appraisal process.
Primary Appraisal
Primary appraisal is the cognitive process that
occurs when one is appraising whether an event is
stressful and relevant to him or her. During this phase,
a decision is made about whether the event poses a
threat, will cause harm or loss, or presents a challenge.
Harm or loss is associated with damage that has
already occurred, such as a death or a job loss. Threat
is the possibility of a harm or loss in the future, such
as sickness or poor job performance. Conversely,
challenge consists of events that provide a person an
opportunity to gain a sense of mastery and competence
by confronting and overcoming a dilemma.
Such a struggle would be considered a positive type of
stress and allows a person to expand one’s knowledge
and experience, and to develop extra tools to embrace
future challenges or stresses. Finishing a marathon or
writing a book might be an example of a challenge.

952———Stress Appraisal Theory (Primary and Secondary Appraisal)
Secondary Appraisal
Secondary appraisal is the cognitive process that
occurs when one is figuring out how to cope with a
stressful event. During this process, a person decides
what coping options are available. A harmful event
requires immediate evaluation of coping options
because it has already occurred, whereas threatening
or challenging events allow one time to gather more
information about events. Prior experience or being
exposed to similar situations previously provides a
frame of reference to determine the options available
for dealing with the situation.
Background
Richard Lazarus, the originator of stress appraisal theory,
became interested in the early 1950s in studying
differences between individuals with relation to stress
and the coping mechanisms. He was deeply impressed
by a monograph written by two psychiatrists, Roy
Grinker and John Spiegel, about how flight crews dealt
with the constant stress of air war. He came to realize
that stress was associated with the subjective meaning
of what was happening to the personnel, who, in combat,
were in imminent danger of being killed. A person
constantly weighs coping options to deal with stress in
the context of his or her personal goals or resources or
environmental constraints. Lazarus argued that individuals
differ in how they perceive circumstance as relevant
and in how they react to and cope with situations.
Environmental and Person Variables
Stress appraisal theory takes into consideration precursory
conditions that affect the process of appraisal.
These antecedent conditions are divided into two
classes, environmental variables and personal variables.
Environmental variables are those that are
beyond the person and lend rules of behavior that are
governed by societal norms. Environmental variables
include demands, constraints, opportunity, and culture.
Person variables are those that lie within the person,
including goals and goal hierarchies, beliefs about self
and world, and personal resources.
Demands
Demands are pressures from the social environment
to behave in certain ways and to conform to social conventions.
Examples of demands include helping others
in need, taking care of children, and performing well at
one’s job. Although demands originate from external
pressure, they are later internalized.
Constraints
Constraints are composed of the behaviors in which
one should not engage. They are defined by social
norms or laws and are usually backed by punishment
if violated. The punishment can come in social form,
such as in banishment, or in legal form such as a fine
or incarceration.
Opportunity
Opportunity refers to taking the right action at the
right moment. Being able to take advantage of an
opportunity involves recognizing the opportunity and
knowing when to take action. An example of an opportunity
would be making a decision right away to take a
job that has been offered.
Culture
Culture generally refers to cultural norms and how
those norms shape emotional perception. An example
of a cultural norm would be understanding that (in
most Western cultures) you should strive for individuality
and distinction. This is inherent knowledge
because of where you grew up, who your peers are,
how people behave around you, and so on.
The four environmental variables—demands, constraints,
opportunities, and culture—do not operate
alone on the appraisal of an event. They interact with
person variables on the appraisal of harm or loss, threat,
and challenge, and the coping process. The person variables—goals
and goal hierarchies, beliefs about self
and world, and personal resources—give meaning to
the events encountered and order them into an implicit
understanding of how things work and how to cope
with stresses elicited by environmental variables.
Goals and Goal Hierarchies
Goals and goal hierarchies refer to motivations to
achieve one’s objectives and to order them into a
meaningful succession of importance. When a person
attempts to fulfill goals or has multiple goals in conflict,
stress will arise. It is important to determine
which goals he or she values most and least. An example
of goal and goal hierarchies would be that a person
contemplates current goals in term of importance, such

as striving to achieve a good grade in one’s classes,
getting more involved in community services, and
cleaning one’s apartment every Sunday.
Beliefs About Self and World
Beliefs about self and world refer to what one thinks
of oneself and the world. These beliefs form perceptions
and emotions, lending information as to what one
expects to happen in a given situation. A person operates
in a certain way because he or she knows what the
outcome will be. For instance, a person knows that
one’s parents would withdraw their financial support if
one fails one’s classes. Even though studying is not fun,
this person studies hard to conceive of oneself as a good
student for his or her parents.
Personal Resources
Personal resources are those things that a person
has at his or her disposal that influence what he or she
can and cannot do to satisfy his or her needs. Some
of these resources a person is born with; others are
acquired by effortful measures. Some examples of
personal resources include intelligence, physical
attractiveness, social standing, and money.
During the process of primary appraisal, environmental
and person variables interact to determine
whether an event is considered a threat, harm or loss,
or challenge. If an event is considered a harm, threat,
or challenge, the relationship between environmental
and person variables is considered again during the
secondary appraisal process to determine appropriate
coping options. Take two persons, A and B, who have
recently lost their jobs. Person A feels threat because A
has a large family to support (demands) with little savings
(personal resources). Person A decides to look for
a job right away because supporting family is one’s
most important role (beliefs about self and culture).
Meanwhile, person B feels challenge because losing
the job provides an opportunity to do something B has
always wanted to try (opportunity and goal). Person B
decides to send out applications to graduate schools
because obtaining an advanced degree has long been
one of B’s goals, and B’s partner can provide financial
support (opportunity, goal, and personal resources).
Importance and Implications
of Stress Appraisal
Stress appraisal theory considers how individual differences
play a critical role in assessing stressors and
determining appropriate coping responses. By understanding
how stress is appraised, one obtains information
about the best methods for coping with stress.
Understanding how stress occurs and the way in which
one deals with it is important so that one can become
more effective at reducing the adverse effect of negative
stress and the ability to maximize positive stress.
Tamara Stone
Kyunghee Han
See also Coping; Culture; Goals; Health Psychology;
Personality and Social Behavior; Stress and Coping
Further Readings
Structural Equation Modeling———953
Lazarus, R. S. (1963). A laboratory approach to the dynamics of
psychological stress. Administrative Science Quarterly, 8(1).
Lazarus, R. S. (1999). Stress and emotion: A new synthesis.
New York: Springer.
Lazarus, R. S. (2000). Relational meaning and discrete
emotions. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone
(Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, methods,
research, New York: Oxford University Press
Tomaka, J., Blascovich, J., Kibler, J., & Ernst, J. M, (1997).
Cognitive and physiological antecedents of threat and
challenge appraisal. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 73(1), 63–72.
STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING
Structural equation modeling (SEM) is a particular
form of data analysis. According to this approach, a
researcher begins with a model that specifies how
multiple variables are related to each other. These theorized
relationships are formalized into a set of equations
that include the variables in question. These
variables are then measured and their relations to each
other are quantified. The test of the model involves an
assessment of how well the equations can reproduce
or “fit” the observed relations.
As a simple example, consider a model in which
the researcher theorizes that variable A influences C
because of its influence on B. Schematically, A → B
→ C. This model has two equations, one that predicts
B using A and one that predicts C using B. To test this
model, the researcher measures the observed relations
between A, B, and C. Application of SEM provides
tests of (1) whether A is actually a useful predictor of
B, (2) whether B is actually a useful predictor of C,

954———Subliminal Perception
and (3) whether the model as a whole fits the observed
data. The latter test is not simply redundant with the
previous two tests. The reason for this is that the
model specifies that A is only a predictor of C because
of its relation to B. A might be a useful predictor of B,
and B of C, but the model might provide a poor fit
because the researcher has incorrectly specified that A
has no direct relation with C.
As can be seen, the proper use of SEM requires that
the researcher has carefully thought about the ways
variables are related to each other before collecting
the data. In this sense, application of SEM is typically
considered to be confirmatory in nature rather than
exploratory. Although researchers often conceptualize
the associations among variables in terms of causal
influences, causality cannot be inferred simply from
observed relations (the term causal modeling is therefore
a misnomer). Once a relation has been identified
and placed in the context of a larger set of variables
using SEM, researchers are best advised to test for
causality using experimental designs.
As might be imagined, SEM can be an extremely
powerful and flexible data analytic technique. Indeed,
many other data analytic strategies can be thought
of as specific forms of SEM, including linear and
nonlinear regression, path analysis, factor analysis,
and hierarchical modeling. SEM actually allows the
researcher to combine several of these simpler data
analytic techniques in a single analysis rather than
conducting separate analyses using multiple steps.
For example, one of the more popular applications of
SEM involves a combination of factor analysis and
path analysis. Because factor analysis deals with
latent, or unobserved, variables, this form of analysis
is often referred to as latent variable modeling.
As might be expected, most application of SEM
are computationally complex and require sophisticated
statistical computer packages. Among the most
popular of these is LISREL.
See also LISREL; Nonexperimental Designs; Research
Methods
Further Readings
Jay Hull
Bollen, K. A. (1989). Structural equations with latent
variables. New York: Wiley.
Kline, R. B. (2004). Principles and practice of structural
equation modeling (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
McDonald, R., & Ho, M. R. (2002). Principles and practice
in reporting structural equation analyses. Psychological
Methods, 7, 64–82.
Raykov, T., & Marcoulides, G. A. (2006). A first course in
structural equation modeling. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
SUBLIMINAL PERCEPTION
The term subliminal is derived from the terms sub
(below) and limen (threshold), and it refers to perception
so subtle it cannot reach conscious awareness.
Most of the research on subliminal perception is done
on visual subliminal perception. For instance, one
can flash words or pictures so quickly on a computer
screen (generally faster than 10–15 milliseconds) that
perceivers have the feeling they do not see anything at
all. In other words, they are not consciously aware of
the presented words or pictures. However, such visual
stimuli are processed unconsciously, and they can
have brief and subtle effects on our feeling and thinking.
In addition, some research has been done on
auditory subliminal perception. No reliable scientific
evidence exists, however, for psychological effects of
auditory subliminal perception.
The idea of an objective “threshold’ is misleading.
No objective threshold exists for conscious perception.
Whether a briefly presented stimulus reaches
conscious awareness depends on many different factors,
including individual differences. The threshold is
merely subjective.
Effects of subliminal perception are generally
small and not easy to establish in controlled laboratory
research. However, a few findings are reasonably
well established, the most prominent being subliminal
mere exposure; Repeated subliminal exposure to a
stimulus (for example a picture) leads perceivers to
like this picture a little more. Effects of mere exposure
have even been obtained for stimuli that were perceived
for only one millisecond. Perceivers can to
some extent infer the valence (is something good
or bad?) from subliminal stimuli. This is shown in
research on the subliminal perception of short positive
(e.g., sun) and negative (e.g., death) words.
Subliminal perception is controversial mainly
because of the notion of subliminal persuasion: The
strategy that may be used by marketers or politicians
to deliberately influence customers or voters subliminally.
In 1957, James Vicary claimed that he increased

the sale of cola and popcorn in a New Jersey cinema
by subliminally flashing “Drink Coke” and “Eat popcorn”
during movies. This however, turned out to be a
myth. Perhaps because of the media attention subliminal
perception and persuasion sometimes receives,
most of the American population does believe subliminal
persuasion to have far reaching consequences.
However, although subliminal perception exists,
research shows the effects to be minor and usually
short-lived. There is no scientific reason to believe it
can substantially change consumer behavior.
Ap Dijksterhuis
See also Automatic Processes; Mere Exposure Effect;
Nonconscious Processes; Persuasion; Priming
Further Readings
Dijksterhuis, A., Aarts, H., & Smith, P. K. (2005). The power
of the subliminal: Subliminal perception and possible
applications. In R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, & J. A. Bargh
(Eds.), The new unconscious. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Dijksterhuis, A., & van Knippenberg, A. (1998). The relation
between perception and behavior or how to win a game of
Trivial Pursuit. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 865–877.
SUBTYPING
Definition
Subtyping refers to a process whereby people come to
view individuals who don’t fit a stereotype as exceptions
or as poor members of a group. The concept is
important because it explains why people often do
not change their stereotypes in the face of disconfirming
information. Subtyping involves psychologically
fencing off deviant group members so that perceivers
need not consider information about those individuals
when thinking about the group as a whole.
Background and Research
Early research on stereotype change showed that the
same amount of stereotype disconfirming information
was more likely to weaken a stereotype when it was
Subtyping———955
dispersed across many group members rather than concentrated
in only a few. In these studies, participants
read about multiple group members who each exhibited
various behaviors. Participants who read about many
group members who committed one disconfirming
behavior each later reported weaker stereotypes than
those who read that the disconfirming behaviors were
all committed by a small subset of the group. This finding
suggests that it may be easy to subtype, and therefore
ignore, small numbers of extreme deviants.
Researchers have gone on to study specific conditions
that promote subtyping. Strong evidence indicates
that people are especially likely to subtype
individuals who seem atypical rather than typical
of their group. For example, in one study, people were
more likely to change their stereotype that lawyers
are extraverted if they learned about an introverted
lawyer who seemed otherwise typical of the group (e.g.,
was White), rather than one who seemed deviant on
multiple dimensions (e.g., was Black). Other research
suggests that people are more likely to subtype individuals
who deviate a lot on a particular stereotypic
trait rather than just a little, presumably because
extreme deviants seem more atypical of the group. At
least one study points to the disturbing finding that
getting to know someone in a stereotyped group personally
can promote subtyping, suggesting that making
friends across group boundaries is not enough to
change stereotypes. Research also suggests that
people may perceive neutral information about a disconfirming
group member in ways that promote subtyping
and stereotype preservation.
Subtyping is not an inevitable process. When people
encounter large numbers of disconfirming individuals,
subtyping may become more difficult. In addition, if
perceivers view disconfirming individuals as legitimate
group members, a process referred to as subgrouping
rather than subtyping, then perceivers may come to see
the group as more diverse, and the stereotype may
eventually weaken. As predicted by this theoretical distinction,
people encouraged to pay attention to similarities
and differences among all group members, a
manipulation intended to induce subgrouping, later
report weaker stereotypes than those in a subtyping
condition instructed to think about distinctions between
typical and atypical group members.
Carolyn Weisz
See also Contact Hypothesis; Person Perception; Prejudice;
Stereotypes and Stereotyping

956———Suicide
Further Readings
Kunda, Z., & Oleson, K. C. (1995). Maintaining stereotypes
in the face of disconfirmation: Constructing grounds for
subtyping deviants. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 68, 565–579.
Park, B., Wolsko, C., & Judd, C. M. (2001). Measurement of
subtyping in stereotype change. Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, 37, 325–332.
SUICIDE
Definition
Suicide is the act of intentionally taking one’s life.
This definition, however, has been expanded to
describe the range of thoughts and behaviors that are
exhibited by individuals who are in some manner considering
suicide. Suicidal ideation involves having
thoughts of killing oneself or of being dead. Suicidal
intent involves having a plan for how to kill oneself
and intending to carry that plan out. Suicidal behavior
is a broad term that includes all actions related to
suicide (i.e., all the terms in this paragraph), but also
includes some behaviors not captured by the other
terms listed here, including actions related to suicide
that did not result in an attempt, such as gathering bottles
of pills (without taking them), or tying a noose
(without using it). A suicide attempt occurs when an
individual intends to take his or her own life, acts on
that intent, but does not die. A suicide completion
occurs when an individual intends to take his or her
own life and dies as a result. One way to understand
suicidal behavior is to think of it as a continuum with
ideation at the far left and completion to the far right:
In this way, behaviors toward the left of the continuum
are relatively less severe and behaviors to the right are
relatively more severe because of their differing proximities
to suicide completions. This continuum view
has not been empirically validated (e.g., it is possible
that suicidal ideation differs from suicide attempt in
kind rather than just in degree), and in any event, all
suicidal behaviors are serious and warrant assessment
by a mental health professional.
Importance and Context
Suicide is a serious health problem worldwide, including
in the United States. In 2002, it is estimated that
31,655 individuals died by suicide, making suicide the
11th leading cause of death (homicide ranks 14th).
Although rates vary somewhat year to year, approximately
30,000 people in the United States, and almost
a million people die by suicide each year worldwide.
On one hand, 30,000 U.S. deaths per year—one every
18 minutes or so—is a lot. On the other hand, suicide
is a rare cause of death compared with other causes of
death in the United States. For example, given that a
person has died, the chance that the cause was heart
disease or cancer is 52%. Given that someone has died,
the chance that the cause of death was suicide is a little
over 1%. However, the number of deaths by suicide
(i.e., the number of suicide completions), though an
accurate representation of the fact that death by suicide
is rare, also greatly underestimates the magnitude of
the problem: For every death by suicide, there are as
many as 25 nonfatal attempts. Suicidal ideation is even
more common than attempts: Estimates suggest that
approximately 13% of individuals in the United States
will experience substantial suicidal ideation at some
point in their lifetime. Thus, suicide completions are
relatively rare in the United States, but attempts are
more common, and ideation is even more common.
The prevalence of suicidal behavior (i.e., how common
it is) differs for men and women. Males complete
suicide more often than females do, but females
attempt suicide more often than males do. More
specifically, men are approximately 4 times more
likely than are women to die by suicide; women are
approximately 3 times as likely as men to attempt suicide.
This pattern can be explained in part by research
showing that, in general, men engage in more violent
behavior than women. Suicide attempts by women, on
average, use methods that are less violent, and therefore
are less likely to be lethal. For example, 2 of 3
male suicide victims in the United States die by
firearm, whereas 1 of 3 female suicide victims in the
United States die by firearm. The most common
method for female victims is overdosing or poisoning.
Measurement
Although attempts and completions can be investigated
with medical records, the other aspects of suicidality
(i.e., ideation and intent) cannot be measured in
such a straightforward manner. One commonly used
measure is the Beck Suicide Scale, a self-report measure
with 21 questions. For each of the questions,
respondents pick one of three statements that best

describes how he or she has been feeling; each statement
is scored as 0, 1, 2 with increasing level of severity.
For example, one of the items that indicates
suicidal ideation is as follows: “I have no desire to kill
myself” (0 point response), “I have a weak desire to
kill myself” (1 point response), and “I have a moderate
to strong desire to kill myself” (2 point response).
Higher scores on the Beck Suicide Scale indicate
more severe suicidal ideation or intent.
Theories of Suicide
One of the most prominent theorists of suicide is
Edwin Shneidman. His theory states that suicide
results from the perception of unendurable psychological
pain, which he calls psychache. Another
researcher of suicide, Aaron Beck, theorizes that our
thoughts (i.e., cognitions) play a causal role in the
development of suicidal behavior. This theory proposes
that suicide results from cognitions that involve
hopelessness—beliefs that things will not get better
in the future. Roy Baumeister proposed that suicide
results from a desire to escape from painful selfawareness
resulting from discrepancies between
expectations and actual events. A more recent theory
was proposed by Thomas Joiner. This theory states
that suicide results from the combination of three factors:
thwarted belongingness, perceived burdensomeness
(i.e., the belief that one is a burden on others),
and an acquired ability to enact lethal self-injury.
The last component of the theory, acquired ability,
involves the idea that it is difficult to overcome the
most basic instinct of all—self-preservation—and that
individuals acquire this capability through experience
with painful and provocative events. Through these
experiences, individuals get used to the pain of selfinjury,
become less afraid of self-injury, and build
knowledge that facilitates self-injury.
Risk Assessment
Suicide risk assessment is a process conducted by a
mental health professional to determine if an individual
is at risk for engaging in suicidal behavior. Two main
questions guide suicide risk assessment: Is the individual
being assessed a danger to himself or herself and is
the danger both immediate and severe? The answer
to these questions can come from the use of standardized
assessment measures (such as the Beck Suicide
Scale) as well as clinical interviews. A thorough risk
assessment for suicide gathers information from the
individual on both present suicidal symptoms as well as
past suicidal behavior, current stressors, and other psychological
symptoms (e.g., hopelessness). For example,
individuals who suffer psychiatric disorders are at
higher risk for suicide. A disorder with one of the highest
rates is major depressive disorder. One of the
strongest predictors of completed suicide is a prior
attempt; thus, considering presenting symptoms is not
sufficient for thorough risk assessment.
If risk is deemed to be immediate or severe, emergency
mental health services are used, most often
involving hospitalization until the individual is no
longer at imminent risk for suicide. If risk is not deemed
immediate or severe, alternatives to emergency mental
health can be used. For example, with the help of a
trained mental health professional, individuals may be
helped to create a coping card that lists concrete steps to
take in the event that suicidal symptoms intensify.
Warning Signs
Suicide———957
Members of the American Association of Suicidology
are researchers and clinicians who research and treat
suicidal behavior. This group devised a list of warning
signs for suicide that indicate severe and immediate
risk for suicide. These warning signs are designed for
the friends, family members, and any other people
who may come into contact with a suicidal individual.
The warning signs instruct that a person should get
help immediately if he or she witnesses, hears, or sees
any one or more of the following:
• Someone threatening to hurt or kill himself or herself
• Someone looking for ways to kill himself or herself
by seeking access to pills, weapons, or other means
• Someone talking or writing about death, dying, or
suicide
The warning signs also instruct that should seek
immediate help if one witnesses, hears, or sees someone
exhibiting any one or more of the following:
• Hopelessness
• Rage, anger, seeking revenge
• Acting reckless or engaging in risky activities, seemingly
without thinking
• Feeling trapped—like there’s no way out
• Increasing alcohol or drug use
• Withdrawing from friends, family, or society

958———Sunk Cost
• Anxiety, agitation, unable to sleep or sleeping all the
time
• Dramatic changes in mood
• No reason for living
• No sense of purpose in life
Kimberly A. Van Orden
Theodore W. Bender
Thomas E. Joiner, Jr.
See also Depression; Need to Belong; Rejection; Social
Exclusion
Further Readings
American Association of Suicidology. (n.d.). Understanding
and helping the suicidal person. Retrieved September 29,
2006, from http://www.suicidology.org/displaycommon
.cfm?an=2
Joiner, T. E. (2005). Why people die by suicide. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
SUNK COST
Definition
Sunk cost refers to money, time, or effort that has
already been spent on a particular endeavor and that
cannot be recovered. Economic principles dictate that
sunk costs should not be considered when making decisions
about whether to continue one’s present course of
action or to divert resources elsewhere. Such decisions
rationally should be based only on consideration of the
anticipated costs and benefits of current options.
For example, after 6 months of exclusively dating
one man, a woman ponders whether it makes sense to
maintain the relationship. Upon weighing the positives
and negatives, she comes to the realization that continuing
to date this same man will not allow her to achieve
the quality of relationship she desires. That being the
case, the clearly rational thing for the woman to do is to
immediately terminate the relationship.
Unfortunately, people do not always make decisions
in accord with rational principles. In this instance, the
woman may factor into her deliberations what she has
already invested in the relationship. Perhaps she has put
considerable time, effort, and money into helping the
man update his wardrobe, tolerated many insufferable
visits to his parents, and passed up opportunities to date
more promising long-term partners. Although these
prior investments cannot be undone or canceled out by
staying in the relationship (or leaving for that matter),
they often lead decision makers to choose to hang on to
a current relationship despite knowing that it will never
fully meet their expectations. This kind of irrational
behavior has been described as throwing good money
after bad. More formally, psychologists identify such
behaviors as instances of the sunk-cost fallacy.
Sunk-Cost Fallacy: Scientific Evidence
Scientific demonstrations of the sunk-cost fallacy are
numerous. For example, in one study some people
were asked to imagine that they enjoy playing tennis,
but that on one occasion they develop a bad case of
tennis elbow, thereafter making it extremely painful
for them to play. Their doctor tells them to expect to
experience pain while playing for approximately a
year. People were then asked to estimate the number of
times they would play tennis over the next 6 months.
Another group of people was presented with a similar
scenario, but were additionally told to imagine that
they had recently paid a $400 nonrefundable fee for a
tennis-club membership, which expires in 6 months. If
people were making a decision rationally, the two versions
of the scenario should produce comparable
estimates. Their decision to play tennis in both
instances should be determined by an evaluation of the
costs and benefits of engaging in this activity. If people
believe that their enjoyment will exceed the physical
discomfort, then they should decide to play. If they
instead anticipate that the pain will sap any pleasure
from the experience, they should logically choose not
to play. Whether or not they paid the $400 fee should
not influence their decision. Play or not play, that
money is irretrievably lost and thus should be irrelevant
to any decision to play tennis in the near future.
However, people estimated that they would play tennis
2.5 times more in the situation in which they had paid
the membership fee, thereby honoring sunk cost.
Although the sunk-cost fallacy has been shown to
be a fairly common judgment error, whether it occurs
may depend on aspects of the situation and characteristics
of the decision makers themselves. For example,
people are more likely to fall prey to the sunk-cost fallacy
in circumstances in which they feel personally
responsible for making the initial investment in an
endeavor. Also, some evidence demonstrates, interestingly,
that adults are more susceptible to the sunk-cost
fallacy than are 5- and 6-year-olds. This seems at odds
with common sense because young children have

more modest cognitive abilities to apply to any
decision-making task and, therefore, should have even
more difficulty than adults sidestepping maladaptive
decisions. This finding, however, becomes more understandable
once possible explanations for the sunk-cost
fallacy are examined.
Why Sunk-Cost Fallacy Occurs
One explanation for the sunk-cost fallacy is that
people tend to justify their behavior. According to this
self-justification account, people continue to invest in
endeavors that are unlikely to produce desired outcomes
because failing to do so could be interpreted as
an admission that their initial decision to invest was a
mistake. Abandoning the initial course of action could
also make decision makers appear inconsistent.
Neither of these possibilities is tolerated well, so
people choose instead to escalate their commitment to
the initial decision in a misguided attempt to reaffirm
its “correctness” to themselves and others. This selfjustification
explanation receives support from the
previously mentioned study showing that greater personal
responsibility for the initial decision heightens
the likelihood of the sunk-cost fallacy occurring.
Another possible explanation for the sunk-cost fallacy
is people’s desire not to be wasteful. “Waste not,
want not” is a maxim that most Americans have been
exposed to since childhood, and it may be that this
generally beneficial rule is inappropriately applied
in sunk-cost situations. That is, abandoning a failing
course of action could be construed as wasting the
resources that have already been expended. As noted
earlier, children have been found to be less likely to
manifest the sunk-cost fallacy. This may be because
children tend to stay focused on the immediate consequences
of their actions, whereas adults are sidetracked
by abstract rules such as “Don’t waste,” which
most of the time help simplify decision-making tasks.
But in situations in which sunk costs are involved, the
misapplication of well-ingrained rules on waste may
only make it more difficult to ignore prior investments
when deciding whether anticipated benefits outweigh
anticipated costs for any given course of action.
G. Daniel Lassiter
Jennifer J. Ratcliff
Matthew J. Lindberg
See also Cognitive Consistency; Consumer Behavior;
Decision Making
Further Readings
Arkes, H. R., & Ayton, P. (1999). The sunk cost and
Concorde effects: Are humans less rational than lower
animals? Psychological Bulletin, 125, 591–600.
SUPPLICATION
Supplication———959
We often want to influence the way other people perceive
us. For instance, a professor might want her
class to see her as intellectual and competent, whereas
a boxer might want his competitors to see him as
physically powerful and mean. Both the professor and
the boxer are likely to act in ways that influence how
others see them. The professor might take extra time
preparing her notes for class or use impressive words
in her lectures, whereas the boxer might affect a scowl
or show off his muscles before a match. These are
examples of strategic self-presentation—the term for
acting in a manner that shapes how people view us.
Supplication is one kind of strategic self-presentation.
Although most strategic self-presentations strategies are
designed to make positive impressions on others, sometimes
we lack the ability or impress others with our
capabilities. Supplication is a strategy for this kind of
situation. Rather than trying to look able, strong, or
smart, people using supplication as a self-presentation
strategy purposely emphasize their incompetence or
weakness. They want to appear helpless. The purpose
of appearing helpless is to advertise their dependence on
others to get help or sympathy. For example, a schoolchild
might feign a complete inability to do homework
to a parent. This seeming dependence on the parent is
designed to provoke the parent’s sense of nurturance
toward the child, resulting in the parent doing the
homework for the child. However, supplication does
not necessarily entail pretending to be dependent; it can
refer to emphasizing actual inadequacies. Panhandlers
frequently emphasize their destitute condition to
increase their chances of getting money. The need for
money may or may not be real, but the advertising of
need constitutes supplication. Another example familiar
to most people is crying. The student who cries to a
professor over a grade or the driver who cries to the
police officer over a ticket may be supplicating—trying
to get help or mercy via pity.
Whether the supplicant is a family member, a
coworker, or a stranger, the purpose is to arouse a
sense of obligation toward the supplicant. Supplicants
exploit their weakness by throwing themselves on the

960———Surprise
mercy of others, which places both supplicant and
target in an uncomfortable position. This may explain
why, of the many different methods of strategic selfpresentation,
supplication is used infrequently. The
extreme difference in power inherent is a supplication
disrupts the day-to-day stability of close relationships.
Most people to whom supplication is directed will
quickly tire of repeated demands on their pity. Supplication
is also distasteful to the supplicant because it is
personally demeaning, which limits how much an individual
would want to resort to using it.
Tyler F. Stillman
See also Helplessness, Learned; Self-Handicapping; Self-
Presentation
Further Readings
Jones, E. E., & Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general
theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.),
Psychological perspectives of the self (pp. 231–261).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
SURPRISE
Definition
Surprise is the sense of astonishment, wonder, or
amazement that is caused by something sudden or
unexpected. The experience of surprise varies with
the importance of the outcome, as well as beliefs about
the outcome. Some formalists have offered mathematical
definitions of surprise (i.e., a comparison of
Bayesian priors and posteriors), but there is little
consensus about a psychological definition. Some
researchers treat surprise as a cognitive assessment
based on the probability of an event, whereas others
treat it as an emotion, on par with happiness, sadness,
anger, disgust, and fear because of its unique pattern
of facial expressions. If surprise is an emotion, it is
an unusual one; it can be positive or negative, and it
dramatically shapes the experience of other emotions.
Importance
The concept of surprise is relevant to many aspects of
human behavior. Humans notice and focus on surprising
events and are more likely to attend to surprising
events. Surprise facilitates curiosity and learning. It
also affects beliefs about other events. When a person
takes an unexpected stance that violates his or her
self-interest, the person’s arguments are surprising
and quite often more persuasive.
Surprise is a key factor in emotional life. Neurological
studies show that when monkeys expect a reward,
dopamine neurons fire. When monkeys get the
reward, neuronal firing depends on prior expectations.
Unexpected rewards lead to greater firing than
expected rewards. Apparently, unexpected pleasures
are more rewarding than expected ones.
What Makes Something Unexpected?
If surprise depends on sudden or unexpected events,
what makes something unexpected? An unexpected
event is a low-probability event. Surprise usually follows
the event, but it can also be anticipated. However,
the intensity and duration of surprise may be harder to
forecast than the valence of a future event.
An unexpected event may be an unfamiliar event.
A tourist who travels to Hawaii may be surprised to
see 30-foot waves, despite the fact that such waves are
common during the winter months and familiar to
local inhabitants. An unexpected event may also be a
novel event. Most people expect swans to be white, so
a black swan is unique and rare.
Unexpectedness depends on the ease with which a
person can imagine an event. Some people are more
surprised to draw a red ball at random from an urn
containing 20 balls, 1 of which is red, than to draw a
red ball from an urn with 200 balls, 10 of which are
red. Although the two events are equally likely, the
first event can happen in only one way, whereas the
second event can happen in 10 different ways.
Unexpectedness also varies with the ability to
imagine other events unfolding. Some people are
more surprised to select a red ball at random from a
jar with 1 red ball and 19 blue balls than to pick a red
ball from a jar with 20 balls, each a different color. In
the first case, the blue ball is the only referent, but in
the second, there are many referents. In a similar fashion,
a negative event is often more surprising, and
more tragic, if there were many ways it could have
been avoided than if there was only one way.
Finally, unexpectedness depends on social and cultural
norms. A person learns how to react to events
from his or her social environment. Research shows
that East Asians tend to take contradictions and inconsistencies
for granted and are less surprised by most
events than are Americans.

Magnifier of Emotions
Psychologists have developed a theory that connects
surprise to the pleasure or pain of an outcome. Decision
affect theory predicts that surprising outcomes have
greater emotional intensity than expected outcomes; a
surprising positive event is more pleasurable than an
expected positive event, and a surprising negative event
is more painful than an expected negative event.
In gambling studies, a surprising outcome had a
small probability of occurrence. Surprising wins or
losses are more intense than expected wins or losses.
In studies of skill, a surprising outcome is one that
deviates from expectations. A person may expect to
succeed or fail at a task. In this case, surprising success
is more pleasurable than expected success, and surprising
failure is more painful than expected failure.
When assessing the ability to be successful, a person
often sees himself or herself through rose-colored
glasses. Inaccurate self-assessments are sometimes
called positive illusions. One such illusion is overconfidence,
the tendency of a person to believe he or she
will do better at a task of skill than reality suggests.
Overconfidence has two detrimental effects on affective
experiences. It makes successes less surprising
and therefore less pleasurable, and it makes failures
more surprising and therefore more painful.
Another positive illusion is called hindsight. After
learning what happened, a person thinks he or she
knew it all along. The person recollects past beliefs
as too accurate. Hindsight makes events seem less
surprising, and it has one detrimental effect on emotional
experiences. An expected negative event will be
less painful than a surprising negative event, but an
expected positive event will be less pleasurable than a
surprising positive event.
Strategic Shifts
Can beliefs be systematically altered before an event
occurs to make a person feel better? People are aware
that bad news feels worse when unexpected, and some
lower their expectations to avoid a surprising disappointment.
In one experiment, researchers asked college
sophomores, juniors, and seniors to estimate their
starting salary for their first job at the beginning and
end of the spring term. Sophomores and juniors
showed no change, but seniors lowered their estimates.
They were the only group that would soon face reality.
People also shift their beliefs after the event, especially
if it was bad. They convince themselves that the
event was inevitable. For example, sports fans might
convince themselves that their team lost because the
umpire was biased. Such thoughts diminish the pain
by making the loss seem expected. To feel better about
negative events, people should remember that much
of life is unpredictable, and surprises should be
expected.
Barbara Mellers
See also Affect; Beliefs; Emotion; Expectations; Hindsight
Bias
Further Readings
Symbolic Interactionism———961
Mellers, B. A. (2000). Choice and the relative pleasure of
consequences. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 910–924.
Mellers, B. A., & McGraw, A. P. (2004). Self-serving beliefs
and the pleasure of outcomes. In J. Carrillo & I. Brocas
(Eds.), The psychology of economic decisions. Vol. 2:
Reasons and choices (pp. 31–48). New York: Oxford
University Press.
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Definition
Symbolic interactionism is a major theoretical perspective
in North American sociological social psychology
that studies how individuals actively define
their social reality and understand themselves by
interacting with others. Symbolic interactionism has
its origins in pragmatism, the American philosophy of
how living things make practical adjustments to their
surroundings. American sociologist and pragmatist
philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) is
generally identified as the founder of this theory,
although the term symbolic interactionism was actually
coined by Mead’s student, Herbert Blumer, who
formally articulated Mead’s ideas following his death.
Assumptions and Implications
According to symbolic interactionism, social reality is
not fixed and unchanging. Instead, people are continually
constructing (and reconstructing) the meaning of
their social lives through interacting with others. An
essential component of this creative interaction is the
use of symbols. Spoken or printed words are symbols,
as are many nonverbal gestures. Symbols in their various
forms are the basis of social life because they

962———Symbolic Interactionism
create a shared meaning in both the expresser and the
recipient. When socializing, people interpret others’
expressions and respond on the basis of this interpreted
meaning. However, the meaning of these words
and gestures may differ depending on the social context.
For example, the question “Do you want to spend
the night at my place?” may have a very different
meaning when spoken by a romantic partner rather
than by a platonic friend.
To understand others’ intentions during social
interactions, Mead argued that people engage in role
taking, which is imaginatively assuming the point of
view of others and observing their own behavior from
this other perspective. Mead believed that through
such symbolic interaction, humans cease being puppets
controlled by environmental strings and, instead,
become coactors who have control in creating their
social reality. Thus, unlike many social scientists who
believe that society dictates meanings to people, interactionists
believe that meaning emerges and is transformed
as people interact. Although society does
shape the conduct of its individual members, those
same individuals have the capacity to shape society by
redefining their social reality.
Reflected Appraisal and
Self-Development
Through symbolic interaction, individuals also develop
a sense of themselves as they learn to use symbols, but
this self-development occurs in stages. Mead asserted
that children become selves as they begin taking the
role of other people in their play activities. The roles
they adopt in the first stage of self development, the
play stage, are those of specific others, such as parents
and siblings, and they can only adopt one role at a
time. For example, after disobeying a family rule, a
young child may spontaneously adopt the perspective
of “Daddy” and reprimand himself or herself. Through
such role taking, children develop an understanding of
societal norms, and they develop beliefs about themselves,
which are largely a reflection of how they
believe others evaluate them. This reflected appraisal
is an important determinant of the beliefs and attitudes
that form people’s self-concepts. In other words, individuals
develop a sense of themselves as they learn to
see themselves the way they believe others see them.
As children mature, Mead stated that they learn to
take the role of many others simultaneously and, as a
result, the self becomes more cognitively complex. In
this second stage of self-development, the game stage,
they can engage in complex activities (often in the
form of games) involving the interaction of many
roles. An example of such role taking would be people
playing soccer. To play effectively, players must understand
how everyone on the field is related to one
another, and each player must cognitively adopt these
multiple roles simultaneously. Mead stated that as the
self becomes increasingly complex, older children
begin responding to themselves from the point of
view of not just several distinct others, but from the
perspective of society as a whole. By internalizing the
attitudes and expectations held by the larger society—
what Mead called the generalized other—the person
becomes a mature self.
Presentation of Self and Social Roles
The emphasis that symbolic interactionists place on
symbols, negotiated reality, and the ever-changing
social construction of society explains their interest in
the social roles people play. Erving Goffman, a prominent
theorist in this tradition, suggests that social life
is like a theatrical performance, with people behaving
like actors on stage playing prescribed roles. Goffman’s
approach is called dramaturgy, and it focuses on the
techniques people use to manage the impression they
make on others by carefully constructing and monitoring
their presented selves. According to Goffman, while
“on stage,” people act out “lines” and attempt to maintain
competent and appropriate presented selves. In observing
this performance, the audience generally accepts
the presented selves at face value and treats them
accordingly because to do otherwise would disrupt the
smooth flow of social interaction. Figuratively “booing”
performers off stage by rejecting their presented selves
typically occurs only when performers are so incompetent
that they cannot adequately play their roles.
Research Focus
Because symbolic interactionists view human societies
as consisting of actively created realities among individuals,
their research focuses on observable face-to-face
interactions. Furthermore, because symbolic interactionists
believe that social reality is continually being
modified, they tend to shift their focus away from stable
norms and values in society toward more fluctuating and
continually adjusting social processes. Regarding the
scientific methods employed by symbolic interactionists,
they tend to rely on participant observation, although
some interactionists employ surveys, interviews, and

experiments. This emphasis on participant observation
is based on the belief that close contact and immersion
in the everyday lives of participants is necessary for
understanding the meaning of actions, the definition of
the situation itself, and the process by which actors construct
the situation through their interaction. Symbolic
interactionists have been criticized for being overly subjective
and impressionable in their reliance on qualitative
methods, as well as being somewhat unsystematic
in their theoretical formulations. However, although
more quantitatively oriented social psychologists find
fault in this methodology, symbolic interactionists contend
that their approach allows them to watch behavior
in its “wholeness,” providing the full context in which to
understand it.
Stephen L. Franzoi
See also Interpersonal Cognition; Self; Self-Presentation;
Social Cognition; Sociological Social Psychology
Further Readings
Goffman, E. (1958). The presentation of self in everyday life.
Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh, Social Sciences
Research Centre.
Hewitt, J. P. (2003). Self and society: A symbolic
interactionist social psychology (9th ed.). Boston: Allyn
& Bacon.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Stryker, S. (1980). Symbolic interactionism: A structural
version. Caldwell, NJ: Blackburn Press.
SYMBOLIC RACISM
Definition
Symbolic racism is a form of prejudice that Whites in
particular hold against Blacks, although it is likely to
be held in some measure by other American ethnic
groups, and in principle some version of it may target
groups other than Blacks. Symbolic racism is usually
described as a coherent belief system that can be
expressed in several beliefs: that Blacks no longer face
much prejudice or discrimination, that Blacks’ failure
to progress results from their unwillingness to work
hard enough, that they make excessive demands, and
that they have gotten more than they deserve. The
theory of symbolic racism centers on four essential
propositions: (1) Symbolic racism has largely replaced
Symbolic Racism———963
old-fashioned racism, in that only a tiny minority of
Whites still accept the latter, whereas they are about
evenly divided about the beliefs contained in symbolic
racism; (2) symbolic racism now influences Whites’
political attitudes much more strongly than does oldfashioned
racism; (3) Whites’ opposition to racial policies
and Black candidates is more influenced by
symbolic racism than by realistic self-interest, defined
as threats posed by Blacks to Whites’ own lives; and
(4) the origins of symbolic racism lie in a blend of negative
feelings about Blacks, acquired early in life, with
traditional moral values. The label “symbolic” therefore
highlights its roots in abstract moral values rather
than in concrete self-interest or personal experience,
and its targeting Blacks as a group rather than as specific
Black individuals. The label “racism” reflects its
origins partly in racial antagonism.
Background
Symbolic racism has been the most influential form
of racial prejudice in American political life since the
civil rights era of the 1960s. Racial conflicts have
plagued the United States from its very beginnings,
driven in particular by prejudice against Blacks. At the
end of World War II, African Americans were secondclass
citizens, denied the pursuit of the American
dream socially, economically, and politically. Since
then, the Southern system of institutionalized Jim
Crow segregation has been eliminated, as has most
formal racial discrimination elsewhere. Old-fashioned
racism, embodying beliefs in the biological inferiority
of Blacks and support for formal discrimination and
segregation, has greatly diminished. However, African
Americans continue to experience substantial disadvantages
in most domains of life. A variety of government
race-targeted policies have addressed those
disadvantages, such as busing for racial integration,
affirmative action in university admissions, protection
of equal opportunity in hiring and promotion, and special
assistance in housing. These racial policies have
been greeted with much White opposition. One explanation
for that opposition is that some new form of
racism, such as symbolic racism (also known as modern
racism or racial resentment), has become influential
in contemporary politics.
Contemporary Politics
Research on symbolic racism finds it to be the most
powerful influence over Whites’ attitudes toward

964———Symbolic Self-Completion
racial issues and that it strongly influences Whites’
voting behavior in election campaigns that involve
Black candidates or racial issues. Its explanatory
power typically outweighs that of other important
political attitudes, such as conservative ideology,
preference for smaller government, or of more traditional
racial attitudes such as old-fashioned racism,
negative stereotypes, or pure anti-Black feelings.
This has even affected the politically crucial change
of the once solidly Democratic White vote in the
South to conservative Republican dominance. The
especially high levels of symbolic racism among
White Southerners and its especially strong influence
over their voting preferences seem to be leading factors
in that change.
The symbolic racism claim is an important one that
the politics of race are not merely politics as usual, but
that they are significantly distorted by the underlying
racial prejudice held by many racial conservatives,
with ostensibly race-neutral rhetoric often disguising
underlying racial animosity. Not surprisingly, then,
the theory has stimulated some heated criticism.
Criticism
Some conservatives say that racial prejudice has
become only a minor political force, and that the
theory of symbolic racism mistakenly treats ordinary
political conservatism as reflecting racial prejudice.
Its political effects might not be the result of racial
prejudice, but of unprejudiced conservatives’ aversion
to large, active government programs. However, symbolic
racism invariably has far greater power than
does ostensibly race-neutral conservatism in explaining
White opposition to racial policies, such as
affirmative action, when both are considered.
Critics on the political left say that symbolic racism
theory ignores the vested interest that Whites have in
maintaining their privileged position as the dominant
group in a racially hierarchical society. In their view,
symbolic racism is not the product of early acquired
prejudices, but is a way of rationalizing Whites’
defense of their own and their group’s privileges. But
considerable research shows that neither White opposition
to greater racial equality nor symbolic racism
stems to an important degree from Whites’ feelings
of personal racial threat, their degree of identification
with other Whites, or their perceptions that Blacks
threaten Whites’ interests.
Relevance
These controversies are of more than mere academic
relevance. They go to the substantive core of
America’s longest-running and most difficult social
problem. If the symbolic racism claim is right, much
remedial work of a variety of kinds needs to be done
on the White side of the racial divide. If it is wrong,
and racial conservatives’ views about the optimal relative
balance of governments and markets in modern
societies are largely free of underlying racial prejudice,
much obligation would be placed upon Blacks to
adapt to a society in which they no longer are being
treated much less fairly than other Americans.
David O. Sears
P. J. Henry
See also Discrimination; Political Psychology; Prejudice;
Racism; Stereotypes and Stereotyping
Further Readings
Sears, D. O., & Henry, P. J. (2005). Over thirty years later:
A contemporary look at symbolic racism. In M. P. Zanna
(Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology
(Vol. 37, pp. 95–150). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Sears, D. O., Sidanius, J., & Bobo, L. (Eds.). (2000).
Racialized politics: The debate about racism in America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Valentino, N. A., & Sears, D. O. (2005). Old times there are
not forgotten: Race and partisan realignment in the
contemporary South. American Journal of Political
Science, 49, 672–688.
SYMBOLIC SELF-COMPLETION
Definition
Symbolic self-completion refers to having or seeking
social symbols of achievement regarding a goal
important to one’s self-identity. R. A. Wicklund and
P. M. Gollwitzer’s symbolic self-completion theory
was based on the pioneering work of Kurt Lewin and
his collaborators. Wicklund and Gollwitzer posited
that once an individual commits to a goal, psychological
tension exists until the goal is achieved. If the
individual engages in a task to accomplish the goal but

is interrupted, the tension will motivate a return to the
task or to a substitute task that could also lead to goal
accomplishment. Personality psychologists, beginning
with Alfred Adler, proposed a similar notion of
substitutability in their concept of compensation, in
which the individual compensates for perceived deficiencies
through renewed efforts in either the domain
in which one feels inferior or in other domains that
could also broadly compensate for the deficiency.
Theory and Research
The theory proposes that when an individual is committed
to a self-defining goal, such as a role like physician
or an attribute like intelligence, that individual
will seek symbols of completeness, socially acknowledged
indicators that one has achieved that goal. For
example, a medical degree is one symbol of being a
physician and high scores on the Scholastic Aptitude
Test are symbols of intelligence. When an individual
has an ample supply of symbols regarding a particular
self-defining goal, he or she will not need to seek additional
symbols of completeness. However, if the individual
perceives a deficit in symbols, efforts will be
made to display symbols that restore completeness.
Two strategies have been used to test these ideas.
The first is to compare people with and without a
strong background of symbols of completeness. For
example, one study asked people with extensive and
limited educational backgrounds in their self-defining
domains to admit to mistakes in that domain. As symbolic
self-completion theory predicts, individuals with
limited educational backgrounds, being more incomplete,
were far more reluctant to admit mistakes.
The second strategy is to bring participants into the
lab and induce half of them to believe they are incomplete
with regard to a self-defining goal. In one study,
participants were asked to write about mistakes they
had made in a self-defining domain or in an unimportant
domain. The participants were then asked to write
a self-descriptive essay regarding the self-defining
domain. As the theory predicted, those led to feel
incomplete in the self-defining domain spent more time
writing the essay, presumably to restore completeness.
Theoretical implications
Symbolic self-completion theory provides insight into
goal striving and has been used to help explain the
desire for cosmetic surgery, impulsive shopping, and
subscription to particular magazines. The theory and
research also indicate that those who feel the least
adequate in an important domain may be most boastful,
least willing to admit mistakes, and most likely to
display degrees and awards. This suggests that people
should not judge the competence of a person based
solely on that person’s outward presentation of their
own qualifications and attributes. If one does so, one’s
judgments may be quite contrary to the truth.
Jeff Greenberg
See also Goals; Self-Affirmation Theory; Self-Presentation;
Self-Promotion
Further Readings
Wicklund, R. A., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1982). Symbolic selfcompletion
theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
SYSTEM JUSTIFICATION
System Justification———965
Definition
System justification refers to a social psychological
propensity to defend and bolster the status quo, that is,
to see it as good, fair, legitimate, and desirable. A consequence
of this tendency is that existing social, economic,
and political arrangements tend to be preferred,
and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged. System
justification refers, therefore, to an inherently conservative
tendency to defend and justify the status quo
simply because it exists, sometimes even at the expense
of individual and collective self-interest.
System Justification Theory
To understand how and why people accept and maintain
the social systems that affect them, social psychologists
have developed system justification theory. According
to system justification theory, people want to hold favorable
attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and
their own groups (group-justification), and they want to
hold favorable attitudes about the overarching social
order (system-justification). Importantly, system justification
theory holds that this motive is not unique to

966———System Justification
members of dominant groups, who benefit the most
from the current regime; it also affects the thoughts and
behaviors of members of groups who are harmed by it
(e.g., poor people, oppressed minorities, gays, and lesbians).
System justification theory therefore accounts
for counter-intuitive evidence that members of disadvantaged
groups often support the societal status quo
(at least to some degree), even at considerable cost to
themselves and to fellow group members.
Evidence for the
System Justification Motive
Several lines of research have documented the means
by which individuals engage in system justification.
First, sociologists and psychologists have identified
several distinct but related system-justifying ideologies
adopted by members of both advantaged and
disadvantaged groups in the service of rationalizing
the status quo, including the belief in a just world,
Protestant work ethic, meritocratic ideology, fair market
ideology, power distance, opposition to equality,
and political conservatism.
Second, evidence indicates that most people want to
perceive existing authorities and institutions as largely
benevolent and legitimate. The dominant tendency, at
least in the Western world, is for people to trust and
approve of their government, to restrict criticism of it,
and to believe in the fairness of their own system.
Similarly, most people disapprove of protest and radical
social change. Paradoxically, these tendencies are
(at least sometimes) most pronounced for members of
disadvantaged groups, who would have the most to
gain from the implementation of a new system.
Third, members of advantaged and disadvantaged
groups tend to internalize intergroup preferences that
reinforce and legitimate the existing social hierarchy.
Hundreds of studies have shown that members of
advantaged groups tend to exhibit ingroup favoritism
(preferences for their own kind), whereas members
of disadvantaged groups exhibit this tendency to a
much lesser extent and in many cases show outgroup
favoritism (preferences for others who are
more advantaged), especially but not exclusively on
implicit (nonconscious) measures of preference.
Outgroup favoritism among the disadvantaged maintains
the status quo by accepting rather than supplanting
existing forms of inequality.
Fourth, studies have also shown that consensual
stereotypes (as well as evaluations) are used to differentiate
between advantaged and disadvantaged groups
in such a way that the existing social order, with its
attendant degree of inequality, is seen as legitimate
and even natural. For example, members of low-status
groups are routinely stereotyped by themselves and
by others as less intelligent, competent, and hardworking
than members of high-status groups. At the
same time, complementary, off-setting stereotypes
also lead people to show increased support for the status
quo, insofar as such stereotypes maintain the belief
that every group in society benefits from the existing
social system. For example, individuals who are
exposed to “poor but happy,” “poor but honest,” “rich
but miserable,” and “rich but dishonest” stereotype
exemplars score higher on a measure of system justification
than do individuals who are exposed to noncomplementary
stereotype exemplars.
If there is indeed a psychological motive to defend
and justify the status quo, as system justification theory
suggests, then people should be especially likely
to exhibit the patterns of behavior described previous
when the legitimacy or stability of the social system is
threatened, as in the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Numerous studies have indeed shown that there
are increases in the endorsement of system-justifying
beliefs and ideologies and the use of evaluations and
stereotypes to differentiate between groups of unequal
status in response to threats directed at the status quo.
Consequences of System Justification
In accordance with the motivational perspective of system
justification theory, the successful rationalization
of the status quo is associated with reduced negative
affect and satisfaction of basic epistemic and existential
needs (e.g., uncertainty reduction, threat management)
for everyone in the system. However, the long-term
consequences of system justification can differ for
members of advantaged and disadvantaged groups.
Whereas members of advantaged groups experience
increased self-esteem and subjective well-being to the
extent that they engage in system justification, members
of disadvantaged groups who buy into the legitimacy
of the system suffer in self-esteem and subjective
well-being and hold more ambivalent attitudes about
their own group membership.
System justification may also have detrimental consequences
for society as a whole. Although there are
hedonic benefits associated with minimizing the unjust
and oppressive aspects of everyday life, processes of
rationalization inhibit the motivation to change and
improve the status quo, thereby undermining efforts to

eform society’s institutions and to redistribute social
and economic resources in a more just manner. By
highlighting the ways in which people consciously and
unconsciously defend and bolster the status quo, system
justification theory helps explain why acquiescence
in the face of injustice is so prevalent and why
social change is so rare and difficult to accomplish.
See also False Consciousness; Ideology; Political
Psychology; Prejudice
Further Readings
John T. Jost
Ido Liviatan
Jost, J. T., & Banaji, M. R. (1994). The role of stereotyping
in system-justification and the production of false
consciousness. British Journal of Social Psychology,
33, 1–27.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of
system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of
conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status quo.
Political Psychology, 25, 881–919.
Jost, J. T., & Hunyady, O. (2005). Antecedents and
consequences of system-justifying ideologies. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 260–265.
Kay, A. C., & Jost, J. T. (2003). Complementary justice:
Effects of “poor but happy” and “poor but honest”
stereotype exemplars on system justification and implicit
activation of the justice motive. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 85, 823–837.
SYSTEMS THEORY
See DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS THEORY
System Justification———967

TEASING
Teasing is central to human social life. In fact, in one
study of grade-school children, more than 96% of
respondents said they had been teased, and more than
50% admitted to teasing others. Teasing is as varied as
the people doing the teasing and being teased. Teasing
can be purely physical or verbal, and ranges widely in
its affiliative or hostile intent. People tease to socialize,
negotiate conflicts, flirt, and play. Empirical studies of
this pervasive social practice have yielded answers to
several intriguing questions.
Definition
A first question may be the most basic and most elusive
to answer: What is teasing? Empirical studies of teasing
lead to the following definition: Teasing is a behavior
designed to provoke a target through the use of playful
commentary on something relevant to the target. This
provocation can be verbal (a cutting remark) or physical
(an embarrassing gesture) and, by definition, threatens
the teaser’s and the target’s desired social identity,
or what some call “face.” If the tease is too harsh, the
target risks embarrassment or hurt feelings, and the
teaser risks looking overly aggressive. To minimize
these risks, teases are often accompanied by playful
behaviors designed to signal that the tease is not meant
to be taken too literally and that it is delivered, in part,
in the spirit of play. Some examples of these behaviors,
called off-record markers, include using a singsong
voice, exaggerated facial expressions, metaphors, and
T
969
unusual speed of delivery. Lastly, the tease is directed
at something relevant to the target: either a commentary
on the target himself or herself, the relationship between
the target and the teaser, or some object of interest to
the target. This definition helps clarify the differences
between teasing and other related behaviors. The most
common of these is bullying, which is a direct act of
hostility that lacks the playful markers that signal playful,
even affectionate, intent.
Occurrence
Equipped with a working definition of teasing, a second
question can be asked: When do people tease?
Observational studies in which researchers have documented
the occurrence of teasing in naturalistic contexts,
for example, in family dinner conversations or at
work, reveal that teasing usually occurs in response to
two kinds of social disturbances: norm deviations and
interpersonal conflicts. First, individuals often tease
others who have violated social norms. Elementary
school children have been observed teasing each other
for playing with classmates of the opposite sex or following
violations of gender norms. Parents sometimes
tease their children when they sulk or act selfishly.
Coworkers tease one another in response to violations
of the ethics and standards of the workplace.
Teasing often arises in a second context of social
tension: conflict. Studies have indicated that siblings
tease each other more during conflict situations,
friends are more likely to tease each other during discussions
of their conflicting goals and beliefs, and
coworkers are more likely to tease when addressing

970———Teasing
hot-button issues, such as allocation of office space.
Provocative and at times unpleasant, teasing in fact
serves important prosocial functions, enabling individuals
to signal and negotiate norm violations and
interpersonal conflict.
Variations in Contexts
Given that teasing socializes and figures in conflict
resolution, how then does it vary across different contexts?
The same tease, it seems on the surface, acquires
radically different meaning when delivered by superiors
rather than peers or in formal as opposed to informal
settings. Several studies have documented how
the nature of the social context influences the content
and meaning of a tease. Qualities of the relationship
between the teaser and the target, such as social power
and familiarity, have been found to influence teasing.
High-power individuals are less dependent on others
and are thus less concerned with the risks associated
with teasing. High-power individuals, it should come
as little surprise, are more likely to tease than lowpower
individuals, and they tease in a more hostile,
less playful manner. The degree of closeness between
teaser and target also affects teasing behavior, as individuals
are less concerned about saving face in front of
close others. As a result, people are more likely to tease
close others than strangers, and to do so in a more
direct manner. This may account in part for the ironic
tendency for teasing, although aggressive, to be a signal
of affection.
There also exist developmental differences in the
content and meaning of teasing. Teasing, by its very
nature, involves several capacities that develop with
age. Among these are the ability to understand nonliteral
communication and many of the playful tactics
used in teasing such as irony and sarcasm. As a result,
older children are more likely to tease than are younger
children, and to do so in a more subtle and sophisticated
manner. The content of teasing also changes with
age, as certain social norms become more or less
relevant. For example, possessiveness and aggression
are important topics for teasing in preschool, whereas
experimental behaviors related to sex and drug use are
focused on in adolescence and young adulthood.
Teasers
Who, then, is more likely to tease? Gender is one
important determinant of the frequency and content of
teasing. In general, men have been found to tease more
than women when interacting with same- and opposite-sex
friends as well as with children. Some studies
suggest that while men have been observed to tease in
more hostile and direct ways, women use more indirect
methods, such as social exclusion. Gender has also
been related to differences in teasing content, with men
teasing more about physical appearance and women
teasing more about the target’s relationships.
The personalities of the individuals involved also
shapes teasing in important ways. Highly agreeable
individuals, who report great warmth and cooperativeness,
tease less often in general, and when they do
tease, they do so in more affectionate, less hostile fashion.
In addition, Agreeableness has also been associated
with stronger feelings of remorse after teasing
someone. Highly extraverted individuals tease more
often and feel less empathy toward the target than do
those low in Extraversion. In addition, the target’s personality
and past history of teasing have been related to
reactions to being teased. Among individuals who have
been teasers themselves, individuals high on Agreeableness
and Extraversion respond more positively
to being teased than those low in Agreeableness and
Extraversion.
Research
The empirical study of teasing is relatively new, and
numerous questions await empirical answers. Current
research is systematically examining how culture shapes
the content and meaning of teasing. Studies within
development are exploring how teasing is involved in
language acquisition. Other studies are exploring how
individuals with deficits in the cognitive capacities
required of teasing understand teasing and tease themselves.
It looks as though high-functioning autistic
children have particular difficulties in seeing the playful
intent of teasing and generating playful teasing.
Still other lines of research are exploring how the teasing
of bullies goes woefully awry and how to intervene.
Continued research of these and other important
issues pertaining to teasing will continue to enhance
understanding and appreciation of this complex social
phenomenon.
See also Bullying; Conflict Resolution
Dacher Keltner
Maria Logli Allison

Further Readings
Keltner, D., Capps, L., Kring, A. M., Young, R. C., &
Heerey, E. A. (2001). Just teasing: A conceptual analysis
and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin,
127, 229–248.
Keltner, D., Young, R. C., Heerey, E. A., Oemig, C., &
Monarch, N. D. (1998). Teasing in hierarchical and
intimate relations. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 75, 1231–1247.
Kowalski, R. M. (2000). “I was only kidding!”: Victims’ and
perpetrators’ perceptions of teasing. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 231–241.
Kowalski, R. M. (2004). Proneness to, perceptions of, and
responses to teasing: The influence of both intrapersonal
and interpersonal factors. European Journal of
Personality, 18, 331–349.
TEMPORAL CONSTRUAL THEORY
Definition
Temporal construal theory is a general theoretical
framework that describes the effects of psychological
distance on thinking, decision making, and behavior.
Psychologically distant objects and events are those
beyond one’s direct experience of the here and now
and can be distant on a number of dimensions: time,
space, social distance (self vs. other, ingroup vs. outgroup),
and hypotheticality. A central proposition of
temporal construal theory is that psychologically distant
objects or events evoke mental representations, or
construals, that capture the general and essential features
of the objects or events (i.e., high-level construals),
whereas psychologically near objects or events
bring to mind unique, concrete, and incidental features
(i.e., low-level construals). The activation of highversus
low-level construals produces systematic differences
in individuals’ understanding of objects and
events, leading to changes in evaluation, judgment, and
action.
Background
Temporal construal theory (also referred to as construal
level theory) was originally proposed by Nira
Liberman and Yaacov Trope as an integrative framework
for understanding the effects of time on decision
making and behavior. Objects and events, however,
Temporal Construal Theory———971
can be distant not only in time but also in space, social
distance, and hypotheticality. As such, the theory has
since been expanded beyond time to incorporate these
other dimensions of psychological distance. The
term construal refers to the construction of knowledge
structures that represent objects or events in an individual’s
mind (i.e., how information is processed so
that an individual can think about and understand an
object or event).
When objects and events are psychologically
distant, less information is known about them. An
individual can learn about a dog, but without direct
experience, there is little to distinguish this particular
dog from other dogs. Without such information, individuals
can only think of objects and events in broad,
general terms (i.e., high-level construals). Thus, the
individual might know that the dog has four furry legs
and barks. As the objects and events become more psychologically
near, direct experience of these objects
and events becomes increasingly available. This
allows individuals to think about objects and events
in more concrete details, highlighting their specific,
unique, incidental features (low-level construals).
Through more direct experience, for example, an individual
might learn about the unique properties or
characteristics of a dog: the breed, specific coloration,
or temperament. This association between the psychological
distance of an object and its corresponding
level of construal is thought to be so ingrained that
respective construals are activated even when all
necessary information is available. That is, even if an
individual knows that a dog is called Fluffy and is a
white poodle, when the dog is psychologically distant
(e.g., far away in time or space), the individual is more
likely to think of the dog as a furry animal with four
legs rather than as Fluffy.
As high- and low-level construals bring to mind
different features of objects and events, they can systematically
change individuals’ decisions and behavior.
They can focus individuals on contrasting aspects
of a situation and lead to very different evaluations
and judgments of the same thing. Going on a vacation
in the abstract (high-level construal) may evoke images
of the beach and pleasant company. When psychologically
distant, going on a vacation should therefore
engender positive feelings. Going on a vacation, however,
more concretely (low-level construal) entails
making plans, dealing with travel agencies, and having
to bear the inconveniences of traveling. Thus,
when psychologically near, going on a vacation may

972———Temporal Construal Theory
evoke more negative evaluations. Hence, psychological
distance, through the activation of different
levels of construal, plays an important role in human
decision making and behavior.
Evidence
Empirical data have supported the proposition that
increasing psychological distance leads individuals to
construe objects and events more broadly and generally
(i.e., activate high-level construals). Research has
shown, for example, that individuals organize objects
associated with temporally distant events in fewer,
broader, and more abstract categories than objects associated
with temporally near events. Similarly, when
feeling socially distanced from others, individuals are
more accurate in recalling the gist rather than the
specifics of material that they have seen before. Individuals
are also more likely to access global, abstract
concepts, such as stereotypes and traits, when making
judgments about psychologically distant others,
whether they be distant by physical space, time, or
social distance.
There is also accumulating evidence that by changing
how individuals construe situations, psychological
distance can influence the kinds of judgments and decisions
individuals make. High-level construals, when
activated by increasing psychological distance, lead
individuals to be more concerned with high- rather than
low-level features of objects and events. That is, individuals
are more likely to make choices on the basis of
global, primary concerns over local, secondary considerations
when events are psychologically distant rather
than near. For example, increasing the temporal distance
of an event leads individuals to make decisions
more on the basis of ends (why they might engage in
an action) rather than means (how they would perform
an action). They also prefer activities that accord with
their goals and values to a greater extent when those
activities are associated with distant future rather than
near future events.
All of the research described here has suggested that
increasing any dimension of psychological distance—
time, space, social distance, or hypotheticality—leads
to similar effects on mental representation (i.e., activates
high-level rather than low-level construals) and
decision making (i.e., preferences and choices based
on high-level rather than low-level features). Providing
additional support for the notion that these various
dimensions of psychological distance are interrelated
is research that suggests that thinking about one type
of distance facilitates thinking about others. That is,
thinking about “here” leads one also to think about
“now” and “us,” whereas thinking about “there” leads
to thoughts of “then” and “them.”
Beyond Psychological Distance
The psychological distance of objects and events are
not the only factor that leads individuals to evoke
high- versus low-level construals. It has been found,
for example, that positive moods tend to activate higherlevel
construals as compared to negative moods. Moreover,
engaging in any mental process that leads one
to extract generalized properties of objects and events,
such as causal reasoning or superordinate categorization,
can activate high-level rather than low-level construals.
Construals can also carry over from unrelated
prior contexts. For example, imagining one’s life at a
distant location or distant time can lead individuals to
use high-level construals in subsequent contexts, even
those that had nothing to do with what one imagined.
In addition, there may be individual differences in
the use of high- versus low-level construals. That is, in
addition to situational factors, there may be personality
factors in the tendency to represent objects and
events at different levels of construal. Some individuals
may habitually use high-level construals, whereas
others tend to use low-level construals.
Importance
Individuals make decisions about objects and events
that are psychologically distant in almost every domain
of life. Indeed, the ability to make choices about objects
and events beyond one’s direct experience is one of the
hallmarks of the human mind. Despite this remarkable
ability, individuals are fallible decision makers, often
making decisions that seem good at the time but that
they later regret. Temporal construal theory provides a
general framework for understanding why and how this
occurs and has important implications for interventions
aimed at improving decision making. As such, the theory
has been applied to a wide array of research topics
in psychology that range from attribution, attitudes, and
self-control to interpersonal perception, social power,
and negotiation.
Kentaro Fujita
Yaacov Trope
Nira Liberman

See also Action Identification Theory; Actor–Observer
Asymmetries; Delay of Gratification; Ingroup–Outgroup
Bias; Outgroup Homogeneity; Self-Regulation
Further Readings
Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2003). Temporal construal.
Psychological Review, 110, 403–421.
TEND-AND-BEFRIEND RESPONSE
In times of stress, humans and many animal species
tend and befriend. Tending involves quieting and caring
for offspring during stressful times, and befriending
involves engaging the social network for help in
responding to stress.
Background
Threatening circumstances trigger a cascade of neuroendocrine
responses to stress, including engagement
of the sympathetic nervous system and
corticosteroids that mobilize a person or animal to
cope with stress. Consequently, stress responses are
heavily marked by physiological arousal. Historically,
the prototypical response to stress has been regarded
as fight or flight. That is, in response to a threat,
arousal mobilizes the person to behave aggressively or
assertively (fight), or flee or withdraw instead (flight).
Contemporary manifestations of fight responses in
humans assume the form of aggressive reactions to
stressful circumstances, and flight responses are often
manifested as social withdrawal or substance abuse,
as through alcohol or drugs.
Although fight or flight is somewhat descriptive
of human responses to stress, scientists have noted
that social affiliation distinguishes human responses
to stress as well, and it has long been known to protect
against the adverse changes in mental and physical
health that stress can produce. Social support
from a partner, relative, friend, or coworkers and
from social and community ties reliably reduces cardiovascular
and neuroendocrine stress responses and
psychological distress. Correspondingly, social isolation
has been consistently tied to poor health and a
higher risk of mortality in both animal and human
studies. Taken together, these findings may account
for the robust relations between social support and a
Tend-and-Befriend Response———973
lower likelihood of illness, faster recovery from illness,
and greater longevity.
Further refining of these social responses to stress
has led to the characterization “tend and befriend.”
That is, the fight-or-flight response seems incomplete
when one realizes that humans have few of the physical
resources necessary to do either (e.g., sharp claws,
speed). Instead, human survival has depended on
group living. From an evolutionary standpoint,
humans would not have survived had they not evolved
ways of coping with stress that involved the protection
of offspring from harm and group living to fend off
threats and predators.
Gender Differences
The tend-and-befriend response to stress appears
to be especially characteristic of females. Historically,
females have had primary responsibility for the care
of offspring, and consequently, the tend-and-befriend
responses may have evolved in females especially
in light of these selection pressures. That is, a female
stands a better chance of protecting both herself and
her immature offspring if she tends to those offspring
and enlists the help of the social group for protection
as well.
What is the evidence that tend-and-befriend characterizes
females’ responses to stress? Across the
entire life cycle, girls and women are more likely to
mobilize social support, especially from other
females in times of stress. Compared to men,
women seek out social contact more, they receive
more social support, they provide more social support
to others, and they are more satisfied by the
support they receive. Whereas men also draw on
social support, especially from their partners,
women seek more social support from a broader
array of sources, including friends and relatives, and
these findings are consistent across many different
cultures. The sex difference in women’s seeking of
social support in times of stress is modest in size but
very robust.
Research suggests that there may be biological
underpinnings of these tending and befriending
responses. In particular, oxytocin has been identified
as an affiliative hormone that is known to increase
maternal behavior and affiliative activity. Because the
effects of oxytocin are strongly enhanced by the
presence of estrogen, oxytocin has been thought to
have more important effects on the social behavior of

974———Territoriality
females than males. Although there is modest evidence
to date that oxytocin is implicated in these affiliative
processes under stress, studies do suggest that oxytocin
levels rise when women experience gaps in their
social network, potentially providing a neuroendocrine
basis for an increased desire to affiliate with others in
difficult times. Studies also show that oxytocin reduces
sympathetic nervous system arousal and corticosteroid
activity and that it is associated with reduced anxiety
and a sense of calm. Consistent with this point, tending
activities represent adaptive responses to stress,
not only because of the protection they provide for offspring
but also because tending quells biological stress
responses in both offspring and mother. Endogenous
opioid peptides, that is, opioids naturally produced by
the body, also appear to play a role in these tending and
befriending processes.
The exploration of the tend-and-befriend response
is a relatively new theoretical and empirical undertaking
for social psychologists. This is in large part
because, until recently, stress studies were based heavily
on animal studies and on males. As females have
been included in stress studies, the fact that their
responses to stress are more social than men’s has
come into focus. This gender difference must not be
overstated, however. Both men and women demonstrate
affiliative responses to stress, and men profit
from social support just as women do. Although oxytocin
may not play a role in men’s affiliative behavior
(because of its regulation by estrogen), possibly vasopressin,
a hormone similar to oxytocin that is regulated
in part by androgen, may be implicated. Vasopressin
appears to underpin male monogamous behavior, protection
of mate and offspring, and guarding of territory,
for example, in some rodent studies; however, whether
vasopressin plays a role in human behavior is not yet
known.
Shelley E. Taylor
See also Fight-or-Flight Response; Social Support; Stress and
Coping
Further Readings
Carter, C. S. (1998). Neuroendocrine perspectives on social
attachment and love. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 23,
779–818.
Hrdy, S. B. (1999). Mother nature: A history of mothers,
infants, and natural selection. New York: Pantheon Books.
Repetti, R. L., Taylor, S. E., & Seeman, T. E. (2002). Risky
families: Family social environments and the mental and
physical health of offspring. Psychological Bulletin,
128, 330–366.
Tamres, L., Janicki, D., & Helgeson, V. S. (2002). Sex
differences in coping behavior: A meta-analytic review.
Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6, 2–30.
Taylor, S. E. (2002). The tending instinct: How nurturing is
essential to who we are and how we live. New York:
Henry Holt.
TERRITORIALITY
Definition
Territoriality is a pattern of attitudes and behavior held
by a person or group that is based on perceived,
attempted, or actual control of a physical space, object,
or idea, which may involve habitual occupation, defense,
personalization, and marking of the territory. Marking
means placing an object or substance in a space to
indicate one’s territorial intentions. Cafeteria diners
leave coats or books on a chair or table. Prospectors
stake claims. Personalization means marking in a manner
that indicates one’s identity. Many employees decorate
their workspaces with pictures and mementoes.
Some car owners purchase vanity license plates. Territoriality
usually is associated with the possession of
some physical space, but it can also involve such
processes as dominance, control, conflict, security,
claim staking, vigilance, and identity. If a territory is
important to a person, his or her sense of identity may
be closely tied to it. Although it is sometimes associated
with aggression, territoriality actually is much
more responsible for the smooth operation of society
because most people, most of the time, respect the territories
of others.
Types of Territories
Territoriality is extremely widespread. Once you
recognize them, the signs of human territoriality are
everywhere: books spread out on a cafeteria table to
save a place, nameplates, fences, locks, no-trespassing
signs, even copyright notices. There are billions of
territories in the world; some are large, others small,
some are nested within others (such as a person’s “own”
chair within a home), and some are shared.

Primary territories are spaces owned by individuals or
primary groups, controlled on a relatively permanent
basis by them and central to their daily lives. Examples
include your bedroom or a family’s dwelling. The psychological
importance of primary territories to their owners
is always high.
Secondary territories are less important to their
occupiers than primary territories, but they do possess
moderate significance to their occupants. A person’s
desk at work, favorite restaurant, locker in the gym,
and home playing field are examples. Control of these
territories is less essential to the occupant and is more
likely to change, rotate, or be shared with strangers.
Public territories are areas open to anyone in good
standing with the community. Beaches, sidewalks, and
hotel lobbies are public territories. Occasionally, because
of discrimination or unacceptable behavior, public territories
are closed to some individuals. Retail stores,
for example, are public territories open to anyone.
However, someone who causes trouble may be banned
from a particular store.
The physical self may be considered as a body territory.
The boundary is at one’s skin. Bodies may be
entered with permission (as in surgery) or without permission
(as in a knife attack). Some people mark and
personalize their own bodies with makeup, jewelry, tattoos,
piercings, and clothing, but they certainly defend
and try to control access to their bodies by other people.
Two other types of territories exist, although they
are not universally considered territories. Objects meet
some of the criteria for territories—we mark, personalize,
defend, and control our possessions. Ideas are
also, in some ways, territories. We defend them through
patents and copyrights. There are rules against plagiarism.
Software authors and songwriters try to protect
ownership of their programs and songs.
Infringements
Even though territories usually work to keep society
hassle-free, sometimes they are infringed upon. The
most obvious form of infringement is invasion, in
which an outsider physically enters someone else’s
territory, usually with the intention of taking it from
its current owner. One obvious example is one country
trying to take the territory of another.
The second form of infringement is violation, a temporary
infringement of someone’s territory. Usually, the
goal is not ownership but annoyance or harm. Vandalism,
hit-and-run attacks, and burglary fall into this category.
Sometimes a violation occurs out of ignorance, as when
a boy who cannot yet read walks into a women’s washroom.
Other times the violation is deliberate, such as
computer pranksters worming their way into others’
machines. Violation may occur without the infringer personally
entering the territory. Jamming radio waves and
playing loud music are some examples.
The third form of infringement is contamination,
in which the infringer fouls someone else’s territory by
putting something awful in the territory. Examples
would be a chemical company leaving poisonous waste
in the ground for later residents to deal with, a houseguest
leaving the kitchen filthy, or pesticide spray drifting
into your yard.
Defenses
Territoriality———975
Just as there are a three general ways to infringe on
territories, there are three different types of defense.
When someone uses a coat, sign, or fence to defend a
territory, it is called a prevention defense. One anticipates
infringement and acts to stop it before it occurs.
Reaction defenses, on the other hand, are responses
to an infringement after it happens. Examples range
from slamming a door in someone’s face or physically
striking the infringer to court actions for copyright
violations.
The third type is the social boundary defense. Used
at the edge of interactional territories, the social boundary
defense consists of a ritual engaged in by hosts and
visitors. For example, you need a password to enter
many Web sites. Another example is the customs office
at the national border. Social boundary defenses serve
to separate wanted visitors from unwanted ones.
Territoriality in Everyday Life
One way territoriality has been used in everyday life
involves defensible space theory, sometimes called
crime prevention through environmental design. The
theory proposes that certain design features, such as
real or symbolic barriers to separate public territory
from private territory and opportunities for territory
owners to observe suspicious activity in their spaces,
will increase residents’ sense of security and make
criminals feel uneasy. It has been used widely to reduce
crime in residences, neighborhoods, and retail stores.
See also Control; Identity Status; Personal Space
Robert Gifford

976———Terrorism, Psychology of
Further Readings
Edney, J. (1974). Human territoriality. Psychological Bulletin,
81, 959–975.
Taylor, R. B. (1988). Human territorial functioning: An
empirical, evolutionary perspective on individual and
small group territorial cognitions, behaviors, and
consequences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
TERRORISM, PSYCHOLOGY OF
Terrorism is certainly the scourge of our times.
Considerable economic, military, political, and scientific
resources are devoted these days to the “war on
terrorism.” Psychological research is not only relevant
but also essential to understanding this issue. Indeed,
the psychology of terrorism has become one of psychology’s
major growth markets. Books and journals
on the topic have been published in unprecedented
quantities. Terrorists’ acts of self-destruction and their
indiscriminate killings of innocent civilians cry out
for a psychological explanation. But what explanations
has psychology provided? How do psychologists
analyze the phenomenon of terrorism? And how can
psychology help eradicate it?
What Is Terrorism?
Before answering these questions, it is important to
first describe what terrorism is. This is not an easy
task. Terrorism researchers have proposed over a hundred
different definitions of the phenomenon. Why is
it so hard to agree on a definition?
A major problem is that this term carries a negative
connotation. It is for that reason that one person’s terrorist
is another’s person freedom fighter. Thus,
applying the “terrorism” label to an act depends not
only on the act but also on who is applying the label.
The U.S. Department of State formally defines terrorism
as “premeditated, politically motivated violence
conducted in times of peace, perpetrated against
noncombatant targets by sub-national groups or clandestine
state agents, usually intended to influence an
audience to advance political ends.” This definition
contains a number of ingredients: For it to be called
terrorism, an act needs to be planned (“premeditated”),
to be politically motivated, to involve violence,
to be carried out in peacetime, to be directed
against civilians (i.e., “noncombatants”), and to
involve no government directly. Such a multidimensional
definition allows one to set terrorism apart from
(1) state-originated violence at times of war (e.g., the
bombings of German or Japanese cities during World
War II), (2) incidental killings of noncombatants
(so-called collateral damage), and (3) underground
resistance to occupation.
Terrorism as Syndrome Versus
Terrorism as Tool
Over the years, two psychological approaches to terrorism
have appeared. One approach treats terrorism
as a syndrome; the other treats it as a tool. The syndrome
view treats terrorism as a unique phenomenon
with its own psychology. From this perspective, terrorists
are considered different from nonterrorists.
They are assumed to differ not only in what they do,
but also in who they are, and why they do what they
do. In this respect, terrorism is considered akin to a
mental disorder, like depression or schizophrenia. The
syndrome view of terrorism also suggests that there
could exist external root causes of terrorism, such as
poverty or political oppression, which inevitably
breed terrorism.
In contrast, the tool view of terrorism does not
assume anything psychologically abnormal or
unique about terrorists. This view depicts terrorism
as a means to an end, a tactic of warfare that anyone
could use. It suggests that like the rocket launcher,
the tank, or the AK-47 assault rifle, terrorism may
be used by nonstate militias, state-sponsored military,
and even lone perpetrators. If one assumes that
terrorism is a means to an end, its psychology can be
well understood by general theory and research on
goals and motivations. Basically, this body of
knowledge has taught psychologists that a specific
means is used when a person considers it of a high
expected utility. That is, if a person wants to achieve
something, he or she is more likely to use a tool or
means, if it is seen as helpful to such attainment. If
it is so seen, the tool or means is considered to have
high expected utility. Moreover, a tool is particularly
high in expected utility if the thing the person
wants to achieve is important to him or her. Thus, to
the extent that a tool is highly helpful to the achievement
of important goals, it is said to have high psychological
utility.

What does this mean for the psychology of terrorism?
As the name implies, the tool view of terrorism
suggests that the tool of terrorism may, for some individuals
and under some circumstances, be particularly
high in expected utility. In such cases, terrorism may
be seen as helpful to the achievement of highly important
goals, and the actors involved may feel they have
no other means that are equally helpful. The goals of
the terrorists and their available means are of great relevance
for understanding the psychology of terrorism.
In light of these ideas, it may be possible to think of
various ways in which terrorism is used by different
organizations. Utopian Islamist groups, for example,
have doctrines and convictions that leave little room for
negotiation, dialogue, or peacemaking. For them terrorism
and violence represent the only available means.
Given such depth of commitment to violence, it is
unlikely that anything short of a total defeat will convince
the Utopian Islamists to give up their use of terrorism.
The situation is different for terrorism-users for
whom terrorism represents merely one among several
available instruments. Though not shy of using terrorism,
Hamas, Hezbollah, and Sinn Féin, for example,
have other means at their disposal (diplomacy, media
campaigns) as well as other goals (of a political or
social variety). All three have mitigated their use of terrorism
or withheld it for a time when alternative means
to their purpose appeared feasible or when other goals
existed to which terrorism appeared inimical.
In short, different organizations may differ in their
potential for relinquishing the use of terrorism. Whereas
negotiating with terrorists is unlikely to work with
terrorists whose commitment to terrorism is total, it
might work with terrorist groups who may entertain
alternative means and value alternative goals. On the
level of terrorist organizations, then, the terrorism-asa-tool
view helps to explain how terrorism could be
of use.
Root Causes Versus
Contributing Factors
What are the factors that lead individuals to embrace
the goal of terrorism? This question has been answered
in two ways. Some have tried to identify the root causes
assumed to underlie terrorist engagement, whereas others
have argued that there is no single root cause but
rather several contributing factors that may help motivate
an individual to embrace terrorism. The root cause
Terrorism, Psychology of———977
concept implies a factor that constitutes both a necessary
and a sufficient condition for some effect. The
concept of a contributing factor raises doubts about
whether any given personality trait, need, or situational
circumstance could constitute such a condition, inevitably
giving rise to terrorism. But if an individual were
presented with the idea of terrorism, traits, motivations,
and situational conditions might well affect the
likelihood of his or her embracing it.
Although it may be appealing to identify a single
cause for terrorist activity, research thus far has failed
to provide supportive evidence that such cause exists.
Early psychological investigations asked whether
terrorists are driven by some kind of psychological
disturbance. However, painstaking empirical research
conducted on various terrorist organizations didn’t reveal
anything particularly striking about the psychological
makeup of terrorists.
That does not mean that psychological factors do
not matter. Decades of psychological research have
demonstrated that motivation significantly affects
the tendency to embrace beliefs on various topics, and
beliefs in the efficacy and justifiability of terrorism are
no exception. Thus, individuals with appropriate motivations
(deriving from their stable personality traits or
situational pressures) might be more prone to endorse
terrorism under the appropriate circumstances than
might individuals with different motivations. In this
context, it has been found that whereas in Iran, mortality
salience enhanced support for suicide terrorism, in
the United States, it enhanced the support for tough
antiterrorist measures. In Lebanon, right-wing conservatism
predicted the support for terrorism, whereas in
the United States, it predicted the support for counterterrorism.
In other words, mortality salience and conservative
attitudes do not in and of themselves produce
terrorism. They are not the root causes of terrorism, but
in a social and cultural environment where terrorism
is viewed as an acceptable tool, they may contribute to
individuals’ endorsement of terrorism.
Research has also failed to find evidence for a
relation between poverty or education and terrorism,
although some investigators have found that many terrorists
come from countries that suffer from political
repression. However, from the standpoint of psychological
theory, there are reasons to doubt a general
causal link between either poverty or political repression
and terrorism. Presumably, the underlying logic of
such a hypothesized link is that poverty and oppression

978———Terrorism, Psychology of
foster frustration, fomenting aggression against others,
ergo terrorism. But in scientific psychology, the simple
frustration–aggression hypothesis has long been questioned.
Just because one is frustrated does not necessarily
mean that one would become a terrorist. Instead,
one could escape, withdraw, or aggress against self rather
than against others. Thus, again, poverty, lack of education,
and political repression may not be considered
root causes of terrorism. However, being deprived of
opportunities, and hence suffering and frustrated, may
be considered a contributing factor in the emergence of
terrorism.
Discouraging Terrorism
The tool view of terrorism suggests that terrorism may
particularly thrive in circumstances under which no
alternative tools are available to achieve one’s goals
and in which the individual has a strong conviction
that these goals are important to attain. According to
this view, discouraging terrorism amounts to convincing
the perpetrator that (a) this means is not of use to
achieve the goal, (b) there are alternative and better
means to achieve the goal, and (c) once terrorism is
chosen to achieve particular goals, it will be carried
out at the expense of other goals that may also be
worthwhile to attain.
Perceived Use of Terrorism
Though schematically simple, implementation of
these strategies is anything but that. A major difficulty
is that events are perceived differently by different parties.
Such perceptions are often biased by interests and
motivations. For example, throughout much of the second
intifada, about 80% of the Palestinian population
supported the use of terror tactics against the Israelis,
believing this to be an effective tool of struggle. By
contrast, the majority of the Israelis (85%) viewed
Palestinian terror as counterproductive. It seems plausible
to assume that the divergent motivations of Israelis
and Palestinians importantly colored their beliefs in this
matter.
Terrorism may be difficult to give up also because,
apart from presumably helping to achieve the ideological
(political, religious, ethnonationalistic) objectives
of the terrorist, it brings about the emotional satisfaction
of watching the enemy suffer. In that sense, terrorism
is multipurpose, adding up to its appeal or the
total value of objectives to which it appears of use.
Such counterterrorist policies as ethnic profiling, targeted
hits, or inadvertent collateral damage might further
enhance the terrorists’ rage, amplifying the emotional
goal of vengeance against the enemy. A recent empirical
analysis suggests that targeted hits by the Israeli
forces boosted the estimated recruitment to the terrorist
stock, presumably due to Palestinians’ revenge motivation.
Thus, whereas targeted hits do hurt the terrorist
organizations and may decrease the perceived efficacy
of terrorism, they may also increase the appeal of terrorism
by increasing the intensity of the emotional
goal it may serve.
Feasibility of Alternatives to Terrorism
Whereas alternative goals (such as revenge) may
increase terrorism’s appeal by increasing the total
expected utility of terrorism, perceived availability
of alternative means to the terrorism’s ends may
decrease it. Such availability brings about the possibility
of shifting to a different means and abandoning
terrorism, at least for a time. For instance, following
the election in 2005 of Mahmud Abbas to the presidency
of the Palestinian Authority and a renewed
chance for a peace process (i.e., an alternative means
potentially helpful to end the Israeli occupation), support
for suicide attacks among the Palestinians dipped
to its lowest in 7 years: a mere 27%.
Alternative Objectives
Discouraging people from using terrorism may also
be attained by making potential users of terrorism
aware of alternative objectives that do not fit well with
terrorism. In the Palestinian context, the opposition
to suicide attacks is particularly pronounced among
Palestinians likely to possess the means to alternative,
individualistic goals, for example, professional, family,
or material goals. Such opposition reached 71% among
holders of B.A. degrees compared to 61% among illiterates,
75% among employees compared to 62% among
students, and, curiously enough, 74% among individuals
willing to buy lottery tickets (i.e., individuals presumably
interested in material goals) compared to 64%
among those unwilling to buy them.
Arie W. Kruglanski
Mark Dechesne

See also Aggression; Frustration–Aggression Hypothesis;
Goals; Ideology; Mortality Salience; Peace Psychology;
Political Psychology
Further Readings
Crenshaw, M. (2000). The psychology of terrorism:
An agenda for the 21st century. Political Psychology,
21, 405–420.
Kruglanski, A. W., & Fishman, S. (2006). The psychology
of terrorism: Syndrome versus tool perspectives.
Terrorism and Political Violence, 18, 193–215.
McCauley, C. (2002). Psychological issues in understanding
terrorism and the response to terrorism. In C. Stout (Ed.),
The psychology of terrorism: Vol 3. Theoretical
underpinnings and perspectives (pp. 3–30). Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press.
TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY
Definition
Terror management theory is an empirically supported
theory developed to explain the psychological functions
of self-esteem and culture. The theory proposes
that people strive to sustain the belief they are significant
contributors to a meaningful universe to minimize
the potential for terror engendered by their awareness
of their own mortality. Cultures provide their members
with meaning-imbuing worldviews and bases of selfesteem
to serve this terror management function.
Background
Former University of Kansas graduate student colleagues
Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom
Pyszczynski developed terror management theory in
1984. These social psychologists were searching for
answers to two basic questions about human behavior:
Why do people need self-esteem? Why do different
cultures have such a difficult time coexisting peacefully?
The trio found potential answers to these questions
in the writings of anthropologist Ernest Becker.
Becker integrated insights from psychoanalysis, psychology,
anthropology, sociology, and philosophy into
a framework for understanding the motives that drive
human behavior. Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski
Terror Management Theory———979
designed terror management theory to summarize,
simplify, and elaborate Becker’s scholarly synthesis
into a unified theory from which they could generate
new testable hypotheses regarding the psychological
functions of self-esteem and culture, and thereby
address the two basic questions they originally posed.
The Theory
Terror management theory begins with two simple
assumptions. The first is that, being evolved animals
with a wide range of biological systems serving survival,
humans have a strong desire to stay alive. The
second is that, unlike other animals, humans have
evolved cognitive abilities to think abstractly; to think
in terms of past, present, and future; and to be aware
of their own existence. Although these cognitive abilities
provide many adaptive advantages, they have led
to the realization that humans are mortal, vulnerable
to all sorts of threats to continued existence and that
death, which thwarts the desire to stay alive, is inevitable.
According to the theory, the juxtaposition of the desire
to stay alive with the knowledge of one’s mortality
creates an ever-present potential to experience existential
terror, the fear of no longer existing. To keep
the potential terror concerning mortality at bay,
people need to sustain faith in a meaning-providing
cultural worldview and the belief they are significant
contributors to that meaningful reality (self-esteem).
By psychologically living in a world of absolute meaning
and enduring significance, people can obscure the
possibility that they are really just transient animals in
a purposeless universe destined only to absolute annihilation
upon death.
The terror management functions of worldviews
and self-esteem emerge over the course of childhood.
Parents are the initial basis of security for the small
vulnerable child and convey the core concepts and
values of the prevailing cultural worldview. Throughout
socialization, religious, social, and educational institutions
reinforce and further elaborate this worldview.
As part of this process, parents impose conditions of
worth on the child that reflect the culture’s customs
and standards of value. These conditions must be met
to sustain the parental love and protection and, later,
the approval of one’s peers, teachers, and cultural
ideals and authority figures. In this way, believing
in and living up to the values of the culture confer
self-esteem and become the individual’s basis of

980———Terror Management Theory
psychological security. As the child matures, the limits
of the parents become apparent and the basis of
security gradually shifts to the culture’s broader spiritual
and secular ideals and figures. Each cultural
worldview offers its own bases of self-esteem, such
that what bolsters self-esteem in one culture might not
in another.
The most obvious examples of how worldviews
provide the basis for terror management are religious
worldviews such as Christianity and Islam, in which
one’s earthly purpose is to serve one’s deity, after
which those who have been true to the teachings of the
deity will be rewarded with eternal life. Indeed, a spiritual
dimension and concept of eternal soul had been
central to all known cultures until the rise of sciencebased
secular worldviews in the 19th and 20th
centuries. These forms of literal immortality (or death
transcendence) are supplemented by symbolic modes
of immortality offered by secular components of culture.
Symbolic immortality can be achieved in modern
society through identification with collectives and
causes that transcend individual death, such as one’s
nation; it can also be achieved through offspring,
inheritances, memorials, and many forms of cultural
achievement in the arts and sciences (novels, paintings,
sculptures, discoveries, etc.). Thus, as a result of the
socialization process, people everywhere live out their
lives ensconced within a culturally derived orderly and
meaningful construal of reality in which they strive to
be significant beings qualified for transcendence of
death through an eternal soul and/or permanent contributions
to the world.
Terror Management Theory
and Social Behavior
Terror management theory can help explain much of
what has been learned about humans from history and
the social sciences. People by and large conform to
their culture’s ways, following its norms and obeying
authorities. People vehemently defend their cherished
beliefs and rituals. Religious, governmental, and educational
institutions reinforce cultural beliefs and values
in myriad ways. Cultural belief systems provide
explanations of where the world and humans come
from, what humans should strive for, and how humans
will persist in some form after individual death.
The theory answers basic questions about selfesteem
and intercultural disharmony. Self-esteem, the
belief that one is a valuable member of a meaningful
universe, serves to minimize anxiety concerning one’s
vulnerability and mortality. This view of self-esteem
can help explain why those with high self-esteem fare
much better in life than those with low self-esteem
and why threats to self-esteem engender anxiety, anger,
and defensive reactions, ranging from self-serving
attributions to murder.
The theory also offers an explanation for what
is perhaps humankind’s most tragic flaw: people’s
inability to get along peacefully with those different
from themselves. People who subscribe to a different
cultural worldview call into question the validity of
one’s own, thus threatening faith in one’s own basis
of security. To minimize this threat, people derogate
those with different beliefs, perhaps labeling them
“ignorant savages”; try to convert them, as in missionary
activity; or, in extreme historical cases such
as Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union, try to
annihilate them.
Research
Since its initial development, a body of more than 250
studies conducted in 14 different countries has supported
terror management theory. Prominent contributors
to this research in addition to the codevelopers
of the theory include Linda Simon, Jamie Arndt,
Jamie Goldenberg, Victor Florian, Mario Mikulincer,
Mark Dechesne, Eva Jonas, and Mark Landau.
The first research based on the theory tested the
idea that self-esteem protects people from anxiety.
A series of studies showed that when people feel
really good about themselves, they can deal with
potentially threatening situations in an especially
calm manner. One such study showed that when
people are given a very favorable report regarding
their personality, they perspire less while anticipating
exposure to painful electric shocks. Follow-up
research found that high self-esteem is particularly
protective regarding death-related concerns.
Subsequent studies examined the idea that if selfesteem
protects people from their concerns about
death, making people think about their own mortality
(known as mortality salience [MS]) should lead them
to defend their self-esteem more fervently and
strive harder to exhibit their worthiness. For example,
research has shown that MS leads people who base
their self-esteem partly on their driving ability to drive
more boldly, those who base it partly on physical
strength to display a stronger hand grip, and those

who base it on their appearance to become more interested
in tanning. In addition, MS leads people to give
more generously to valued charities, to strengthen their
identification with successful groups, and to reduce
their identification with unsuccessful groups.
The other general terror management idea tested
early on was that MS would lead people to strongly
defend and uphold the beliefs and values of their own
worldview. Using a variety of approaches, more than
100 studies have supported this idea. The first such
study found that MS led municipal court judges to set
higher bonds for an alleged prostitute in a hypothetical
but realistic case. Many subsequent studies have supported
the idea that MS increases harsh judgments of
others who transgress the morals of one’s worldview.
But MS also increases favorable treatment of those who
uphold the worldview, such as heroes. Furthermore, MS
increases favorable reactions to others who praise or
otherwise validate one’s worldview and intensifies
negative reactions to others who criticize or otherwise
dispute the validity of one’s worldview. For example,
a study using American participants found that MS
increased positive reactions to a pro-U.S. essayist and
negative reactions to an anti-U.S. essayist. Similarly,
a study using Christian participants found that MS
engendered positive reactions to a fellow Christian and
negative reactions to a Jewish person.
These studies have reminded people of their mortality
in a variety of ways and in comparison with
many control conditions. Reminders of mortality have
included two questions about one’s own death, gory
accident footage, death anxiety scales, proximity to
funeral homes and cemeteries, and exposure to
extremely brief subliminal flashes of death-related
words on a computer screen. Control conditions have
reminded participants of neutral topics such as television,
and aversive topics such as failure, worries after
college, uncertainty, meaninglessness, pain, and social
exclusion. These findings support the specific role of
mortality concerns in MS effects.
Once support for these basic terror management
hypotheses had accumulated, a variety of additional
directions were pursued. One body of research explored
the processes through which thoughts of death produce
their effects. This research has shown these effects do
not occur while people are consciously aware of deathrelated
thoughts and are not triggered by consciously
experienced emotion. Rather, thoughts of death that
are outside of but close to consciousness signal heightened
potential for anxiety, which triggers intensified
Terror Management Theory———981
efforts to bolster the worldview and one’s self-esteem.
This work shows that cultural investments and selfesteem
striving often serve existential needs outside of
conscious awareness.
Another set of studies has examined the effects of
MS on basic ways in which people preserve their
sense that life is orderly and meaningful. This work
shows that MS leads people to increase their preference
for believing that the world is a just place, for art
that seems meaningful, and for people who behave
consistently and who conform to prevailing stereotypes
of their group. Thus, concerns about mortality
help shape people’s basic beliefs about their world.
Recent work in the political realm has shown that
MS leads people to prefer charismatic leaders who
emphasize the greatness of one’s own group and
the need to heroically triumph over evil. Because of
this latter tendency, MS increases support for violent
actions against those designated by one’s culture as
evil. One study found that although Iranian college
students generally were more favorable to a fellow student
who advocated peaceful strategies over one who
advocated suicide bombings of American targets, after
being reminded of their mortality, this preference
reversed, with the students generally siding more with
the advocate of suicide bombing. Similarly, although
American college students were generally not supportive
of extreme military actions against terrorists (including
use of nuclear weapons) that would kill many
innocent people, MS led politically conservative students
to shift toward advocacy of such measures.
Research has also addressed the implications of the
theory for people’s attitudes toward their own body
and its activities. The physical body is what dooms
humans to death and is therefore a continual reminder
of mortal fate. MS should therefore lead people to
distance from reminders of their animal nature.
Consistent with this idea, studies have shown that
MS reduces the appeal of physical aspects of sex and
increases disgust reactions to reminders of the body.
MS also leads men to deny attraction to women who
arouse lustful feelings in them. This body of work helps
explain why all cultures try to control and disguise
bodily activities, imbuing them with ritualistic and
spiritual elements.
Although MS increases wariness about physical
aspects of sex, the theory also posits that romantic
relationships serve a valuable terror management
function. Love relations serve terror management by
helping people feel that their lives are meaningful and

982———Testosterone
that they are valued. Love relationships may also
provide a fundamental source of comfort because, as
attachment theory proposes, they hark back to the
earliest security-providing relationships with one’s
parents. In support of these ideas, a substantial body
of research has shown that MS increases the desire for
close relationships and appreciation of one’s romantic
partner. In addition, threat to a relationship brings deathrelated
thought close to consciousness.
Implications
Terror management research indicates that concern
about mortality play a significant role in prejudice
and investment in cultural stereotypes of women and
minority groups. This work suggests a variety of measures
that could help reduce intergroup violence, prejudice,
and discrimination. Reducing the salience of
mortality could be helpful. This would be difficult in
places where violence is already prevalent but could
be accomplished by minimizing actions likely to
increase focus on death, whether by terrorists or
military forces. The mass media could also play a role
given the prevalence of reminders of death in news
reports, films, and television shows.
A second possibility is to alter the cultural worldviews
in which we embed our children. Studies show
that worldviews that are more global and that more
strongly advocate tolerance of diverse beliefs and
customs should reduce the propensity for feeling
threatened and needing to defend against those with
different customs and beliefs. Worldviews and cultural
practices that reduce the fear of death, such as
death awareness courses in schools, could also be
helpful. Addressing the matter of our mortality in a
thoughtful, conscious manner may encourage more
constructive approaches to coping. Indeed, preliminary
research suggests that extensive contemplation
of death, long practiced in some forms of Buddhism,
may actually promote tolerance rather than punitiveness
toward others who do not conform to the dictates
of one’s own worldview.
The theory has implications for individual mental
health as well as intergroup harmony. People should
function securely in their daily lives as long as they
have strong faith in a meaning-providing worldview
and believe they are significant contributors to that
meaningful world. This suggests that buttressing
these psychological resources should be an important
goal for psychotherapists. This goal should also
be embraced by educators and policy makers, for
the culture at large provides the critical bases for
viewing life as meaningful and oneself as significant.
If the standards for significance offered by a
culture are too narrow, too stringent, or too unavailable
for many individuals or for certain minority
groups within a culture, mental health problems,
alternative subcultures, and drug abuse are likely to
be prevalent.
The knowledge of mortality is a difficult problem
that has haunted humanity since its emergence. Terror
management theory offers insights into the productive
and destructive ways people cope with this problem
and thereby offers a psychological basis for considering
potential avenues for optimizing modes of death
transcendence.
Jeff Greenberg
See also Attachment Theory; Culture; Intergroup Relations;
Mortality Salience; Prejudice; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Becker, E. (1974). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.
Greenberg, J., Koole, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (Eds.). (2004).
Handbook of experimental existential psychology. New
York: Guilford Press.
Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., & Pyszczynski, T. (1997). Terror
management theory and research: Empirical assessments
and conceptual refinements. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 29,
pp. 61–139). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2003). In the
wake of September 11: The psychology of terror.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (1991).
A terror management theory of social behavior: On the
psychological functions of self-esteem and cultural
worldviews. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in
experimental social psychology (Vol. 24, pp. 93–159).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
TESTOSTERONE
Definition
Testosterone is a hormone that is responsible for
the development and maintenance of masculine

characteristics. Testosterone is released into the
bloodstream by the testes (testicles) in males and to
a lesser extent, by the adrenal cortex and ovaries in
females. Not only does testosterone influence the
growth and development of masculine physical
characteristics, such as the penis and the beard, but
testosterone is also related to masculine psychological
characteristics and social behaviors, including
aggression, power, sexual behavior, and social dominance.
In addition, social experiences such as competition
can cause testosterone levels to rise or fall.
Background and History
The history of testosterone research dates back to
ancient times, when farmers observed that castrated
animals (animals whose testes had been removed)
were not very aggressive and had low sex drives.
Castrated humans showed similar changes in
behavior.
In 1849, German scientist Arnold Berthold conducted
the first formal experiment involving testosterone.
It was already known that when chickens were
castrated during development, they became more
docile than normal roosters. These castrated chickens,
called capons, did not fight with others and did not
show normal mating behavior. But when Berthold
implanted testes from other birds into the abdomen of
these capons, they developed into normal roosters.
Berthold concluded that the testes must influence
aggression and sexual behavior by releasing a substance
into the bloodstream.
In 1935, Dutch researchers identified this substance,
a hormone that they named testosterone.
Later that same year, another group of researchers
developed a method for producing testosterone from
cholesterol. Through the development, in the 1960s,
of a method called radioimmunoassay, researchers
were able to measure the amount of testosterone circulating
in the bloodstream, and shortly after that, a
technique was developed to measure testosterone
levels in saliva. The ability to measure testosterone
levels through saliva rather than blood has made it
easier and more practical to conduct research in
humans.
Effects
Testosterone exerts its effects during three different
life stages: the perinatal period (which includes
pregnancy and the period shortly after birth), puberty,
and adulthood.
Perinatal Period
During the perinatal period, testosterone influences
the development of the sexual organs (e.g., the penis).
Animal studies show that high testosterone levels during
the perinatal period also cause the nervous system
to develop in a more malelike way and cause more
masculine adult behaviors. The evidence in humans
for the effects of testosterone during the perinatal
period is less clear. Some human studies have actually
found an effect of perinatal testosterone in females but
not in males. For example, high perinatal testosterone
levels in females are associated with more masculine
behaviors in early childhood and with more masculine
personality traits, such as sensation seeking and emotional
stability, in adulthood.
Puberty
Testosterone levels rise during puberty, and this
rise is related to the deepening of the voice, muscle
growth, facial and body hair growth, and increased
sex drive. There is also evidence in animals that a rise
in testosterone level at the beginning of puberty influence
competitive behaviors, including aggression and
dominance, although scientists are not sure whether
this relationship exists in humans.
Adulthood
Testosterone———983
Across a number of animal species, high testosterone
concentrations in adult males are associated
with high sex drive, and seasonal rises in testosterone
(e.g., during the breeding season) are related to an
increase in sexual behaviors. In humans, testosterone
increases sex drive and sexual behaviors among men
with abnormally low levels of testosterone but not
among men who already have testosterone levels
within the normal range.
Adult levels of testosterone are also associated
with aggression and competition over food and mates.
In animals, seasonal rises in testosterone (e.g., during
the breeding season) are associated with increases
in aggression and mate competition. There is also a
small relationship between testosterone and aggression
in humans. For example, several studies of male
and female prisoners have found that prisoners with

984———Thematic Apperception Test
higher testosterone commit more violent crimes and
break more rules in prison.
Testosterone is also related to power and social
dominance. Animals with high testosterone levels
tend to have high social rank within status hierarchies.
In humans, high testosterone levels are associated
with more masculine, dominant facial characteristics
and with personality styles that are related to power
and dominance. In addition, individuals with high
testosterone levels are more reactive to and pay more
attention to threats to their status, such as losing in a
competition. For example, one study found that individuals
with high testosterone levels felt badly (e.g.,
irritable, hostile) and could not concentrate after they
lost in a competition but felt fine and could concentrate
quite well after they won in a competition.
Changes in Levels
Testosterone levels can change in both the short term
and the long term. In humans, testosterone levels peak
in the late teens to early 20s and decline slowly but
steadily after that. Testosterone levels also change
throughout the day: They are highest in the morning,
drop over the course of the day, and rise again in the
evening. In a number of animal species, there are seasonal
changes in testosterone, and testosterone levels
are typically highest during the breeding season.
Social experiences can also cause testosterone levels
to change. In animals and in humans, winners of
competitions tend to increase in testosterone, whereas
losers tend to drop in testosterone. In addition, testosterone
can increase in response to sexual stimuli, such
as the presence of a female.
Gender Differences
Most of the research on testosterone has focused on
men, but more studies have begun examining women.
Although women have only about one-seventh the
testosterone levels as men, testosterone still seems to
play a role in women. For example, research has found
that women with higher testosterone levels tend to
smile less often, score higher on tests of social dominance,
and are more vulnerable to stereotype threat.
Pranjal Mehta
Robert Josephs
See also Aggression; Dominance, Evolutionary; Hormones
and Behavior; Sex Drive
Further Readings
Archer, J. (2006). Testosterone and human aggression: An
evaluation of the challenge hypothesis. Neuroscience and
Biobehavioral Reviews, 30, 319–345.
Dabbs, J. M., & Dabbs, M. G. (2000). Heroes, rogues, and
lovers: Testosterone and behavior. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Mazur, A., & Booth, A. (1998). Testosterone and dominance
in men. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 353–397.
THEMATIC APPERCEPTION TEST
Definition
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a psychological
assessment device used to measure an individual’s
personality, values, or attitudes. The TAT is a projective
test that is made up of 30 pictures that show persons in
black and white, engaged in ambiguous activities. The
test may be adapted for adults and children, males or
females by using particular cards within the set. The
test taker is asked to make up a story, telling what led
up to the scene in the picture, what is happening at the
current moment, how the characters are thinking and
feeling, and what the outcome will be.
The original purpose of the TAT was to assess
Henry Murray’s need theory of personality. Currently,
clinicians or researchers use it more generally to assess
personality, attitudes, and values.
Background and History
The TAT is based on the projective hypothesis.
Projective tests assume that the way that a test taker
perceives and responds to an ambiguous scene reveals
inner needs, feelings, conflicts, and desires. The
responses are a “projection” of the self and are thought
to be indicative of an individual’s psychological functioning.
This type of testing was influenced by
Freudian thought and theories and became popular in
the 1940s.
Projective tests have been used in psychological
testing since the 1940s and remain popular in clinical
settings. They have been criticized, however, for having
poor reliability and validity. While the tests seem
to generally reflect a participant’s feelings or personality,
they are also potentially influenced by other
variables. In particular, there is a lot of random error

introduced into these tests. The participant can be
influenced by temporary states, such as hunger, sleep
deprivation, drugs, anxiety, frustration, or all of these
things. The results could be influenced by instructional
set, examiner characteristics, the respondent’s
perception of the testing situation, or all three elements.
Finally, ability factors influence all projective
tests, particularly verbal ability. A meaningful interpretation
of projective tests must consider all of these
factors.
The TAT is the most popular projective test after
the Rorshach Inkblot Test, and when scored using the
standardized procedure developed by Bellak or used
for well-defined constructs such as achievement motivation
or affiliation, it is fairly reliable and valid.
The TAT was developed as measure of Henry
Murray’s need theory. Murray proposed a set of psychological
needs that determined personality. He also
defined common environmental forces—presses—
which acted on personality and behavior. Murray
believed that the projective responses to the ambiguous
TAT cards would reveal an individual’s needs and
presses. Currently, the TAT is used in clinical as well
as research settings to measure personality constructs.
In social psychology the TAT might be used to assess
individual differences in relating to others within social
settings or groups.
Elizabeth K. Gray
See also Need for Affiliation; Projection; Research Methods
Further Readings
Bellak, L., & Abrams, D. M. (1996). The T.A.T., C.A.T., and
S.A.T. in clinical use (6th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
THEORY OF MIND
Definition
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to humans’ everyday
mind reading. It is the commonsense ability to
attribute mental states (such as beliefs, desires, and
intentions) to one’s self and to other people as a way
of making sense of and predicting behavior. For
example, your thought that “John thinks I ate his sandwich”
reflects a basic understanding that John has
internal mental states much like your own, though the
Theory of Mind———985
specific content of those mental states may differ from
your own (in this case, perhaps you believe that Mary
ate John’s sandwich). ToM is fundamental to everyday
social life: Normally it is taken for granted that others
have beliefs and desires and that they act in accordance
with those mental states; furthermore, it is
assumed that other people use their ToM to think
about another’s mental states (e.g., “John believes that
I intend to make him believe that I didn’t crave his
sandwich”). Although potatoes and houseflies are
considered incapable of these complex forms of
thought, it is less obvious whether or not other mammals
and birds have a ToM. The emerging consensus
on this issue is that other species have either highly
limited or, more often the case, no ToM abilities resembling
those of humans. Therefore, ToM may be one of
the crucial attributes that make humans human and
distinguish humans’ social lives from the experience
and behavior of all other social animals. Also, among
humans, it is possible that newborn babies do not have
a ToM, and so child psychologists are very interested
in understanding when and how children acquire this
ability.
Background
The term ToM was coined by primatologists David
Premack and Guy Woodruff, who were interested in
whether chimpanzees could use abstract concepts such
as desire and memory to interpret others’ behavior.
Although the matter remains controversial, ToM capabilities
appear to be uniquely human. Other species
may communicate with elaborate signaling and vocalizations,
but they are probably not drawing on a rich
understanding of mental states and how they influence
behavior. Their social interactions might be characterized
in the same way as your interaction with a vending
machine:You do such-and-such, this thing responds
in a useful and predictable way, but you don’t necessarily
believe that it thinks, feels, or has any intentions
of its own.
Basic Research
In addition to primatologists, scholars in diverse disciplines
have taken an interest in ToM. Evolutionary
psychologists have noted that the evolution of human
language and social cooperation may have built on
ToM. That is, without ToM, human language probably
would not have developed into its present state. Some

986———Theory of Mind
philosophers contend that ToM figures centrally in
human consciousness, since the appreciation that
one’s perception of the world may differ from others’
requires knowing that one knows (i.e., metacognition).
The most extensive ToM research comes from developmental
psychologists. ToM may seem like a perfectly
obvious and basic capacity, but humans are not
born with it. As the psychologist Jean Piaget noted,
young children have difficulty appreciating that their
construal of reality may not be shared by everyone.
Gradually they begin to understand that their mental
states are unique to their perspective and begin to
represent others’ perspectives based on knowledge of
their mental states. ToM is often assessed in children
using a false belief task: Show a child that a container
labeled “lollipops” actually contains pencils rather
than the expected candy. Ask the child what someone
else who has not seen the contents of the container
will think it contains. Most 3-year-olds incorrectly
predict “pencils,” whereas most 4-year-olds predict
“lollipops.” Passing this test requires thinking through
what another person would think given knowledge
that differs from one’s own.
Implications for Everyday Life
Everyday social activities—communicating, navigating
public spaces, or outsmarting a basketball opponent—
depend crucially on everyday mind reading. How fundamental
ToM is to everyday social life isn’t realized
until seeing cases where it is impaired. This seems to
be the case with autistic individuals, who lack normal
social insight and communication skills in part
because of selective deficits in the capacity to reason
about others’ mental states. The following are some
everyday social phenomena involving ToM.
Communication
In normal, reciprocal communication, a person uses
ToM to monitor whether the person and his or her
communication partner are still attending to the same
topic, to shift topics, and to discuss imaginary or hypothetical
situations. ToM is also instrumental in understanding
subtle or indirect meanings, such as those
conveyed through sarcasm, humor, and nonverbal communication
(e.g., facial expressions). Conversely, everyday
types of miscommunication occur when people
fail to take into account each other’s perspective. For
example, you might be confused if a friend called and
abruptly announced, “I refuse to do that!” because she
has failed to think through what knowledge is only in
her head and what knowledge is mutually shared, or
common ground.
Persuasion
The ability to reason about what others think, and
how certain messages are likely to affect attitudes, is
critical for influencing beliefs and actions. For example,
if you attempted to use persuasion to influence
your boss’s attitude about the importance of conserving
water, you would need to adopt his or her point of
view and to anticipate his or her reactions to your persuasive
appeal. On a similar note, effectively deceiving
someone, from telling a white lie to staging an elaborate
ruse, demands that the deceiver see the world
through another’s eyes. It would be quite impossible to
tailor a persuasive or deceptive message without first
appreciating what others already know, want, or feel.
Empathy and Helping
Imagine seeing someone struggling to open a door
while negotiating six bags of groceries and three
children. Would you offer help even if there was nothing
in it for you? According to Daniel Batson, if you
empathize with the person—that is, vicariously experience
the person’s suffering—you will be likely to
help regardless of what you stand to gain by doing so.
Whether a person lends a hand to those in need can
thus depend crucially on his or her ability to put himor
herself in their shoes, to experience events and
emotions the way they experience them.
Explaining Behavior
People often act as amateur psychologists, trying to
interpret others using what Fritz Heider called a naive
or commonsense psychology about how minds and
actions interrelate. People use information about traits
and situations, but they also interpret others’ actions
from the perspective of their predisposing desires and
beliefs (“He’s upset because he thinks I ate his sandwich”).
Interestingly, people are also prone to attribute
human-like mental states to nonhuman entities that
presumably don’t have minds (“This butterfly came by
to cheer me up!” or “I think my computer hates me!”).
Cultural practices (e.g., rain dances) and beliefs (e.g.,
karma, fate) suggest that the young child’s animism,

the belief that the physical world is endowed with
mental life, retains its appeal well into adulthood.
Conflict
To have a mind is what it really means to be human.
Historically, one way that people have justified their
incessant brutalization and annihilation of each other is
to deny that their victims are possessed of mind—they
are “rats,” “bugs,” or even “filth”—and are thus (the
reasoning goes) appropriate to enslave, belittle, or
extinguish without compunction. Consistent with this
notion is recent evidence that humans are more likely
to attribute mind to those they like. Future research
should explore not only the capacity for ToM but also
the social ramifications of people’s motivations for
admitting or denying certain others into the charmed
circle of mental beings.
See also Attributions; Empathy
Further Readings
Mark J. Landau
Carruthers, P., & Smith, P. (1996). Theories of theories of
mind. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations.
New York: Wiley.
Mitchell, P. (1997). Introduction to theory of mind: Children,
autism, and apes. London: Arnold.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee
have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
4, 515–526.
THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR
Developed by Icek Ajzen in 1985, the theory of
planned behavior (TPB) is today perhaps the most
popular social-psychological model for the prediction
of behavior. It has its roots in Martin Fishbein and
Ajzen’s theory of reasoned action, which was developed
in response to observed lack of correspondence
between general dispositions, such as racial or religious
attitudes, and actual behavior. Instead of dealing
with general attitudes of this kind, the TPB focuses on
the behavior itself and goes beyond attitudes to consider
such other influences on behavior as perceived
social norms and self-efficacy beliefs.
Theory of Planned Behavior———987
Conceptual Framework
According to the theory, human social behavior is
guided by three kinds of considerations: beliefs about
the behavior’s likely positive and negative outcomes,
known as behavioral beliefs; beliefs about the normative
expectations of others, called normative beliefs;
and beliefs about the presence of factors that may
facilitate or impede performance of the behavior,
termed control beliefs. For example, people may
believe that the behavior of exercising, among other
things, improves physical fitness and is tiring (behavioral
beliefs), that their family and friends think they
should exercise (normative beliefs), and that time constraints
make it difficult to exercise (control belief).
Taken together, the total set of behavioral beliefs produces
a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward the
behavior; the total set of normative beliefs results in
perceived social pressure to perform or not to perform
the behavior, or subjective norm; and, in their totality,
control beliefs give rise to a sense of self-efficacy or
perceived control over the behavior.
Attitude toward the behavior, subjective norm, and
perceived behavioral control jointly lead to the formation
of a behavioral intention. The relative weight or
importance of each of these determinants of intention
can vary from behavior to behavior and from population
to population. However, as a general rule, the
more favorable the attitude and subjective norm are,
and the greater the perceived behavioral control is,
the stronger is the person’s intention to perform the
behavior in question. Finally, people are expected to
carry out their intentions when the appropriate opportunity
arises. However, successful performance of a
behavior depends not only on a favorable intention but
also on a sufficient level of volitional control, that is,
on possession of requisite skills, resources, opportunities,
and the presence of other supportive conditions.
Because many behaviors pose difficulties of execution,
the TPB adds perceived behavioral control to
the prediction of behavior. To the extent that perceived
behavioral control is accurate, it can serve as a proxy
of actual control and can, together with intention, be
used to predict behavior.
Beliefs play a central role in the TPB, especially
those salient behavioral beliefs that are most readily
accessible in memory. In applications of the theory,
these salient beliefs are elicited in a free-response format
by asking a representative sample of respondents
to list the advantages and disadvantages of performing

988———Theory of Planned Behavior
a behavior of interest (behavioral beliefs), to list the
individuals or groups who approve or disapprove of
performing the behavior (normative beliefs), and to
list the factors that facilitate or inhibit performance
of the behavior (control beliefs). The most frequently
emitted behavioral, normative, and control beliefs are
assumed to be the salient beliefs in the population and
to determine prevailing attitudes, subjective norms,
and perceptions of behavioral control. These salient
beliefs are focused on the particular behavior of interest,
and they serve as the fundamental explanatory
constructs in the theory. More general factors, such
as personality traits, gender, education, intelligence,
motivation, or broad values are assumed to influence
behavior only indirectly by their effects on salient
beliefs. Assume, for example, that women are found
to drink less alcohol than men. The TPB would
explain this gender effect by predicting that men hold
more favorable behavioral, normative, or control beliefs
about drinking than women do.
The TPB assumes that human social behavior is reasoned
or planned in the sense that people are assumed
to take into account a behavior’s likely consequences,
the normative expectations of important referents, and
factors that may impede performance of the behavior.
Although the beliefs people hold may sometimes be
inaccurate, unfounded, or biased, their attitudes, subjective
norms, and perceptions of behavioral control are
thought to follow spontaneously and reasonably from
these beliefs, to produce a corresponding behavioral
intention, and ultimately to result in behavior that is
consistent with the overall tenor of the beliefs. This
does not necessarily presuppose a deliberate, effortful
retrieval of information and construction of attitudes
prior to every enactment of a behavior. After at least
minimal experience with the behavior, attitude, subjective
norm, and perceived behavioral control are
assumed to be available automatically as performance
of the behavior is contemplated.
Successful application of the TPB is predicated on
two conditions. First, the measures of attitude, subjective
norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention
must be compatible with one another and with the
measure of behavior relative to the action involved,
the target at which the action is directed, and the
context and time of its enactment. Second, attitude,
subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and
intention must remain relatively stable over time. Any
changes in these variables prior to observation of the
behavior will tend to impair their predictive validity.
Empirical Support
The TPB has been applied in research on a great variety
of behaviors, including investment decisions, highschool
dropout, mountain climbing, driving violations,
recycling, class attendance, voting in elections, extramarital
affairs, antinuclear activism, playing basketball,
choice of travel mode, tax evasion, and a host of other
activities related to protection of the environment,
crime, recreation, education, politics, and religion. It
has found its most intense application, however, in the
health domain, where it has been used to predict and
explain such varied behaviors as drinking, smoking,
drug use, exercising, blood donation, dental care, fat
consumption, breast self-examination, condoms use,
weight loss, infant sugar intake, getting medical checkups,
physician referrals, protection of the skin from the
sun, living kidney donation, and compliance with medical
regimens. The results of these investigations have,
by and large, confirmed the theory’s structure and predictive
validity, especially when its constructs were
properly assessed. Even without this caveat, the TPB
has fared very well. Meta-analytic reviews of close to
200 data sets in a variety of behavioral domains have
found that the theory accounts, on average, for about
40% of the variance in intentions, with all three predictors—attitude
toward the behavior, subjective norm,
and perceived behavioral control—making independent
contributions to the prediction; the reviews also
found that intentions and perceptions of behavioral
control explain about 30% of the behavioral variance.
Given its predictive validity, the TPB can serve as a
conceptual framework for persuasive messages and
other interventions designed to influence intentions and
behavior. Influence attempts directed at one or more of
the theory’s predictors have been found to increase
use of public transportation among college students,
to raise the effectiveness of job search behavior of
unemployed individuals, to promote testicular selfexamination
among high-school and college students,
and to induce alcoholics to join a treatment program.
Intention–Behavior Relation
For the TPB to afford accurate prediction, intentions
must remain relatively stable prior to observation of
the behavior. Empirical evidence supports this expectation,
showing that the intention–behavior relation
declines with instability in intentions over time. More
important, the theory also assumes that people will act

in accordance with their intentions under appropriate
circumstances. This expectation has frequently been
challenged, beginning with R. T. LaPiere’s classic
study in which ready acceptance of a Chinese couple
in hotels, motels, and restaurants contrasted sharply
with stated intentions not to accept “members of the
Chinese race” in these same establishments. Similar
discrepancies have been revealed in investigations of
health behavior where it is found that large proportions
of participants fail to carry out their intentions to use
condoms, to undergo cancer screening, to exercise, to
perform breast self-examination, to take vitamin pills,
to maintain a weight-loss program, and so forth.
A variety of factors may be responsible for
observed failures of effective self-regulation, yet a
simple procedure can often do much to reduce the gap
between intended and actual behavior. When individuals
are asked to formulate a specific plan—an implementation
intention—indicating when, where, and
how they will carry out the intended action, the correspondence
between intended and actual behavior often
increases dramatically. Behavioral interventions of
this kind that focus on implementation intentions have
been shown to produce high rates of compliance with
such recommended practices as cervical cancer
screening and breast self-examination.
Critiques
Although popular and successful, the TPB has not
escaped criticism. One type of critique has to do with
the theory’s sufficiency—the proposition that attitudes,
subjective norms, and perceptions of behavioral control
are sufficient to predict intentions and behavior.
Investigators have suggested a number of variables that
might be added to the theory to improve its predictive
validity. Among the proposed additions are desire and
need, affect and anticipated regret, personal and moral
norms, past behavior, and self-identity (i.e., the extent
to which people view themselves as the kind of person
who would perform the behavior in question).
In another major critique, investigators have challenged
the theory’s reasoned action assumption, or
more precisely, they have argued that reasoned action
may represent only one mode of operation, the controlled
or deliberate mode. According to Russell Fazio’s
MODE model, reasoned action occurs when people
are motivated and capable of retrieving their beliefs,
attitudes, and intentions in an effortful manner. When
they lack motivation or cognitive capacity to do so,
they are said to operate in the spontaneous mode where
attitudes must be strong enough to be activated automatically
if they are to guide behavior.
A related critique of the TPB’s reasoned action
assumption relies on the well-known phenomenon
that, with repeated performance, behavior becomes
routine and no longer requires much conscious control
for its execution. Some have suggested that as a result
of this process of habituation, initiation of the behavior
becomes automatic, and control over the behavior is
transferred from conscious intentions to critical stimulus
cues. The finding that frequency of past behavior is
often a good predictor of later behavior and, indeed,
that it has a residual impact on later behavior over and
above the influence of intention and perceived behavior
control, has been taken as evidence for automaticity
in social behavior.
Icek Ajzen
See also Attitude–Behavior Consistency; Implementation
Intentions; Reasoned Action Theory
Further Readings
Thin Slices of Behavior———989
Ajzen, I., & Fishbein, M. (2005). The influence of attitudes
on behavior. In D. Albarracín, B. T. Johnson, &
M. P. Zanna (Eds.), The handbook of attitudes
(pp. 173–221). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
THIN SLICES OF BEHAVIOR
Definition
Thin slices of behavior is a term coined by Nalini
Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in their study examining
the accurate judgments of teacher effectiveness.
They discovered that very brief (10-second and even
2-second) clips of dynamic silent video clips provided
sufficient information for naive raters to evaluate a
teacher’s effectiveness in high correlation with students’
final course ratings of their instructors. Distinctively,
thin slices are thus defined as brief excerpts of expressive
behavior, sampled from the behavioral stream,
that contain dynamic information and are less than
5 minutes long. Thin slices can be sampled from any
available channel of communication, including the face,
the body, speech, the voice, transcripts, or combinations

990———Thin Slices of Behavior
of all of these. Hence, static images (e.g., photographs)
and larger chunks of dynamic behaviors would not
qualify as thin slices. Thin slices retain much, if not
most, of the information encoded via dynamic, fluid
behavior while reducing or sometimes eliminating
the information encoded within the ongoing verbal
stream, the past history of targets, and the global,
comprehensive context within which the behavior is
taking place.
Impact
Since its introduction to the field of psychology,
research on thin-slice judgments has had a distributed
impact across social, applied, and cognitive psychology,
and it has recently penetrated the popular literature
as well. For instance, judgments based on thin
slices have been shown to accurately predict the effectiveness
of doctors treating patients, the relationship
status of opposite-sex dyads (pairs) interacting, judgments
of rapport between two persons, courtroom
judges’ expectations as to a defendant’s guilt, and even
testosterone levels in males.
Evidence
Recent research on thin-slice judgments has revealed
that the accuracy of such judgments is bounded by
several factors. Overall, the thin-slice methodology is
useful only so long as relevant and valid information
can be extracted from a behavioral stream. Factors
that influence the accuracy of thin-slice judgments
include culture and exposure, individual differences in
the ability to decode information accurately, differences
in accuracy based on expertise and group
membership, and the type of judgment being made.
Although, overall, both children and adults who enjoy
greater interpersonal success are generally better
decoders of nonverbal behavior, individual differences
are tempered by cultural and subcultural exposure.
Specifically, people are better at accurately judging
targets from their own culture and cultures similar to
their own than they are those more foreign. Similarly,
ingroup benefits exist for groups such as homosexuals,
who show an advantage at accurately determining
the sexual orientation of others based on thin slices
of behavior. More individually, thin-slice judgments
can be affected by people’s expertise and competency
with the particular social context being assessed.
Together, these caveats regarding thin slices illustrate
how the validity and utility of a thin slice ultimately
depends both on the construct being evaluated and on
the context within which accuracy is being judged.
For example, although a thin slice may provide
valid information regarding an individual’s affective
state, it may provide entirely invalid information regarding
other aspects of that individual, such as future intentions.
Much of this variance due to culture and exposure
is cogently explained by recent work suggesting the
existence of nonverbal dialects and accents that are
culturally determined. Exposure to particular dialects
and familiarity with cultural norms and constructs
contribute to the increased accuracy. Thus, exposure
to information about persons based on their group
membership and familiarity with the context of evaluation
bolsters expertise and accuracy.
The type of judgment being made has an effect on
accuracy as well. Thin-slice judgments are predictive
and accurate only to the extent that relevant variables
are observable from the thin slice sampled. Thus,
thin-slice judgments of observable variables revealed
through demeanor and behavior, such as how warm or
likeable someone appears to be, tend to be more
predictive in contrast to thin-slice judgments of less
observable variables that cannot be observed rapidly
through behavior, such as how persevering someone
appears to be. This is because information regarding
how perseverance is more likely revealed through
actions and behaviors that unfold over a relatively
long period of time. Such information is less likely to
be gleaned from thin slices of behavior. Consequently,
variables that are easily observable, such as extraversion,
show the highest reliability across judges.
Mental Processes
What mental processes underlie this ability to make
accurate judgments based on thin slices? Because of the
brevity of the stimuli being perceived, as well as the
nature of the information being conveyed, judgments
based on thin slices of behavior likely rely on a nonconscious,
relatively automatic form of cognitive processing.
In this way, important social information can
be gleaned without the perceiver having to rely
on elaborate information-processing strategies, which
strain precious cognitive resources. Thus, thin-slice
judgments seem to be made rapidly and efficiently.
Depletion of cognitive resources does not seem to
disrupt accuracy based on thin slices. In other words,
even when people are distracted or preoccupied, they

can still form accurate impressions based on thin slices.
Conversely, practice does no better to facilitate accurate
judgments, nor does providing incentives such as monetary
reward for higher accuracy. In sum, the accurate
impressions and judgments formed from thin slices
occur automatically, are intuitive in nature, and seem to
proceed outside of conscious awareness or control.
Implications
Thin slices of behavior are diagnostic of many affective,
personality, and interpersonal conditions. Examining
judgments based on thin slices can inform us
about the sensitivity people have to this information as
well as the process by which immediate impressions
are formed. This scrutiny will then lead to a better
understanding of how subsequent expectations of, and
behavior toward, others come about.
Nalini Ambady
Nicholas O. Rule
See also Nonconscious Processes; Nonverbal Cues and
Communication
Further Readings
Ambady, N., Bernieri, F. J., & Richeson, J. A. (2000). Toward
a histology of social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from
thin slices of the behavioral stream. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 32,
pp. 201–271). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of
expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal
consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin,
111, 256–274.
THREATENED EGOTISM
THEORY OF AGGRESSION
Definition
The threatened egotism theory of aggression states
that violence is related to a highly favorable view
of the self, combined with an ego threat. This theory
does not suggest that high self-esteem necessarily
causes violence or that there is any direct relationship
between self-esteem and violence. Furthermore,
Threatened Egotism Theory of Aggression———991
although there is evidence that most violent criminals,
bullies, and terrorists tend to think highly of themselves,
most people who think highly of themselves
are not violent. An accurate characterization of the
theory is that violence is perpetrated by a subset of
people who exhibit an unstable and overly inflated
high self-esteem. They respond with hostile aggression
to what they perceive as challenges to these selfviews
to express the self’s rejection of ego-threatening
feedback.
Context and Importance
This theory runs counter to the widely held belief that
low self-esteem is the cause of violent behavior. High
self-esteem has traditionally been viewed as an unqualified
asset and something that everyone should
strive to achieve. Much of the self-help literature stems
from this notion that high self-esteem is essential for
success in one’s relationships and careers and that one
can develop high self-esteem by adhering to prescribed
formulas. Many school systems have adopted policies
that operate on this premise and offer praise and
rewards to children for effort as much as for achievement.
The threatened egotism theory of aggression
casts serious doubt on this school of thought and
instead suggests that artificially inflating self-esteem
without accompanying boosts in achievement or other
bases for feeling good about one’s self can do more
harm than good. The theory suggests that it is these
people—those with grandiose, unstable self-esteem—
who are most likely to respond violently in response to
unfavorable feedback or other types of threats to their
self-conceptions. It is these people who find criticism
particularly threatening and lash out against its source.
Evidence
Evidence supporting this theory comes from diverse
sources, such as studies of violence in laboratory settings,
criminological surveys, and historical accounts,
and includes a wide range of violence, such as murder,
assault, rape, domestic violence, bullies, youth gangs,
terrorism, repressive governments, tyranny, warfare,
prejudice, oppression, and genocide. The common
theme throughout these studies is that those who perceive
a threat to their high self-esteem are most likely
to perpetrate violence. Threatened egotism has been
measured in a variety of ways as well, such as perceived
disrespect, wounded pride, insults, verbal abuse,

992———Three-Dimensional Model of Attribution
or unfavorable feedback. In addition, the same pattern
was found for nations, medium and small groups, and
lone individuals. It is important to note that the theory
does not claim that threatened egotism is the only
cause of aggression since there are likely numerous
other factors, such as biochemical or genetic causes,
family environment, and other factors that have yet to
be identified. Studies indicate that threatened egotism
is a cause of violence in a substantial number of contexts,
but there are other possible variables that might
play important roles in predicting violence.
Evidence from research examining how violent
groups and individuals view themselves provides support
for this theory, as does an examination of how egotism
predicts violent behavior. Research studies with
narcissistic people (those who are likely to have high
self-esteem that is not well founded) have shown that
they respond to negative interpersonal feedback with
aggression toward the source of the feedback. In one
laboratory study, participants were instructed to write
an essay expressing a particular attitude toward abortion
and were then led to believe that another participant
was going to evaluate the essay and give feedback.
The feedback was construed so that it was positive for
half the participants and negative for the rest of the participants.
The researchers found that when the essay
was evaluated negatively, participants were more likely
to blast the other participant with loud noise on a subsequent
competitive task that involved punishments for
incorrect answers. These aggressive responses were the
strongest among the participants who scored high on a
narcissism scale, indicating that an inflated view of the
self that is challenged is most associated with aggressive
behavior.
Some research compares rates of aggression
between groups that are known to differ on egotism.
Psychopaths, for example, commit a disproportionately
high level of violent crimes and exhibit a highly
inflated view of their abilities and importance in the
world. In addition, the well-documented relationship
between alcohol consumption and aggression can be
understood in the context of this theory. Evidence indicates
that when people drink, they tend to rate themselves
more favorably than they would otherwise,
creating a temporary state of high self-esteem. An
examination of violent offenders also suggests strong
tendencies toward egotism. Men who are imprisoned
for murder or assaults tend to commit these crimes
in response to when they perceive they were insulted,
belittled, or simply had their pride wounded.
Implications
This theory has had a strong influence on how violent
behavior has been understood and on the development
of appropriate interventions. Although it may, in some
ways, seem counterintuitive that high self-esteem
would not be protective against ego threats, an important
component of this theory is that an unstable,
inflated sense of self is the type that is most harmful.
This form of self-esteem is particularly vulnerable
to threats and proneness to violence. This theory provides
compelling evidence that attempting to boost
self-esteem to cure underachievement, social exclusion,
and aggressive tendencies is counterproductive and
potentially harmful.
Laura Smart Richman
See also Aggression; Ego Shock; Narcissism; Self-Esteem
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., Smart, L., & Boden, J. M. (1996). Relation
of threatened egotism to violence and aggression: The dark
side of self-esteem. Psychological Review, 103, 5–33.
Bushman, B. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1998). Threatened
egotism, narcissism, self-esteem, and direct and displaced
aggression: Does self-love or self-hate lead to violence?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 219–229.
Kernis, M. H., Grannemann, B. D., & Barclay, L. C. (1989).
Stability and level of self-esteem as predictors of anger
arousal and hostility. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 56, 1013–1022.
THREE-DIMENSIONAL
MODEL OF ATTRIBUTION
Definition
The three-dimensional model of attribution posits that
the explanations people give for the things that happen
to them can vary on three distinct factors, and these
variations have consequences for people’s mood, selfperception,
and well-being. Attributions can be stable
(true across time) or unstable (temporary); they can
be internal (stemming from the person) or external
(stemming from the environment); and they can be
global (applying to many domains) or specific (limited
to one area).

Background
According to initial work on learned helplessness,
exposure to uncontrollable negative events can lead
to depression. Upon further research, however, Martin
Seligman and colleagues, who originally developed
the theory of learned helplessness, found that this was
true for some people but not for others. Their research
showed that what separated the depressed from the
nondepressed was a tendency to attribute those negative
events to factors that were stable, internal, and
global, despite their inherent uncontrollability. While
the type of attribution people make can vary on all
three dimensions, depending on the event being considered
as well as many other factors, people often
show a general tendency across attributions toward
one pattern of explanation or another. Seligman developed
a test to measure this individual difference,
called the Attributional Style Questionnaire. This
questionnaire has people give explanations for a series
of hypothetical positive and negative events; the general
patterns of responses that they give can be used to
make diagnoses or predictions. For example, a person
who fails a test and explains his or her poor grade by
saying, “I never do anything right,” which is a stable,
internal, global explanation, is more likely to become
depressed than a person who explains away their failure
by saying, “That test was especially difficult,” an
unstable, external, specific explanation.
This latter type of attribution for negative events
may in fact be more common. Nondepressed people
also make stable, internal, global attributions, but
they tend to make them for positive events instead.
Most people feel that the positive things that happen
to them are due to their person and therefore they
were the direct cause, and negative events are due to
the situation and therefore those events shouldn’t
reflect poorly on them. They may believe, for example,
that when they pass a test, it is because they are
smart (which is stable, internal, and global), and
when they fail, it is because of the test or some other
situational factor (which is unstable, external, and
specific). This tendency to take credit for successes
and shirk blame for failures is part of what underlies
people’s tendencies toward positive self-esteem and
even self-enhancement.
See also Attribution Theory; Learned Helplessness
Elanor F. Williams
Further Readings
Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978).
Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49–74.
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1984). Causal
explanations as a risk factor for depression: Theory and
evidence. Psychological Review, 91, 347–374.
TOKEN EFFECTS
Definition
A token is the only person of his or her category, or
one of very few persons, in an otherwise homogeneous
group. A sole female in a group of males is an
example of a token individual, as is the only Latino in
a group of Caucasians. Being numerically distinctive
produces effects on one’s thoughts and capabilities.
When an individual is a token (or solo) in a group, he
or she generally becomes preoccupied with evaluative
or self-presentational concerns, such as “What do they
think of me? How am I coming across?” Frequently,
the attention diverted to these concerns interferes
with the token’s ability to concentrate on the central
group activity, yielding diminished performance. This
phenomenon is called the token deficit effect. There
are instances, however, when the priming of selfpresentation
concern is concordant with the group
task. In these instances, numerical distinctiveness facilitates
performance, resulting in the token surfeit effect.
Research Findings
Token Effects———993
Past research has shown that individuals’ memory for
group interaction and their problem-solving skills are
impaired when they are the numerical token in the
group. In parallel, tokens’ memory for their own performance,
and for that of others, during a group session
is actually enhanced. In short, they are so worried
about how they are being evaluated and about how
well they are performing relative to others that they
fail to perform; instead, they focus on tracking how
well they are doing and how well everyone else is
doing and are consequently able to report very accurately
on this dimension.
Token deficit effects have been demonstrated with
different types of tasks (memory, problem solving)
and with different types of tokens. Early work showed

994———Traits
that gender tokens evinced deficits; later work demonstrated
the same pattern with ethnic/racial tokens.
Note that the token deficit effect is not limited to one
sex or ethnic/racial minority group—both males and
females, and Whites and minorities show similar deficits
when they are numerically distinctive. Moreover, members
of categories that are not visibly distinctive but
socially meaningful show similar results. For example,
being the only one from a particular school in a
group of persons from a rival school also produces
deficits, even when the token looks no different from
the other group members.
The latest work in this area indicates that tokens
might not always be at a disadvantage. In fact, there is
evidence for a token surfeit effect, wherein tokens outperform
their nontoken counterparts. How can this
be the case? In fact, because tokens are compelled to
focus on evaluation in the group, they are especially
attentive to information that relates to interpersonal
evaluation, requires taking the perspective of others,
or both. When they are assigned tasks that draw on
these inclinations, they show superior performance to
nontokens. Group tasks that rely on memory for evaluative
words (trait ratings of self and others) and those
that depend on being able to take different perspectives
(coming up with solutions when two or more
parties are at odds) are compatible with the token
mindset. Accordingly, when faced with these tasks,
tokens do very well.
Numerical distinctiveness as manifested in tokens
can yield deficits and surfeits. Being one-of-a-kind
can produce benefits as well as disadvantages.
Delia S. Saenz
See also Decision Making; Group Dynamics; Intergroup
Relations; Interpersonal Cognition; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Lord, C. G., & Saenz, D. S. (1985). Memory deficits and
memory surfeits: The differential cognitive consequences
of tokenism for tokens and observers. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 918–926.
Saenz, D. S. (1994). Token status and problem-solving
deficits: Detrimental effects of distinctiveness and
performance monitoring. Social Cognition, 12, 60–74.
Saenz, D. S., & Lord, C. G. (1989). Reversing roles: A
cognitive strategy for undoing memory deficits associated
with tokenism. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 56, 698–708.
TRAITS
Definition
When people describe themselves and others, they
tend to use trait descriptors. A trait is marked by the
tendency to act, think, and feel in a certain way—over
time and across situations. Terms such as disposition,
construct, dimension, and personality variable have
very similar meanings and psychologists often use
them interchangeably.
Traits indicate that the probability of certain behavior
is high, but they are not to be understood in a deterministic
sense. Even the cruelest person will have moments
of tenderness. Strictly speaking, traits describe behavior
but do not explain it. Socialization or genetic factors can
be used to explain how traits develop in a person. Some
authors have regarded traits as fictions that do not exist
outside the mind of observers; others have searched for
their neurophysiological basis.
Historical and Contemporary
Approaches to Traits
Hippocrates (460 B.C.E.) stated that an imbalance of
body fluids leads to physical and mental illness. Galen
(130–200 C.E.) asserted that four temperaments are
based on the dominance of one of those fluids: blood
(sanguine, optimistic), yellow bile (choleric, irritable),
black bile (melancholic, sad), and phlegm (phlegmatic,
calm). These historical assumptions influenced the
development of other trait theories. Gordon Allport
(1897–1967) supported an idiographic approach and
emphasized that there are unique personal dispositions
in addition to general dispositions. Raymond B. Cattell
(1905–1998) used factor analysis, a statistical tool, to
identify the traits that are most relevant in distinguishing
people. He proposed 16 Personality Factors (16 PF).
Hans Eysenck (1916–1997) identified three supertraits
(the Gigantic Three): extraversion (outside or inward
orientation), neuroticism (emotional stability or lability),
and psychoticism (antisocial behavior or friendliness).
In the 1970s, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae
suggested that five trait dimensions are optimal for
describing personality. Even though there are authors
who favor six, four, or three factors, the Big Five
(Openness to Experience, Neuroticism, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness) are currently
the most popular approach in studying traits.

Traits or Situations?
In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel dealt a heavy blow to
the trait approach. He pointed out that traits lack crosssituational
consistency and predictive validity. In other
words, what we do depends a lot on the situation, and
what we will do in the future cannot be easily predicted
with the help of personality questionnaires. The
fact that someone who is outgoing in one situation
might be shy in another situation led to the situationist
approach: People’s behavior was understood as
a consequence of situational forces. Later on, Walter
Mischel left that radical position and proposed an
interactionist approach that considers behavior to be
guided by situational cues as well as traits. Recently
Yushi Shoda and Walter Mischel have used situation
profiles to describe the stable patterns with which individuals
react to different situations. Today one will not
find a reasonable theorist who will deny the relevance
of traits or the relevance of situations.
Astrid Schütz
Aline Vater
See also Big Five Personality Traits; Individual Differences
Further Readings
Matthews, G., Deary, I. J., & Whiteman, M. C. (2003).
Personality traits (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge
University Press.
TRANSACTIVE MEMORY
Definition
An important function of relationships is information
sharing. People often look to their interpersonal and
work relationships for needed information: the forgotten
name of a common acquaintance, an opinion
on possible investment strategies, or help with an
unfamiliar task such as setting up a wireless network.
People in relationships often share the burden for
learning and remembering information by dividing
responsibility for different knowledge areas; for example,
in a work team, one member may be responsible
for all information related to Client X while another
member may be responsible for all information related
to Client Y. When one person needs information in
Transactive Memory———995
another’s area, they can simply ask the person responsible
rather than taking the time and energy to learn the
information themselves. The knowledge sharing system
that often develops in relationships and in groups
where people assume responsibility for different
knowledge areas and rely on one another for information
is called transactive memory.
Transactive memory refers to the idea that people
in continuing relationships often develop a specialized
division of labor; that is, specific roles with respect to
the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information from
different knowledge domains. Each member of the
relationship becomes a “specialist” in some areas but
not others, and members rely on one another for information.
For example, among life partners, one partner
might be responsible for knowing the couples’ social
calendar and car maintenance schedule, while the other
might be responsible for knowing when the bills need
to be paid and what is in the refrigerator. Such specialization
reduces the memory load for each individual,
yet each individual has access to a larger pool of information
collectively. For transactive memory to function
effectively, individuals must also have a shared conceptualization
of “who knows what” in the group.
Transactive memory is more than knowing who to
ask for information in different knowledge areas. It
also involves retrieval and communication processes:
knowing how to ask for information from others in the
system, knowing how to communicate information
effectively to those who need it, and knowing how
to use retrieved information in collective decisions.
What makes transactive memory “transactive” are
the “transactions” (i.e., communications) among individuals
to encode, store, and retrieve information
from their individual memory systems. Transactive
memory theory and research borrows heavily from
what is known about the memory processes of individuals
and applies it to groups.
Evidence of transactive memory systems has been
demonstrated in a variety of relationships and groups,
including married couples, dating couples, families,
friends, coworkers, and project teams in both organizational
and laboratory settings.
Transactive Memory Development
One necessary condition for transactive memory
development is cognitive interdependence: Individuals
must perceive that their outcomes are dependent on
the knowledge of others and that those others’ outcomes

996———Transactive Memory
are dependent on their knowledge. Cognitive interdependence
often develops in close interpersonal
relationships, in which people share responsibilities,
engage in conversations about many different topics,
and make joint decisions. It can also arise as a result
of a reward system or the structure of a group task.
Transactive memory develops as individuals learn
about one another’s expertise and begin to delegate and
assume responsibility for different knowledge areas.
The delegation process by which members are associated
with knowledge areas is often implicit and informal,
emerging through interaction. Individuals can
become linked to knowledge-based relative expertise
(the best cook is likely to become the person in charge
of knowing what is in the refrigerator), negotiated
agreements (one person agrees to keep track of car
maintenance if the other will keep track of when bills
are due), or through circumstance (the person who
answered the phone when Client X called the first time
becomes the “Client X” expert). In newly formed
groups, individuals are likely to rely on stereotypes
based on personal characteristics (such as age, gender,
ethnicity, social class, and organizational role) to infer
what others know. In some cases, these initial assumptions
can become self-fulfilling prophecies: Individuals
are assigned knowledge areas that are consistent
with social stereotypes, even though they may not
fit with their actual expertise, and eventually become
experts as a result of those assignments. For example,
a male group member might be assigned to set up a
wireless network because the group assumes that he
knows more about technology than his female group
members when in fact he does not. Through the slow
and cumbersome learning process of setting it up, he
ultimately becomes an expert on wireless networks.
Informal interactions and shared experiences provide
opportunities for members to learn about the
relative expertise of other members, to indicate their
interests and preferences, to coordinate who does
what, to observe members’ skills in action, and to
evaluate the willingness of others to participate in the
transactive memory system. Those systems set up by
formal design (such as a listing of job responsibilities
of staff in an office procedures handbook) are either
validated or modified over time as individuals discover
whether individuals assigned to specific knowledge roles
are able and willing to perform them.
Processes in Transactive Memory
A directory-sharing computer network has been used as
a metaphor for illustrating key processes of transactive
memory systems. The first process is directory updating,
whereby individuals develop a working directory
or map of “who knows what” and update it as they
obtain relevant new information. The second process is
information allocation, whereby new information that
comes into the group is communicated to the person
whose expertise will facilitate its storage. The third
process is retrieval coordination, which involves devising
an efficient and effective strategy for retrieving
needed information based on the person expected to
have it.
Unlike the literal and straightforward ways that
computer networks update directories, and locate, store,
and retrieve information, transactive memory systems
among human agents are often flawed. Transactive
memory systems can vary in accuracy (the degree to
which group members’ perceptions about other members’
expertise are accurate), sharedness (the degree to
which members have a shared representation of who
knows what in the group), and validation (the degree to
which members accept responsibility for different
knowledge areas and participate in the system). Transactive
memory systems will be most effective when
knowledge assignments are based on group members’
actual abilities, when all group members have similar
representations of the system, and when members fulfill
expectations.
Context and Importance
In recent years, a renewed interest in the collective
aspects of cognition has emerged. Proponents argue
that contrary to current social psychological conceptions
of social cognition as individual thought about
social objects, social cognition should be thought of
as a product of social interchange and is constructed,
shared, and distributed among groups of people during
the course of interaction. Theory of and research
on transactive memory examine the collective aspects
of cognition. Transactive memory helps explain how
people in collectives learn, store, use, and coordinate
their knowledge to accomplish individual, group, and
organizational goals.
Implications
People in close interpersonal and work relationships
often perform their tasks and make decisions more
effectively than strangers, because they are better able
to identify experts and make better use of knowledge
through their transactive memory system. Transactive

memory systems can lead to improved group performance
on tasks for which groups must process a large
amount of information in a short period of time and
on tasks that require expertise from many different
knowledge domains. However, there may be situations
in which too much specialization may impede
group performance, for example, when assigned experts
are unavailable, unable, or unwilling to contribute
their knowledge. Even when specialization leads to
better outcomes, some redundancy may be useful. It
helps members to communicate more effectively, it
can encourage group members to be more accountable
to one another, and it can provide a cushion for transitions
in relationships when, for example, the designated
expert leaves the group. New technologies
facilitating the development of transactive memory
are emerging to help people locate and retrieve information
from experts in their organizations and in their
social networks.
Andrea B. Hollingshead
See also Group Decision Making; Interpersonal Cognition;
Memory
Further Readings
Hollingshead, A. B. (1998). Retrieval processes in transactive
memory systems. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 74, 659–671.
Liang, D. W., Moreland, R. L., & Argote, L. (1995). Group
versus individual training and group performance: The
mediating role of transactive memory. Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 384–393.
Wegner, D. M. (1987). Transactive memory: A contemporary
analysis of the group mind. In B. Mullen & G. R.
Goethals (Eds.), Theories of group behavior
(pp. 185–208). New York: Springer.
TRIANGULAR THEORY OF LOVE
Definition
The triangular theory of love characterizes love in
terms of three underlying components: intimacy, passion,
and commitment. People love each other to the
extent they show these three components, and different
combinations of the components yield different
kinds of love.
Triangular Theory of Love———997
The Three Components
The three components of love are each different in
nature. Intimacy is characterized by feelings of caring,
concern, understanding, trust, and closeness between
two partners. Intimate partners are good friends and
support each other in times of need. Intimacy is primarily
emotional in nature. Passion is characterized
by intense desire, feelings of longing, need of the
partner, and joy at the thought of seeing the partner
(and anxiety or worry at the thought of separation).
Passionate partners crave each other’s presence, much
as do people who experience an addiction. Passion
is primarily motivational in nature. Commitment is
characterized by cognitions of the long-lasting nature
or even permanence of a relationship, the stand that
one will stay with the partner, despite any hardships
that may evolve, and the confidence that the relationship
is the right one to be in. Committed partners view
themselves as in the relationship over the long term.
Commitment is primarily cognitive in nature.
Time Courses of the
Three Components
The three components show somewhat different time
courses. Intimacy usually develops somewhat slowly,
over the course of time. In relationships that succeed,
intimacy continues to develop; in those that fail, intimacy
may go up and then start to go down. However,
in many long-term relationships, high levels of intimacy
may be difficult to sustain over periods of many
years. A good test of intimacy is whether, when there
is some disruption in a relationship, the disruption
brings the partners closer together or further apart.
Passion usually develops quickly but also may fade
quickly. It shows a course similar to that of addictions.
After a while, the “high” of the relationship is less
rewarding than the “low” of the thought of termination
of the relationship seems punishing. Commitment
typically develops slowly and may continue to
increase in successful relationships and fade in unsuccessful
ones. Fading of commitment can be caused
by problems in the relationship or by the entrance of
competition to the relationship.
Kinds of Love
According to the theory, different combinations of intimacy,
passion, and commitment yield different kinds
of love.

998———Trust
None of the components = nonlove.
Intimacy alone = friendship. This is the type of love
experienced by good friends. It is a limiting case of love.
Passion alone = infatuated love. This is the kind of love
one experiences in love at first sight. It is a limiting case
of love.
Commitment alone = empty love. This is the kind of love
one experiences when all that holds a couple together is
the cognition that one should stay in the relationship. It
is characterized by the beginning of arranged relationships
and marriages and the (emotional) end of relationships
that have failed over time.
Intimacy + passion = romantic love. This is the type of
love experienced by those who fall in love with each
other but who are not ready to commit for the long term,
such as students whose future lives are yet uncertain.
Intimacy + commitment = companionate love. This is the
kind of love that often develops over the course of many
years, when the passion begins to flicker. Many longterm,
stable relationships are based on companionate love.
Passion + commitment = fatuous (foolish) love. This is
the kind of love, sometimes seen in movies, in which
partners commit to each other on the basis of passion
without even truly getting to know each other. These
kinds of relationships do not have a good prognosis.
Intimacy + passion + commitment = consummate (complete)
love. This is the kind of love to which many people
aspire: It is difficult to attain and even more difficult to
maintain. People generally have to work at relationships
and mutual growth to maintain consummate love.
Origins of the Components
The origins of the components are in stories one
develops about what love should be like. In the United
States, there are about two dozen common stories.
Examples are a fairy-tale story, in which partners
view each other as a prince and a princess; a travel
story, in which partners see themselves traveling
through life together over a sometimes rocky road; a
business story, in which partners view the relationship
as a business, much like any other business; the
pornography story, in which love is viewed as exciting
to the extent it is “dirty”; and a horror story, in which
one partner terrorizes the other.
Data Regarding the Theory
Empirical tests of the theory have yielded several
interesting findings. For example, it has been found
that higher levels of intimacy, passion, and commitment
all tend to be associated with greater happiness
and satisfaction in relationships. The patterns of the
three components also play a role in happiness and
satisfaction. Partners whose patterns of intimacy,
passion, and commitment are more similar (e.g., both
needing high levels of intimacy, or neither caring
much about commitment) tend to be more satisfied
that partners whose patterns differ (e.g., one needing a
high level of intimacy and the other caring much more
about the level of passion). In addition, different
loving relationships, such as with father, mother,
lover, sibling, show quite different patterns of intimacy,
passion, and commitment. Stories also have
been shown to have effects on relationships. For
example, partners with more similar stories about
relationships tend to be happier than partners with less
similar stories (e.g., two partners with a fairy-tale
story will be happier, on average, than one with a
fairy-tale story and the other with a business story).
However, stories do not in and of themselves predict
happiness, independent of match to the partner’s story,
but certain stories are associated with unhappiness,
such as the horror story and the pornography story.
Robert J. Sternberg
See also Companionate Love; Decision and Commitment in
Love; Love; Romantic Love
Further Readings
Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Cupid’s arrow. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1998). Love is a story. New York: Oxford
University Press.
TRUST
Definition
Trust refers to a person’s confident belief that another’s
motivations are benevolent toward him or her and that
the other person will therefore be responsive to his or

her needs. Trust is typically viewed as a belief about a
specific person, though it has also been viewed as a
personality trait characterizing people’s tendency to
trust or distrust others in general.
Evolutionary Foundations
Evolutionary thinkers have argued that issues of trust
were critical to the survival of early humans. Because
one’s welfare depended on cooperation and exchange
with others, for instance in trading berries or other
fruit for meat, people needed to anticipate who they
could count on to engage in fair exchanges and who,
instead, deserved their suspicions as possible cheaters.
They also needed to understand who among their significant
others could be truly relied on to take care of
them in times of serious need and who, instead, were
fair-weather friends. Given that issues of trust were so
important for early humans’ welfare, evolutionary theorists
contend that specific mechanisms likely exist in
the modern brain that allow people to monitor behaviors
relevant to others’ motivations and calibrate
the level of trust that a person warrants—a suspicion
meter, if you will.
Trust in Close Relationships
Trust, of course, remains very critical in modern
life, especially in one’s significant relationships with
family, friends, and romantic partners. Close attachments
such as these oblige people to depend and rely
on others’ good intentions, that is, to become more
heavily interdependent with others to satisfy their own
central needs. As the extent of risk and possible costs
of rejection and betrayal increase in such relationships,
the stakes become much higher and trust
becomes all the more critical. It is therefore unsurprising
that research on trust has been most prevalent
within the contexts of these close relationships.
The development of trust in a relationship is usually
a gradual process that requires social interactions
and experiences with a person that suggest he or she
is predictable and dependable, especially in situations
in which costly sacrifices by another may be necessary
to be responsive to one’s own needs. Such situations
are seen as diagnostic because clearer conclusions
about others’ motives can be drawn when helping is
costly to another and not in their short-term interests.
However, to achieve a true sense of confidence in
Trust———999
another person, one must eventually go beyond the
available evidence and make a leap of faith. Past evidence
can never fully predict future behavior, so to
genuinely trust and achieve some peace of mind about
a significant other, people must set aside their uncertainties
and simply act in a trusting way.
The amount of trust that develops in a relationship
is crucial because it regulates the extent to which people
allow themselves to be committed to and invested in
that relationship. That is, people will only take the risk
of caring and becoming attached to someone they
believe reciprocates their affections. Uncertainty or
insecurity about whether a partner has a strong positive
regard for them can result in people pulling back
or increasing their psychological distance from the
partner, a self-protective behavior that reduces the risk
of being hurt and let down.
Researchers who study romantic relationships from
the perspective of attachment theory, a theory of
personality based on early experiences with caregivers,
have demonstrated that trust has two components.
People who are most able to trust a close partner have
a secure personality style. They view themselves as
worthy of love (they have a positive model of self or
low anxiety about being loved), and view their attachment
figures as generally capable of being loving and
responsive (they possess a positive model of others or
low avoidance of closeness). Insecurity about either
belief or about whether a partner is both willing and
able to be available and responsive to one’s self diminishes
trust in another and results in a less satisfying
relationship.
Trust in another person is determined by one’s personality
and the qualities of one’s relationship and
greatly affects how secure one feels in a relationship.
However, pressures from social networks, such as
social norms within extended families and communities,
may also influence feelings of security. This type
of assurance is most typical in more traditional societies
and also in Asian societies. Asian people who
believe that their parents like and accept their partner
feel more secure about their relationship, which in
turn allows them to risk depending more on their partner
even though their trust in that partner may not
have increased.
Finally, some scientists have studied people’s
general beliefs about the motivations of strangers.
Interestingly, trusting individuals do not naively believe
that everyone is good but instead are selective about

1000———Twin Studies
whom they trust and cooperate only when they believe
that another has positive motivations. In contrast,
competitive people tend to distrust the motives of others,
believing that it is a dog-eat-dog world and that
they must consider their own interests first.
See also Dependence Regulation; Love
Further Readings
John G. Holmes
Justin V. Cavallo
Holmes, J. G., & Rempel, J. K. (1989). Trust in close
relationships. In C. Hendrick (Ed.), Review of personality
and social psychology: Close relationships (Vol. 10,
pp. 187–219). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. (2000). Selfesteem
and the quest for felt security: How perceived
regard regulates attachment processes. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 478–498.
Shaver, P. R., & Hazan, C. (1993). Adult romantic
attachment: Theory and evidence. In W. H. Jones &
D. Perlman (Eds.), Advances in personal relationships
(Vol. 4, pp. 29–70). London: Jessica Kingsley.
Simpson, J. A. (2007). Foundations of interpersonal trust. In
A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social
psychology: A handbook of basic principles (2nd ed.,
pp. 597–621). New York: Guilford Press.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the
banker’s paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of
adaptations for altruism. Proceedings of the British
Academy, 88, 119–143.
TWIN STUDIES
Twin studies can tell us about how genes and environments
affect behavioral and physical development.
There are two kinds of twins: identical and fraternal.
Identical twins result when one fertilized egg splits
during the first two weeks of pregnancy. These twins
share all their genes and are always of the same sex.
They occur in about one third of natural twin conceptions.
Fraternal or nonidentical twins result when two
eggs released by the mother are fertilized by two
sperm from the father. These twins share half their
genes, on average, just like ordinary siblings. Fraternal
twins can be same-sex or opposite-sex.
The classic twin design involves comparing the
similarity of identical and fraternal twins. If identical
twins are more alike in intelligence, personality, or
physical skills this demonstrates that the trait is probably
influenced by genetic factors. Some people have
objected that identical twins are alike because people
treat them alike, not because of their shared genes.
However, careful studies have ruled out this criticism
after finding that identical twins who are treated alike
are not more similar than identical twins who are
treated differently.
There are many ways to study twins. A powerful
method is studying identical twins reared apart from
birth. Reared-apart identical twins resemble one
another only because of their shared genes. Interestingly,
research shows that identical twins reared apart
and together are about equally similar in personality
traits such as aggression and traditionalism. The twinfamily
method includes identical twins, their spouses,
and their children. The children of identical twins are
cousins, but they are also “half-siblings” because they
have a genetically identical parent. These children’s
aunts and uncles are like their “mothers” and “fathers”
because they are genetically identical to the children’s
own parents. It is possible to compare the behavioral
similarity of a twin mother and her daughter (who share
genes and environments) and a twin aunt and her niece
(who share genes but not environments). Research has
shown that parent–child and aunt/uncle–niece/nephew
similarity is the same on a spatial visualization test. A
more recent research design uses a unique twin-like
pair called virtual twins. Virtual twins are same-age
individuals who are raised together, but are not genetically
related. Virtual twins show modest similarity in
intelligence, despite their shared environment, a finding
that supports genetic influence.
The multiple birth rate (especially the fraternal
twinning rate) has increased from 19.3 to 30.7 multiple
births per 1,000 births in recent years. This is primarily
due to new reproductive technologies but also to the
fact that women are having children at older ages. The
increased twinning rate is good news for researchers.
However, the downside is that twins are more likely
than non-twins to suffer from birth difficulties.
It is likely that twins will continue to play significant
roles in psychological and medical research.

Identical twins differing in traits, such as noveltyseeking,
schizophrenia, or breast cancer may help
identify which genes are expressed and which genes
are not expressed. Thus, twin studies can help clarify
the origins of behavior in everyone else.
Nancy L. Segal
Kevin A. Charvarria
See also Genetic Influences on Social Behavior; Research
Methods
Further Readings
Machin, G. A., & Keith, L. G. (1999). An atlas of multiple
pregnancy: Biology and pathology. New York: Parthenon.
Segal, N. L. (2000). Entwined lives: Twins and what they tell
us about human behavior. New York: Plume.
Segal, N. L. (2005). Indivisible by two: Lives of
extraordinary twins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
TYPE A PERSONALITY
See PERSONALITIES AND BEHAVIOR PATTERNS,
TYPE A AND TYPE B
TYPE B PERSONALITY
Twin Studies———1001
See PERSONALITIES AND BEHAVIOR PATTERNS,
TYPE A AND TYPE B

UNIQUENESS
Definition
Uniqueness involves a person’s distinctiveness in relation
to other people. Such uniqueness can reflect
actual behaviors or a person’s perceptions regarding
his or her differences. People can vary in the degree
to which they want such distinctiveness, with some
being highly desirous of specialness (high need for
uniqueness) and others who do not want to stand out
from other people (low need for uniqueness).
History
Uniqueness seeking probably is a modern phenomenon
because people centuries ago were concerned about
fundamental survival issues and did not have the time
to attend to their uniqueness. Toward the 19th, 20th,
and 21st centuries, however, people were more assured
of meeting their basic survival needs, and accordingly,
they turned to issues involving the maintenance
of their self-concepts. Thus, in increasingly technological
and highly populated societies, people became
more focused on matters pertaining to their uniqueness.
Although there were 17th- and 18th-century books
and stories about people who were worried about preserving
their distinctiveness (known under the German
term doppelgänger), prior to the mid-1970s, the shared
view among social psychologists was that people did
not want to be special. This latter anti-uniqueness view
stemmed from both conformity research, showing that
people often wanted to go along with the crowd, and
U
1003
interpersonal attraction research, which showed that
people wanted to be as similar as possible to others.
Likewise, during this pre-1970s period, clinical psychologists
and sociologists viewed any differences
that people displayed as being abnormal, deviant, or
pathological.
Moving into the 1970s and the early 1980s, however,
social psychological researchers began to perform
robust experimental manipulations that were
aimed at studying how people would react when
they were given feedback indicating that they were
extremely similar to other people. Contrary to the pre-
1970s findings, these new research findings showed
that people did not like such extremely high similarity
and, indeed, wanted to feel some sense of specialness
in relation to other people. The terms individuation,
need for uniqueness, and uniqueness theory were
applied to this latter research. Later, it was called optimal
distinctiveness theory.
Evidence
Studies on need for uniqueness basically involved
giving self-report tests that asked research participants
to describe themselves on a variety of dimensions
and thereafter delivering feedback to these
people about how similar they were to other people
who supposedly had taken the same tests. (In actuality,
this similarity feedback was bogus, but the
research participants believed it.) Before their purported
meetings with these other people, various
measures were taken of the research participants’
emotional and behavioral reactions. Results showed
that when people were given feedback that they were

1004———Unrequited Love
very highly similar, as compared to moderately similar,
to others who had taken the same tests, these former
people reported feeling more negative emotions
and engaging in behaviors to reestablish their specialness.
For example, the behaviors aimed at showing
their uniqueness included the endorsing of unusual selfdescriptive
words, conforming less, expressing less
popular ideas, producing more creative uses for objects,
and valuing scarce objects. On this last point, need for
uniqueness has been used to explain why people are
attracted to products that are only available to a few
persons (e.g., “Hurry on down while the supply lasts!”),
as well as why changing product styles each year
makes those products very appealing to people.
Self-report scales also were developed and validated
to measure the degree to which a person has a
low, moderate, or high need for uniqueness. In other
words, some people are especially desirous of displaying
distinctive attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and so
forth, whereas other people do not want such distinctiveness.
These need-for-uniqueness scales have been
used successfully to predict the propensity of people
to seek unusual activities and scarce commodities.
The societally acceptable dimensions on which
people can manifest their distinctiveness have been
called uniqueness attributes, and research shows that
people use the following attributes to display their specialness:
(a) attitudes, (b) beliefs, (c) personal appearance
(including clothing), (d) friends and mates,
(e) personality characteristics, (f) group membership,
(g) signatures, (h) performances, and (i) consumer
products. Furthermore, people display their uniqueness
on those dimensions that are important to their
self-concepts. For example, a person for whom personal
appearance is crucial will dress in a manner that
shows him or her to be different from other people.
The research shows that people generally want to
establish a sense of specialness when they are given
feedback that they are highly similar to others. Moreover,
most people use societally acceptable uniqueness
attributes to show some sense of specialness
relative to other people. Finally, self-report scales also
reveal that some individuals are extremely desirous of
displaying their uniqueness.
Importance and Implications
Uniqueness seeking allows people to attain satisfaction
about their specialness. Also, uniqueness seeking
may increase the diversity in society. This happens
because the people with high needs for uniqueness
seek different goals and interests, and in so doing,
they open up new arenas in which other people can
succeed. In pursuing their uniqueness, people also are
likely to produce new skills, knowledge, beliefs, and
attitudes that may be helpful in solving problems. The
acknowledgment and pursuit of uniqueness foster
greater societal toleration and appreciation of differences
among people.
C. R. Snyder
See also Conformity; Independent Self-Construals; Optimal
Distinctiveness Theory; Self-Concept; Self-Presentation
Further Readings
Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: On being the same or
different at the same time. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 17, 475–482.
Lynn, M., & Snyder, C. R. (2002). Uniqueness. In
C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez (Ed.), Handbook of positive
psychology (pp. 395–410). New York: Oxford University
Press.
Maslach, C. (1974). Social and personal bases of
individuation. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 29, 411–425.
Snyder, C. R., & Fromkin, H. L. (1977). Abnormality as
a positive characteristic: The development and validation
of a scale measuring need for uniqueness. Journal of
Abnormal Psychology, 86, 518–527.
Snyder, C. R., & Fromkin, H. L. (1980). Uniqueness: The
human pursuit of difference. New York: Plenum.
UNREQUITED LOVE
Definition
Unrequited love refers to instances when one person
(the would-be lover) feels romantic, passionate feelings
for an individual who does not return the same
feelings (the rejector). Research indicates that unrequited
love is quite common. Almost everyone in the
United States has either loved someone who did not
love them in return or been loved by someone they did
not love in return by the time they reach college.
Background and History
For centuries, unrequited love has been a prevalent
theme in the cultural arts (e.g., poetry, music, literature),
as well as the popular media. If you turn on your

adio, there is a good chance you will hear a melancholy
singer lamenting over having his or her love
refused by the object of his or her affection. Despite
societies’ fascination with the topic, psychologists
devoted little attention to the topic until more recently.
In the early 1990s Roy Baumeister and colleagues
collected autobiographical narratives written by college
students from the perspective of the rejector
and from the perspective of the would-be lover. Comparisons
made between the roles of would-be lover
and rejector provided insight into the process of unrequited
love, forming the basis of what social psychologists
know about unrequited love to this day.
Common Pathways
Unrequited love occurs for multiple reasons; there is
no one specific reason why romantic attraction goes
unreciprocated. Several common reasons emerged in
the collected narratives, however. For instance, people
will reject offers of love if they come from people who
do not live up to standards they hold for a romantic
partner. For example, one important standard people
set is physical attractiveness. Research in social psychology
indicates that people tend to prefer a romantic
partner who is as physically attractive as, if not
more physically attractive than, they are. So if Lauren
develops a romantic attraction for Joe, she runs the
risk of having her love rejected if Joe thinks that he is
more physically attractive than Lauren.
Physical attractiveness is not the only mismatch that
can lead to a rejection of love. People tend to marry
those who are similar on a whole host of domains, such
as level of intelligence and socioeconomics. Thus,
when people fall in love with targets perceiving themselves
to be superior on mate-valued traits, the admirer
is liable to having their love rejected. Luckily, as people
grow older they learn to better estimate their mate value
and level of physical attractiveness. Consequently, they
experience fewer instances of unrequited love and more
instances of reciprocated love.
Platonic friendships can also lead to unrequited
love. Friendships can exist between two people who
differ in mate standards. Even though love will often
go unreciprocated because of mismatches in mate
value, would-be lovers could misread or misinterpret
positive gestures and intimacies from a platonic friend
as romantic feelings. This can lead would-be lovers to
overinterpret the likelihood of gaining the love of their
friend and want more from the platonic friendship
than is desired by the target of their affection.
Unrequited Love———1005
Developing relationships can also lead to unrequited
love. Sometimes the rejector is initially interested
but, after several dates, loses interest in the
would-be lover for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the
rejector is put off by certain values the would-be lover
holds, the would-be lover could resemble the rejector’s
mom or dad, or maybe the rejector comes to realize
that he or she is not sexually attracted to the
would-be lover despite finding the would-be lover to
be physically attractive. Long-term relationships can
even end in unrequited love, with one person wanting
to continue the relationship while the other is losing
interest. Although one may think all these different
pathways will lead to very different experiences of
unrequited love, research indicates that they are surprisingly
similar.
Experience of Unrequited Love
Unrequited love is characterized by mutual incomprehension.
Would-be lovers characterize the rejector as
sending mixed signals and acting in inconsistent ways,
whereas rejectors typically do not understand why the
would-be lover continues to pursue them past the
point of rejection.
Rejectors commonly grapple with feelings of guilt.
Despite the portrayal of rejectors in the mass media as
uncaring and cold, rejectors typically are quite concerned
about whether they are leading the would-be
lover on. Rejectors typically do not want to hurt the
would-be lover, who is often a friend or colleague,
and struggle with guilt that can accompany rejecting
a person’s offer of love. Guilt, combined with the difficulty
in delivering bad news to others, can often
cause the rejector to send the message of rejection in
a more indirect way to spare the person’s feelings and
salvage the relationship. This, in turn, can confuse the
would-be lover as to the rejector’s intentions. Or it can
cause the would-be lover to maintain hope, prolonging
the experience of unrequited love for both parties.
Would-be lovers, who do not want to hear the bad
news of rejection, will often misconstrue, reinterpret,
or completely ignore such ambiguous messages of
rejection. If the rejector says no to Friday because he
or she is busy, what would stop the would-be lover
from trying for Saturday? No one wants to be
rejected; it is very painful to know that someone does
not feel the same way about you that you do for him
or her. To ward off the negative experience of realizing
the offer of love will not be returned by the object
of affection is potentially one reason would-be lovers

1006———Unrequited Love
typically pursue the rejector long after the rejector
feels it is appropriate to do so. Research indicates that
once the would-be lover picks up on the message
of rejection, he or she experiences a decline in selfesteem,
signaling the end of the pursuit and the beginning
of recovery.
Who Is Worse Off?
Despite the pain that often accompanies having love
rejected, would-be lovers look back at the experience
with a mixture of positive and negative emotions.
Would-be lovers describe the experience as a roller
coaster of emotions, filled with many euphoric highs
but also devastating lows. For example, the state of
being in love with someone alone can keep the wouldbe
lover in pursuit of his or her target. Rejectors, however,
typically describe the experience as mainly a
negative one consisting of few, if any, positives. Targets
of affection may gain slight boosts in self-esteem
from the flattery of being loved by someone, but this
is offset by the moral guilt of rejecting someone and
by the annoyance and frustration experienced if the
would-be lover does not desist pursuit.
Unrequited love has allowed researchers to examine
reasons why people reject love despite humans’
fundamental need for mutually caring relationships.
That people should endure personal costs, such as
emotional discomfort and personal humiliation, to
find such a person highlights just how important the
search is for humans.
Nicole L. Mead
Roy F. Baumeister
See also Autobiographical Narratives; Interdependence
Theory; Love; Need to Belong; Rejection
Further Readings
Baumeister, R. F., & Wotman, S. R. (1992). Breaking hearts:
The two sides of unrequited love. New York: Guilford
Press.
Baumeister, R. F., Wotman, S. R., & Stillwell, A. M. (1993).
Unrequited love: On heartbreak, anger, guilt,
scriptlessness and humiliation. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 64, 377–394.
URBAN MYTH
See RUMOR TRANSMISSION

VALIDITY OF PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS
See PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS,ACCURACY OF
VALUE PLURALISM MODEL
Definition
What happens when two or more values come into
conflict? What will determine the level of conflict
a person experiences, and how will the person
go about resolving it? The value pluralism model
(VPM) addresses these questions. The VPM, in its
original form, consists of three interrelated sets of
propositions:
1. Underlying all belief systems are core or terminal
values that specify what the ultimate goals of life
should be (e.g., economic efficiency, social equality,
individual freedom). Different values may point to
different and often contradictory goals.
2. People find value conflicts challenging for at
least three reasons. First, people confronted with conflicting
values find it cognitively difficult to make
apples-and-oranges comparisons between them (e.g.,
How much of my economic prosperity am I willing to
give up to help promote social equality?). Second,
value conflict is emotionally painful. Most people
faced with a situation in which they must sacrifice one
important value for another experience dissonance.
The more important the value, the more painful the
V
1007
dissonance will be. Third, trade-offs between core values
can be politically embarrassing: If one chooses
one value over the other, one may feel he or she is letting
down those who feel they have received the short
end of the trade-off stick.
3. Given these formidable obstacles, explicit
reasoning about trade-offs between core values is stressful.
In the short term, the motivation to reduce cognitive
discrepancy stems from the need to reduce
negative emotion, but in the long term, the motivation
stems from the requirement for effective action.
Whenever feasible, people should prefer modes of
resolving conflict that are simple and require minimal
effort. However, how much mental effort is required
to resolve the dissonance will depend on the magnitude
of the dissonance. Specifically, when a person is
confronted with a situation that requires choosing
between two values held with unequal strength, he or
she will experience low dissonance. This occurs
when a person believes more strongly in the importance
of value A over value B. Under these circumstances,
the model hypothesizes that people will rely
on the simple cognitive solution of denying or downplaying
the weaker value and exaggerating or bolstering
the stronger value. This process will suffice to
resolve the dissonant reaction. In contrast, when dissonance
is high, the simple solutions of bolstering
and denial no longer offer plausible solutions. This
occurs when the person not only perceives the conflicting
values as important but also perceives them to
be equally important. Under such circumstances, the
person must turn to more effort-demanding strategies,
such as differentiation (weighing the merits of
each value) and integration (developing rules for

1008———Value Pluralism Model
trading off values). These are the two components of
integrative complexity.
Extending the Model
It often proves difficult, however, to motivate integratively
complex processing even when important
values clearly come into conflict. According to the
revised VPM, two classes of variables must also be
taken into account to determine whether people will
indeed respond in integratively complex ways to highvalue
conflict situations. First, the social content of
the colliding values has important implications for
which conflicts people are likely to view as legitimate.
Specifically, people are likely to accept trade-offs
between secular values, such as money, time, and convenience,
much more readily than they are willing to
accept what are considered taboo trade-offs, such as
those between secular values and sacred values
(e.g., life, liberty, and justice). For example, although
attaching monetary value to the services provided by
an employee may be cognitively demanding, it is not
normatively unacceptable. In contrast, attaching monetary
value to human life is. Confronted with the need
to conduct such forbidden trade-offs, decision makers
are likely to rely on massive impression-management
efforts to conceal, obfuscate, or redefine what they are
doing to protect themselves from the harsh judgment
of observers.
Second, the social context of decision making is
also important. Specifically, the types of accountability
pressures people experience can dramatically lower or
raise thresholds for complex trade-off reasoning. For
example, if individuals, unconstrained by prior commitments,
are confronted with a single audience whose
views are known, they will tend to adjust their opinions
in the direction of the audience and show no awareness
of counterarguments or trade-offs. Alternatively,
if decision makers believe that they will be blamed for
whatever position they take on a trade-off problem,
they are likely to resort to the avoidance tactics of
buck-passing (shifting responsibility to others) or procrastination
(delaying decision making). In contrast,
when people are accountable for the long-term consequences
of their decisions or when they are confronted
with an audience with unknown views or with conflicting
views, there is no simple solution available and
no opportunity to delay. People have no choice but to
respond complexly. Thus, complex reasoning will only
be activated when decision makers are accountable to
an audience that cannot be easily appeased.
Evidence and Implications
The model was initially developed to explain individual
differences in political reasoning. For example, it
was able to resolve a long-standing puzzle in political
psychology of why advocates of centrist and moderate
left-wing causes tend to discuss issues in more complex
trade-off terms than do advocates of conservative
or right-wing causes. Indeed, in support of the VPM,
evidence suggests that the former are more likely to
attach high importance to potentially contradictory
values. Numerous archival and laboratory studies have
since confirmed the basic predictions of the model
and have extended its implications to other social
domains, such as tolerance of outgroup members,
resource distribution decisions, religious orthodoxy,
and media and rhetoric effects on attitude change.
Recently it has been used to explain the cognitive
changes that occur when individuals are exposed to a
second culture. Specifically, it has been suggested that
individuals who cope with the social and cultural conflict
situations associated with the acculturation
process by internalizing the values of both old and
new cultural groups (i.e., become bicultural) will
become more integratively complex than those who
choose to adhere to the values of only one cultural
group. This will be due to the greater dissonance
bicultural individuals experience during the acculturation
process.
Importantly, although integrative complexity was
originally viewed as a relatively stable personality
trait, recent research inspired by the VPM has highlighted
the fact that no stable individual differences
should be expected. Rather, the complexity of one’s
reasoning on an issue is a function of the intensity of
value conflict activated by that issue and the accountability
pressures the individual faces. Indeed, similar
levels of integrative complexity should be expected
only to the degree that the issues sampled activate
similar levels of value conflict and when the accountability
pressures are conducive to complex thought.
Moreover, evidence suggests that, contrary to popular
belief, complex solutions should not be viewed as
either cognitively or morally superior to simple reasoning.
Rather, whether integrative complexity should
be viewed as beneficial is context dependent.
Significance
The VPM explains how people deal with value conflicts
of varying intensity and types. It suggests that

although individuals may prefer to be cognitive
misers and favor simple strategies to minimize cognitive
dissonance, under conditions of high value
conflict, they can be motivated to evoke more effortintensive
strategies.
Carmit T. Tadmor
Philip E. Tetlock
See also Accountability; Integrative Complexity; Value
Priorities; Values
Further Readings
Tadmor, C. T., & Tetlock, P. E. (2006). Biculturalism: A
model of the effects of second-culture exposure on
acculturation and integrative complexity. Journal of Cross
Cultural Psychology, 37(2), 173–190.
Tetlock, P. E. (1986). A value pluralism model of ideological
reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
50(4), 819–827.
Tetlock, P. E., Peterson, R. S., Lerner, J. S. (1996). Revising
the value pluralism model: Incorporating social content
and context postulates. In C. Seligman, J. M. Olson, &
M. P. Zanna (Eds.), The Ontario symposium: The psychology
of values (Vol. 9, pp. 25–49). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
VALUE PRIORITIES
Definition
Value priorities are principles that provide people with
a way of knowing what they must do and what type of
person they must be so that they can live the best way
possible, taking into account their environment and
personal attributes. Value priorities therefore provide
people with a way of knowing what is important and
less important to being happy and getting along in their
worlds. Because what these principles mean in
people’s lives develops as a result of experience, they
operate like analogies (in an analogy, one thing is compared
to another). When people encounter new situations,
new people, or new objects, they can use their
value principles to see similarity and therefore respond
according to those principles. People often are not
aware that these principles are operating, but even
when they are unaware, these principles provide the
basis for judging and responding in everyday life. For
example, if people have equality as a very important
value priority and they live in an environment in which
Value Priorities———1009
equality means treating people fairly, then if they
believe another person is being treated unfairly they
will feel a real need to repair this situation; they may
or may not know why they are responding this way.
Value priorities are central to a person’s sense of
self. People use their value priorities not only as
standards for self-evaluation but also as standards for
evaluating other people, things, actions, and activities.
Because value priorities provide a structure for knowing
what is important and less important to living the
best way possible, they assist people in making
choices. Perhaps the most important feature of value
theory—past and present—is the assumption (which
is supported by research) that all people, everywhere,
have the same values but differ in terms of the relative
importance they place on each value. This means that
to be accurate, discussion should be about people’s
value priorities (and not just, e.g., “values”) or should
emphasize the existence of relations among value priorities,
their value systems.
Important Distinctions
When value priorities are discussed, focus is generally
on people’s personal value priorities. However, not
only do people have a personal value system, but they
also have perceptions of others’ value systems (these
are sometimes referred to as social value systems).
Others can be other people, groups, organizations, or
institutions, and their value priorities are transmitted
implicitly through both overt and covert behavior. It is
assumed that perceptions of others’ value priorities
have the same organization as the personal value system,
although there is very little research in this area.
Not only can personal value priorities be distinguished
from perceptions of others’ value priorities,
but they also can be distinguished from what can be
referred to as ideological value systems. Because such
promotions are often explicitly created to provide a
particular image (e.g., for an organization’s mission
statement), they may not have the same implicit structure
as personal value systems in which there are predictable
relations among value types. Again, there is
very little theory-directed research into ideological
value systems.
The concept of value priorities can be distinguished
from the concepts of attitude (an evaluation of
a specific entity), worldview (a collection of conscious
beliefs about how the world is or should be),
and ideology (a rhetorical—i.e., language-based—
association or set of associations between things,

1010———Value Priorities
people, actions or activities and value priorities).
Nevertheless, in past research these distinctions are
not always clear, and the term value has been used in
referring to each of these concepts.
Value Theory
Discussion of the huge amount of theory concerning
human values typically includes Milton Rokeach’s
influential work. Shalom Schwartz built on and extended
Rokeach’s work and developed a values inventory to
measure value priorities. A version of this inventory
has also been developed for use with younger people.
Currently, Schwartz’s theory is the most influential
and respected in the field.
Schwartz provided evidence in support of the
assumption (made by all previous theorists) that
important human values can be understood in terms
of a relatively small set of value types that would be
important to all people throughout the world.
Schwartz’s theory includes 10 value types: Universalism
(understanding, appreciating, tolerating, and protecting
people and nature); Benevolence (preserving
and enhancing the welfare of those with whom we
have frequent contact); Tradition (respecting, being
committed to, and accepting traditional customs and
ideas); Conformity (also known as Dutifulness; having
the self-control required to ensure behavior does
not upset or harm others or violate social expectations
or norms); Security (maintaining stability to
ensure safety and harmony within the self, relationships,
and society); Power ( having control and dominance
over people and resources that results in social
status and prestige); Achievement (gaining personal
success that results from demonstrating competence
according to social standards); Hedonism (indulging
one’s own pleasure and having sensuous gratification);
Stimulation (having excitement, experiencing
novelty, and feeling challenged); and Self-Direction
(being able to think and behave independently and
creatively). For each value type, Schwartz described
representative values. For example, creativity and
independence are two of the values that represent the
Self-Direction value; politeness and self-discipline
are two that represent the Conformity value type.
Analysis of the value priorities reported by many,
many people from different countries around the
world showed that the 10 value types can be arranged
in a circular structure. This makes it possible to see
how priorities on one value type have implications for
priorities on other value types. Value types that are
adjacent to the highest priority value type also will be
held with high priority, whereas the value type positioned
directly opposite to the highest priority value
type will be held with the lowest priority. Underlying
the relations among priorities are two motivational
dimensions.
One dimension concerns whether focus is on individual
outcomes or on social context outcomes
(Schwartz referred to this as the Self-Enhancement–
Self-Transcendence dimension). A focus on individual
outcomes is thinking about the self and others in terms
of achievements and successes. People may develop
this focus because of a belief that others’ assistance
is not dependable, and therefore they must develop
expertise or dominance to enhance their survival; this
type of focus will mean high priorities on Achievement
and Power value types. A focus on social context outcomes
refers to the acceptance of others and being
concerned for others’ welfare. People may develop this
focus as a result of a belief in a shared fate, and therefore
they have the incentive to ensure others’ welfare
and comfort (“to the extent others are doing well, so
will I”); this type of focus will mean high priorities on
Universalism and Benevolence value types.
The second dimension (Schwartz referred to this as
the Openness to Change–Conservation dimension) concerns
whether focus is on opportunity (that highlights
independent thought and action as well as change) or on
organization (that highlights stability and maintaining
the status quo). A focus on opportunity will mean high
priorities on Self-Direction and Stimulation value types,
whereas a focus on organization will mean high priorities
on Tradition, Conformity, and Security value types.
High priorities on the Hedonism value type reflect both
a focus on opportunity and a focus on individual outcomes.
Important Issues
People’s value priorities are stable and relatively
resistant to change, even though researchers have
found that reports of value importance can be influenced
temporarily. The success of such manipulations
arises because human values have been shown
to be universal—all humans, everywhere, believe that
particular values are important, even though people
differ in the relative importance placed on each of
those values. For example, a person with highest
value priorities on Benevolence values (e.g., honesty,

loyalty, responsibility) will also say that Achievement
values (e.g., success, ambition, influence) are important
if attention is focused on these, even though in the
value system, Benevolence and Achievement values
are maximally different in terms of value priorities.
Stability of reported value priorities also might not be
observed in people who do not have explicit awareness
of their value priorities or who confuse personal
value priorities with their perceptions of important
value priorities of others (so reliable measurement is
difficult).
Value priorities transcend situations, and therefore
it is difficult to interpret research in which distinctions
are made between, for example, personal values, work
values, and family values. The confusion that sometimes
arises in this and related research may concern
the distinction between personal value priorities, perceptions
of others’ value priorities, and ideological
values, as well as the focus on single values rather
than on value systems in which priorities on one
value has implications for priorities on other values.
Confusion may also concern the recognition that different
environments provide differing opportunities
for satisfaction. In addition, people who differ in their
value priorities may choose the same behavior to
enable value satisfaction. For example, excellence in a
university course for one person satisfies high Power
value priorities because he or she gains status and
recognition, whereas for another it satisfies high Self-
Direction value priorities because he or she gains
greater choice in future options for study or career.
The connection between people’s personal value
priorities and their self-esteem has yet to be investigated
fully, but there is growing recognition that
people’s feelings of self-esteem implicitly signal how
well they are getting along in their world. Because
value priorities serve to indicate what living the best
way possible means, then to the extent a person is satisfying
his or her personal value priorities or working
toward doing so, he or she is more likely to have optimal
self-esteem. Complications arise because people
have perceptions of others’ value priorities (and exposure
to ideological value priorities), and others’ value
priorities may be more salient to people than their
own value priorities. As a result, attitudinal or behavioral
decisions may be influenced by these salient perceptions
rather than by personal value priorities.
Because value systems often operate outside awareness,
people also may misperceive their own value priorities
and behave according to their misperceptions.
Failing to behave in line with one’s own value priorities
will induce dissatisfaction—and chronic behavior
of this type may lead to dissatisfaction that is reflected
in self-esteem.
See also Self; Social Value Orientation; Values
Further Readings
Meg J. Rohan
Rohan, M. J. (2000). A rose by any name? The values
construct. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4,
255–277.
Schwartz, S. (1996). Value priorities and behavior: Applying
a theory of integrated value systems. In C. Seligman,
J. M. Olson, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), The Ontario
symposium: The psychology of values (Vol. 8, pp. 1–24).
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
VALUES
Definition
The term value has two related yet distinct meanings.
The value of an object or activity is what the object or
activity is worth to a person or community; this is the
economic or decision-making meaning of value. In
its social-psychological meaning, by contrast, a value
is an abstract, desirable end state that people strive
for or aim to uphold, such as freedom, loyalty, or tradition.
Only this second meaning is used in the plural
form values, and public and political discussions
refer to such values in many ways, speaking of the
decline of values, a clash of values, or an election
being about values. This entry describes the ways in
which human values in the second sense select for
certain attitudes, goals, and preferences that in turn
guide concrete actions. Although there is not yet a
consensus on a taxonomy of human values, research
is converging on a set of basic dimensions.
Nature of Values
Values———1011
Many theorists have pointed out that values are distinct
from attitudes, norms, beliefs, goals, and needs.
Values, such as equality, friendship, or courage, are
more abstract and general, and they not only are
directed at specific objects (as attitudes are), behaviors

1012———Values
(as norms are), or states of reality (as beliefs are) but
also represent very general, and at times vague, end
states. The end states described by many values also
benefit the community, unlike goals or needs, which
typically benefit the individual. Compare such values
as honesty, forgiveness, and democracy to the goals of
wealth, fame, and healthiness. Finally, most values are
never quite reached, such as equality, national security,
or world peace. In sum, prototypical values refer
to abstract states that typically benefit the community,
not just the individual, and that people strive for without
ever quite reaching them.
Talking about values can be hard because the idea
of value is so abstract. As long as people believe they
share the same values, there is no need to define those
values. But when people try to ascertain a definition
of something like freedom or true friendship, heated
debates can ensue. Likewise, the vagueness of many
value concepts (consider the term family values) subtly
removes these concepts from open, shared discourse
and can make them subject to arbitrary and
rhetorical use in propaganda. For example, politicians
can try to win votes by saying they stand for family
values, even though they don’t have a very clear idea
what family values are.
Even though all values are somehow represented in
the individual, the more abstract among them are less
likely to guide directly an individual’s concrete behaviors.
How many decisions and actions can you recall
from yesterday that were directly guided by your values
of freedom, democracy, or salvation? Goals are
more apt to influence behavior directly, as people are
more aware of their goals, and goals are more imminent
and context-specific than are values. Values that
resemble goals, however, such as excitement, independence,
or respect for tradition, can directly influence
behaviors. These considerations are largely supported
by empirical research, which shows lower correlations
between concrete behavior and abstract values than
between behavior and specific or goal-like values.
Furthermore, values appear to relate to preferences and
attitudes, which themselves predict behavior. So even
highly abstract values can have an impact on concrete
behavior when that impact is mediated by less abstract
psychological forces. For example, the value of freedom
might make someone study hard for a driver education
test, because getting a driver’s license increases
one’s freedom of movement. The broad, abstract value
of freedom leads to the specific, concrete goal of getting
a license, which guides behavior.
Values can strongly influence behavior when they
are perceived to be threatened and are therefore
defended. A threat can “activate” a value, and defending
and fighting for it entails a number of concrete
behaviors (though rarely of the prosocial variety). For
example, many Americans considered the attacks on
New York’s World Trade Center on September 11,
2001, as a threat to the value of freedom, and numerous
actions following those attacks were directly
motivated, and claimed to be justified, by the defense
of that freedom.
Taxonomies
A taxonomy is an organized list, especially a thorough
list. A taxonomy of values would be a list of all the values
that people hold, sorted into several sublists
according to different types of values. Considerable
effort has gone into trying to put together a taxonomy
of values, and in this endeavor, researchers have drawn
from varying sources: reviews of value-related constructs
in the scholarly literature, interviews and questionnaires
that assess ordinary people’s conception of
values, and systematic analyses of value-related terms
in lexicons. These sources show that individuals and
groups can hold a wide range of values. However,
researchers have tried to identify an underlying structure
for this multitude of values. (The structure of the
taxonomy would be what determines the different
types of values.) They use statistical tools (e.g., factor
analysis) to reduce the large number of specific values
down to a small set of fundamental value dimensions,
not unlike the effort that has led personality psychologists
to the Five-Factor Theory of personality.
Different proposals exist regarding the number,
specificity, importance, and content of human values.
Milton Rokeach distinguished between 18 terminal
values, which are desirable end states (e.g., self-respect,
freedom), and 18 instrumental values, which refer to
modes of conduct (e.g., helpful or forgiving). Contemporary
researchers, such as Shalom Schwartz or
Walter Renner, have proposed that both instrumental
and terminal values fall into a smaller and more fundamental
set of value orientations, such as power,
achievement, tradition, and profit. Individuals differ
reliably in these value orientations, but there is uncertainty
over the particular orientations that make up the
fundamental set. The inclusion of specific value words
(test items) in value measures can change the discovered
structures across data sets, and even though the

value orientations from different data sets overlap,
their numbers and content also vary. Thus, currently
there is no consensus on the fundamental dimensions
of values, but research is converging on these
dimensions.
One complication is that when people get a chance
to judge whether such concepts as power, achievement,
or profit are values or goals, most people agree
that they are goals. So the question arises whether the
fundamental dimensions onto which research is converging
depicts only values or actually mixes values
with goals. It is currently not established whether
goals and values are the same, both operating as motivational
forces in the individual, or whether values
have unique social functions and consequences that
goals do not.
Function
What are values for? In people’s own understanding,
values regulate society and interpersonal relations,
and they guide moral behavior, the distinction
between right and wrong. In this sense, values are not
just motives but socially shared concepts that serve a
communal function. Evolutionary theorist David
Sloan Wilson argues that values bind communities
together, and those communities that agree on a value
system (and on a system of sanctions in case the values
are threatened) may be more successful over the
course of human cultural history. Wilson shows
through historic analysis that, for example, those religious
groups that formed an agreed-upon value system
became stronger than their competitors and
outlived them. Values create a group bond at an
abstract level that unifies individual actions into a
group-level mind-set and organization. In this sense,
values may be a uniquely human adaptation to the
demands of a social reality in which not only individuals
but also groups compete with each other.
However, while values increase organization and
cohesion within a group, they also sharpen boundaries
to other groups (those who don’t share the same value
system), and indeed, intergroup conflict is often motivated,
or at least rationalized, by a clash of values.
If there is only a small set of human values, these
values should be relatively constant across cultures
and history. The reason for this limited and stable set
may be the invariable demands on human survival to
serve biological needs, succeed in social interaction,
and negotiate conflicts between biological needs and
social interaction. But the evidence on historic and
cultural variations is only beginning to be available.
Historic and Cultural
Differences
Some values that communities uphold may have
changed relatively little over documented history. In
contrast to norms and laws, which have changed substantially,
standards such as freedom, courage, fairness,
and even honesty have remained the same at
least since ancient Greece. Some values have been
applied selectively to certain groups, such as equality
and forgiveness, which are often extended only to
members of the dominant group; other values have
increased in importance in recent times, such as democracy
and diversity.
Recent research by Schwartz, using questionnaires
presented to people from different cultures, offers evidence
for the universality of fundamental standards.
Cultures differ, of course, in the extent to which they
regard particular values as more or less important, but
the set of fundamental dimensions within which cultures
express their values may be universal. This
evidence, however, is not without its critics. For one
thing, translating words across languages such that
their meaning stays truly constant is challenging.
Moreover, the presentation of questionnaires, which
fix the relevant value dimensions at the outset, does
not establish which dimensions people would have
picked as fundamental values if given no researcherdevised
measure. To illustrate, gender equality is seen
as an important value in many cultures. But highly
patriarchic cultures not only may consider gender
equality as less important but also may not even conceptualize
it as a value. Future research will help clarify
whether some of these dimensions operate more
like goals and others constitute values “proper,” with
their own unique social functions and consequences.
Bertram F. Malle
Stephan Dickert
See also Attitudes; Big Five Personality Traits; Goals; Group
Cohesiveness; Value Priorities
Further Readings
Values———1013
Rohan, M. J. (2000). A rose by any name? The values
construct. Personality and Social Psychology Review,
4, 255–277.

1014———Visceral Influences
Rokeach, M. (1973). The nature of human values. New York:
Free Press.
Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Are there universal aspects in the
content and structure of values? Journal of Social Issues,
50, 19–45.
VISCERAL INFLUENCES
Definition
Visceral factors are states such as hunger, thirst, sexual
desire, drug cravings, physical pain, and fervent
emotion that influence how much goods and actions
are valued. When experiencing a visceral state, people
focus primarily on goals associated with their current
state and downplay the importance of other goals. For
example, when a person is thirsty, finding water
becomes the most important goal and other goals
tend to be overlooked. Although visceral factors can
have a powerful influence on behavior, people fail to
recognize this influence. That is, they don’t anticipate
the influence that visceral factors will have on their
future behavior, remember the influence that visceral
factors have had on past behavior, or recognize the
influence that visceral factors have on other people.
People may think that they (or others) are acting irrationally
because it is difficult for people in a “cold
state” (not under the influence of a visceral factor) to
predict or remember what it is like to be in a “hot
state” (under the influence of a visceral factor). This
difficulty in prediction is referred to as the hot-cold
empathy gap.
Importance
Researchers who study decision making struggle to
understand why people knowingly behave at odds with
their long-term goals. Why do dieters who claim that
losing weight is important to them and can avoid ordering
dessert from a restaurant menu, succumb to temptation
when a fresh batch of cookies is pulled from the
oven? Why do people who claim that they will never
have sexual intercourse without a condom find themselves
doing just that when they are in a sexually
arousing situation? Many decision-making models
have difficulty describing such “irrational” behavior.
George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist, proposed
that one reason people seem to behave against
their long-term interests is that long-term interests are
often generated while in a cold state, and behavior
often occurs while in a hot state. Loewenstein has
offered several mathematical propositions to specify
how visceral factors will influence behavior, the prediction
of behavior, and the recollection of behavior.
Implications for Behavior
Because the experience of a visceral state leads people
to focus on the goals associated with the current state
at the exclusion of other goals, the more intensely
people experience a visceral factor, the more they tend
to act against their stated long-term goals. In other
words, the more intense the visceral state, the more
likely desire is to win over reason. For example, the
hungrier dieters are, the more likely they are to cheat
on their diets (especially if the cues to cheating are
vivid, such as when the cookies can be seen or
smelled). And, the more sexually aroused people are,
the more likely they are to indulge their sexual desire
at the expense of other goals. In a recent study, men
who were sexually aroused indicated that they would
be willing to go to further lengths to have sex compared
to men who answered the questions when they
were not aroused. Specifically, the aroused men stated
that they would be more willing to tell a woman that
they loved her (if they did not), to encourage their date
to drink, and to slip a woman a drug in order to have
sex with her. It seems that the visceral state of sexual
desire crowded out their long-term goals.
Implications for Predicting and
Recollecting Behavior
Despite the powerful influence that visceral states
have on behavior, people underestimate this influence
when predicting their future behavior. Thus, people
say that they will never have sex without a condom
because they fail to recognize how their sexual desire
will change their feelings about various goals and
actions. While predicting behavior from a cold state,
the goal of being safe may be paramount. But, in the
heat of the moment, the goal of having sex may crowd
out the goal of being safe.
Research on pregnant women’s decisions regarding
anesthesia for delivery illustrates the difficulty of predicting
future visceral states. When predicting from a
cold state whether or not they would want anesthesia
during childbirth, a majority of women said that they
would not want it, but once in the hot state of pain,

most women changed their preference and chose the
painkillers.
Just as people fail to anticipate the influence of visceral
factors on future behavior, as time passes people
forget the influence visceral factors had on their past
behavior. Although people can remember the circumstances
that evoked a visceral state and can remember
being in a certain state, they cannot reproduce the
sensation the same way they can recall words or visual
images. Even pregnant women who had experienced
the pain of childbirth before mispredicted their interest
in painkillers for an upcoming delivery. This is
because they misremembered how much the actual
sensation of pain influenced their desire for painkillers.
The tendency for people to underweight the influence
of visceral factors when they are not currently
experiencing the visceral state also leads to a hot-cold
empathy gap between people. Those in a cold state
often fail to appreciate how someone in a hot state
feels. When someone is in pain, hungry, or depressed,
it is difficult to empathize with that person without
experiencing the pain, hunger, or depression oneself.
Furthermore, when people are in a hot state, research
suggests that it is difficult for them to make predictions
for others without being influenced by the goals
associated with their own current visceral state. For
example, compared to nonthirsty participants, thirsty
participants were more likely to claim that lost hikers
would be more bothered by a lack of water than a lack
of food.
It seems, then, that recognizing the power of visceral
influences may help people predict and understand
their own behavior. By recognizing people’s
tendency to underweight visceral factors, decisionmaking
researchers may be better able to predict and
understand when and why people will act against their
stated long-term interests.
Jane L. Risen
See also Arousal; Behavioral Economics; Decision Making;
Delay of Gratification
Further Readings
Loewenstein, G. (1996). Out of control: Visceral influences
on behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human
Decision Processes, 65, 272–292.
Metcalfe, J., & Mischel W. (1999). A hot/cool-system
analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower.
Psychological Review, 106, 3–19.
VOLUNTEERISM
Definition
Volunteerism———1015
Volunteerism is voluntary, deliberate service to others
over time and without compensation. A key element
of volunteer behavior is that the person freely chooses
to help and has no expectation of pay or other compensation.
Mandatory public service required by
courts or schools would not meet the definition of volunteerism.
The volunteer behavior must include service
work, not simply a donation of money or goods.
This service is long-term, repeated service, such as
giving time weekly to help at a local hospital. The
volunteer service is only a service if it benefits others
who want help. For example, the Boy Scout who helps
the blind person across the street when the blind person
wants to move independently (and perhaps in
another direction) would not be a volunteer.
Who Are Volunteers?
People from youth to older adulthood engage in volunteering.
The organization Independent Sector estimates
that about 44% of adults and 59% of teenagers
volunteer, with the largest group of volunteers being
from 35 to 55 years old. Wealthier people volunteer
more because they have more spare time and more
flexibility in their jobs. The wealthy may also have a
social obligation, called noblesse oblige, to engage in
philanthropy and good works. Those who volunteer
are likely also to be the most generous givers. Women
volunteer slightly more often than men do, but men
give more money to charities. Better-educated people
also volunteer more than less-educated people,
because of the skills and resources they have to offer.
Finally, those people with more connections to the
community, such as people living in smaller, rural
communities and people who have connections to
religious and cultural group memberships, volunteer
more often.
What Motivates People to Volunteer?
E. Gil Clary, Leslie Orenstein, Mark Snyder, and others
have examined motivations for volunteering. A person
is driven by value expressive motivation if his or
her reasons for volunteering derive from the values he
or she holds dear, such as a concern for the poor. When
a person’s primary goal is to learn about a particular

1016———Volunteerism
problem or group of people or to have new experiences,
his or her primary motivation is understanding
or knowledge. Those with a social adjustive motive
volunteer because friends, family, or social demands
encourage them to do so. Others are motivated by
career aspirations. For example, college students may
volunteer to enhance their job skills or increase their
probability of educational or career goals. Some
people volunteer to relieve their personal problems,
such as the guilt of having too much time on their own
hands or needing a positive outlet for their insecurities.
This is called ego-defensive or a protective function.
On the other hand, those with an ego-enhancing motivation
volunteer to increase their own self-esteem. In
a volunteer job, a person can be valued by the staff
and feel competent at a minor job. Finally, some
people volunteer out of community concern. They
demonstrate concern for a particular community as
defined by geography (a neighborhood) or by a particular
condition or need (concern for those with cancer).
Allen M. Omoto and Mark Snyder have discovered
that when motivation type matches recruiting strategy,
people are more likely to volunteer. For example,
when a student is motivated to seek a job, he or she
would be more likely to volunteer in response to
advertisements highlighting job skills. When motivation
is met in volunteering experience, people are
likely to continue to volunteer. For example, a person
who wishes to build confidence will be more likely
to continue volunteering when a coordinator praises
him or her for a job well done. Contrary to expectations,
researchers found that “mandatory volunteerism”
as a college requirement made some students
less likely to freely volunteer in the future. This is
one reason why volunteerism requires helping to be
freely chosen.
Benefits and Costs of Volunteering
Benefits to an organization that uses volunteers include
the money saved from having to hire staff to do the
same job. A research report from Independent Sector
puts the 2005 value of volunteer time at $18.04 per
hour, including wages and benefits, saved by an organization
for each hour a volunteer serves. The organization
also benefits indirectly because volunteers
become representatives and advocates for the organization,
sharing information and positive views with
the community. Costs to the organization include the
costs of training the volunteers, the staff time to coordinate
volunteers, and the chance that volunteers may
offer lower-quality service than paid staff.
Benefits to the recipients of help from well-trained
volunteers can be obvious: The homeless mother gets
served a meal, the immigrant learns to read and write,
and so forth. Costs include not getting expert help
or receiving inconsistent help when volunteers are not
available. Benefits to the volunteers themselves
include increases in their sense of self-esteem and
self-confidence, decreased loneliness, the making of
friends, and more favorable attitudes toward clients
served. In older adults, the increased activity and
social stimulation of volunteering has positive health
effects and increases life satisfaction. In youth,
those who volunteer have a lower likelihood of being
arrested. Costs to the volunteer include any costs associated
with volunteering itself, such as transportation,
and emotional costs of working with those in need,
such as sadness when a client dies. Conflicts between
volunteer time and time spent with family and friends
and the potential stigma of associating with those who
have less desirable traits in society are social costs that
volunteers incur. Benefits to society include the promotion
of the common welfare of the community, the
ability to expand services, the defrayal of dollar costs,
the increase of the skills base in the community, and
the instillation of norms of prosocial behavior.
Shelley Dean Kilpatrick
See also Altruism; Compassion; Cooperation; Empathy;
Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis; Moral Development;
Prosocial Behavior; Reciprocal Altruism; Reciprocity
Norm; Social Support
Further Readings
Clary, E. G., Snyder, M., Ridge, R. D., Copeland, J., Stukas,
A. A., Haugen, J., et al. (1998). Understanding and
assessing the motivations of volunteers: A functional
approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
74, 1516–1530.
Independent Sector. (2001). Giving and volunteering in the
United States: Key findings. Washington, DC: Author.
Snyder, M., Omoto, A. M., & Lindsay, J. J. (2004).
Sacrificing time and effort for the good of others: The
benefits and costs of volunteerism. In A. G. Miller (Ed.),
The social psychology of good and evil (pp. 444–468).
New York: Guilford Press.

ZEAL
Definition
The term zeal came into common usage in reference to
a sect of 1st-century-C.E. religious fanatics who were
uncompromising in their opposition to Roman rule.
Some of them carried daggers under their cloaks and
killed anyone who did not fully support their views.
Such extremism brought reprisals that ultimately
crushed their sect. Accordingly, zeal refers to extreme
ideological conviction that belligerently insists on consensus,
without regard for practical consequences.
Zeal is puzzling because it can be unreasonable and
self-defeating. Just as the original Zealots’ aggressive
fervor led to the annihilation of their sect, thousands of
naively unprepared crusaders were killed from 1086 C.E.
to 1270 C.E. in seemingly foolhardy campaigns to seize
Jerusalem for their ideological cause. Their consensual
zeal inflated them with a righteous euphoria that was
insensitive not only to obstacles and dangers but also to
their own atrocities.
Zeal is an important social phenomenon to understand
because although it sometimes animates devoted
philanthropy, it often fuels militant religious and political
conflicts that can have devastating social consequences.
The first systematic investigation of zeal was
reported a hundred years ago in William James’s classic,
The Varieties of Religious Experience. James
concluded, from dozens of interviews with religious
converts, that moral and religious zeal helps people
forget about their personal problems. At around the
same time, Freud observed that his neurotic patients
Z
1017
repressed taboo thoughts by rigidly focusing on other,
extremely intense trains of thought. Thus, both classic
theorists viewed zeal as a tool for coping with selfthreatening
thoughts and problems.
Research on Zeal
The horror of World War II spurred systematic research
aimed at understanding zealous bigotry, nationalism, and
fascism. Thousands of in-home interviews about respondents’
life experiences and zealous tendencies informed
the conclusion that zeal arises from feelings of personal
vulnerability. Cross-sectional research supports the general
conclusion. For example, during wars, political leaders
tend toward black and white certainty in their
speeches, dogmatic religious denominations flourish, and
children’s books become more moralistic than usual.
These findings are consistent with historians’ observations
that religious movements tend to sprout during
times of social insecurity and that religious fundamentalism
and extremism are especially likely to foment under
conditions of social turmoil and threat. (Accordingly,
enthusiasm for the crusades spiked under conditions of
unprecedented social and political insecurity.)
Laboratory research supports the conclusions from
interview and cross-sectional research. Hundreds of
studies, conducted by dozens of researchers in North
America and Europe in the past 20 years, have found
that people react with exaggerated zeal to experimental
manipulations of experiential self-threats such as mortality
salience, personal uncertainty, social rejection,
loneliness, isolation, failure, inferiority, confusion, and
exposure to people who violate their cherished ideals.

1018———Zeal
Such threats cause people to exaggerate pride and conviction
in favor of their worldviews, countries, groups,
causes, values, opinions, romantic relationships, and
personal goals. Such threats also increase people’s willingness
to fight for their more certain causes and to
exaggerate social consensus for them.
Importantly, zeal reactions occur even in domains
that are not related to the eliciting threats. Thus, zeal
can be regarded as a generalized, compensatory
response to poignant self-threats. Why do people turn
to compensatory zeal when threatened? Just as James
and Freud proposed, zeal insulates people from threatening
thoughts. Laboratory experiments show that
zealous expressions of worldviews, value ideals, personal
convictions, or pride cause previously bothersome
thoughts to recede from awareness. Moreover,
even if repeatedly reminded of distressing thoughts
after zeal expression, the distressing thoughts still feel
less important, less urgent, and less pressing than they
normally do. This means that zeal is not simply a form
of distraction. It somehow makes distressing thoughts
loom less large even when they are in focal awareness.
These experimental findings are consistent with
James’s early observation that religious zealots seem
exceptionally able to cope with challenging circumstances
and to joyfully tolerate severe hardship. (One
mystic saint reputedly demonstrated piety by cheerfully
licking the suppurating wounds of hospital patients.)
How Does Zeal Work?
Recent research is beginning to reveal how compensatory
zeal alleviates distress. Whereas poignant selfthreats
activate a system in the brain that specializes in
avoidance motivation and prevention of unwanted outcomes,
zealous and angry thoughts activate a system in
the brain that specializes in approach motivation and
promotion of desired outcomes. When one system is
active, stimuli and experiences relevant to the other system
loom less large and seem less vital. Preliminary
research indicates this may occur because of reciprocal
inhibition of activity between brain areas that are
centrally involved in approach processes (left frontal
lobe) and those that are centrally involved in avoidance
processes (right frontal lobe). Zeal may thus be an
appealing response to threat because it effectively turns
down activity in brain areas that process threatening
stimuli.
Zealous Personalities and Cultures
Defensive zeal is most pronounced among individuals
who (a) explicitly claim high self-esteem but who show
evidence of low implicit self-esteem on assessments
that bypass conscious awareness, (b) defensively avoid
close personal relationships, or (c) have narcissistically
inflated claims of superiority. These three personality
tendencies are empirically related and share felt insecurity
at the core. Thus, zeal can be seen as a defensive
maneuver in which outwardly proud people engage
when situational threats resonate with inner insecurities.
Defensive zeal is also most prominent in cultures
(e.g., Judaic, Christian, and Muslim) influenced by
ancient Greek ideas that champion independent pursuit
of ideal truth. Zeal is less evident in cultures influenced
by Taoist and Confucian norms that promote yielding
of confrontational opinions to dialectical perspective
taking.
Ian McGregor
See also Attitude Strength; Authoritarian Personality;
Beliefs; Ideology; Mortality Salience; Motivated
Cognition; Regulatory Focus Theory; Religion and
Spirituality; Self; Self-Esteem; Social Neuroscience;
Terror Management Theory; Values
Further Readings
Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., &
Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality.
New York: Harper.
Armstrong, K. (2000). The battle for God: A history of
fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Books.
James, W. (1958). The varieties of religious experience.
New York: Mentor. (Original work published 1902)
McGregor, I., & Marigold, D. C. (2003). Defensive zeal and
the uncertain self: What makes you so sure? Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 838–852.
McGregor, I., Nail, P. R., Marigold, D. C., & Kang, S.-J.
(2005). Defensive pride and consensus: Strength in
imaginary numbers. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 89, 978–996.